First off, the short version of my opinion on this: I think this is a great idea that could inspire more creativity within the community but has the unfortunate potential for monetary abuse.
Let’s start with the biggest problem I have with this system: the potential abuse of the system for monetary purposes. Say you want 1,000,000 Units: right now, you have to earn every coin. With this system, however, it’s not unrealistic that someone might try to make a business using real world cash. There’d be an agreement: you give the guy $10 outside of the game, and he pays the outrageous price of 1,000,000 Units for your blank canvas. He doesn’t want any actual art and you aren’t looking to put effort into the game. It’s a way around the lack of microtransactions, and this is something the devs have been very careful to avoid (why do you think we don’t have a trading system yet?).
That said, I do enjoy the idea of creating something cool and selling it to someone who thinks it’s cool. Player run economies can be very nice, especially since it’s not every item up for sale but only certain items that must be personalized as the players see fit. I could see this being a very positive thing for TU, and I think it’s a good idea.
If I had to propose a system for mitigating the abuse, I’d say that you could browse available selections without being able to search for anything. Unfortunately, this would mean that players looking to buy creations from a specific creator would be out of luck, and this system falls apart if there’s not enough supply as the aforementioned microtransaction creations would be easy to find.
On more specific notes…
- I think the painting idea is just perfect, though it might seem a bit redundant due to the canvas system already in place.
- The condo layout system would be nice, though rather than paying an upfront cost for missing items I’d say we use the item snapping system already in TU. Basically, there’s a white outline around spots where specific items would go. Place near that outline, and the item snaps to the correct position. That way, players don’t need to have all 500 million canvases to start reconstructing AshGe’s 1:1 recreation of Lobby 1.
- Clothing would be interesting, but it would probably need to be limited to accessories like hats since playermodels like the Skeleton don’t wear clothes.
- Technically obscene creations would be a problem, but we already have some content options in the works that would easily make this problem disappear.
- As AmGonaKOYou stated, the Workshop features still need to be implemented. That system may conflict with this suggestion, but we don’t really know anything about TU’s Workshop implementation yet.
Well, sorry for the wall of text! I guess I just wanted to throw some opinions against the wall and just kinda kept going…