Thank you Cade, for the update on this. Much appreciated.
Here are my 2 rusty doubloons:
How can this be a technical issue? It's a very odd design choice that I personally fail to understand.
If EA truly cared about its gaming community and had done the slightest bit of research, this would have never been a problem. Custom avatars would be the default and some of the other forum limitations wouldn't even exist.
The easiest, most straight forward solution is to unlock access to the avatar editor for everyone, so that it is not only limited to heroes and moderators. It's that simple. Even that as a temporary solution is better than nothing. Just unlock it. Potential security risks should have been taken into consideration during early backend development. I don't know what else the problem could be other than potential security risks. If this was a robust and stable platform this could be fixed within a week or possibly sooner.
There is no good reason for it to be this way and it's unfair to the simming community, especially to the veterans who have been part of almost every Sims forum since the birth of the franchise. I'm not even one of them and I feel ignored.
This is the offical forum now, plus the avatar concern was raised a long time ago in February, on the old forum, when it was announced it would be replaced with this new (simmer non-friendly) forum.
I don't believe any concerns we had half a year ago were really taken on board by whoever is hosting or designed this forum. The fact that the team is only now exploring as to whether or not certain features will be possible in the future (?!), tells me that this forum was never actually built for us, or with us in mind. (Sigh, I believe this was the 637th time I said this).
Sadly people are leaving because the place is difficult to navigate, and seeing all these similar avatars makes it even harder and more confusing for many. It doesn't feel personal. People should be having abit of fun on a forum, not feel stressed or confused due to its poor design. There are good things about this forum for sure, but right now the positive is overshadowed by the negative, in my opinion.
I choose to remain optimistic however, and I really hope this and other issues e.g. lack of pagenumbers etc. will be solved very very very very Soon™.