I’m an avatar creator and community member and want to try my best to persuade the vrc devs to change one of the avatar stats, specifically triangles. Today, I went to the avatar performance rankings page to refresh my memory on the stats for each rank of performance and found myself with quite passion to make this post
Firstly, I’d like to mention the triangles for each ranking, excluding excellent, are 70k. As a avatar creator this often discourages me from making medium or poor avatars because the polygons are all the same and just seem “easier” to make an opti avi. I’m not saying this is a bad thing that I want to make the second best avatar performance rank for most of my avatars, but, there are times where I want to make a medium or think “a medium would be nice” and I refrain from making it due to “what’s the point.” Additionally, I would like to build on this argument by saying, polygons are mostly calculated with math which leads to less stress on PC’s due to the PC’s being naturally good at calculating numbers; there is clear evidence in this from multiple sources across the internet. moreover, polygons don’t account for much on performance side. Although I’m not saying to increase this number by a large margined, it would be nice to have a small change within each ranking to give some incentive to create theses other rankings. Lastly on the topic of triangles, I would would like to give an example from my own experience where I find myself, numerous times, optimizing my avatar to that 80k point and thinking “damn I need to cut more,” and start to sacrifice quality of how the mesh bends, just to meat that mark. Although, I know this is a ranking for sacrifices, it would be nice to have that little extra triangles to make my avatar super clean without sacrificing quality.
Overall the avatar stats are quite good but I feel what would push more people to make different avatar ranks or, myself to be more passionate for making other rankings, would be to increase some of the triangle counts for each section for and above opti due to how small of a factor triangles account for in game performance, the passion for avatar creators to be more creative by making different rankings, and even just that little extra to create fully fleshed out, high quality optimized avatars without sacrificing quality.