It's been a long time since our flair has had an update. While we were busy celebrating 10 years and 1 million subscribers (wait, we're already at 1.5M?), thousands and thousands of new titles were released! So it's about time we open the floodgates again and get some suggestions for what games you want to wear on your virtual nametags.

This thread is an opportunity to nominate new flairs, and discuss changes in general. We will take the nominations from this thread and create a separate voting thread in 1 week.

Into the Future

First things first however: we're doing things a little different this time around. Regardless of your opinions on "new reddit", it's likely here to stay, and more importantly it gives us official tools to manage flair that make things a lot more straightforward than the old CSS hacks. Starting with this vote, we'll be moving to using the new emoji system for our images. Thankfully this system is backwards-compatible and the images will still be visible and usable on old reddit. For example, the Spirit Island flair I'm currently using is implemented with the new emojis. (The extra white space you may see will be fixed once we migrate; I just haven't bothered while we're only in testing.)

Emojis do have a couple key distinctions:

• They can be uploaded at up to 128x128px. This doesn't automatically change their size -- the default is still 16x16 -- but on screens with higher pixel density (recent laptops, pretty much all phones) the images will look much sharper if we do so. [see below]
• Users can edit flair to contain as many emoji as the character limit handles, so you can use them in custom ways (build a virtual game shelf?). Emoji added beyond the flair's single default one are NOT currently visible on old reddit, though it's possible the devs may change it later.
• At some point in the future, emoji will probably be supported in post/comment text. The devs haven't confirmed this recently AFAIK, but it was alluded to in the past.

The Chopping Block

Unfortunately at this time the emoji system has the same quantity limits as our existing flair, so in order to add any entries, we have to remove some as well. For now we'll stick with the time-honored tradition of tallying which flairs are least-used and cutting them. To give folks one last opportunity to rally around their favorite icon, we'll give you at least 1 week before we make a final count. In-danger flairs are posted in this comment. EDIT: a full list of user counts is posted on metaboardgames.

Note: it is possible we'll get an emoji expansion at some point in time, but until the devs roll that out or we get a personal exemption, we're stuck with the current limits.

Upscaling

As long as we have the opportunity, we'd like to take advantage of the resolution improvements. BGG microbadges are only 16x16, so in addition to electing new games, we'll be opening the doors to individuals creating new images for games. This part might be a little play-by-ear depending on how many such submissions we get and whether consensus is easy or not, but we wanted to put the opportunity out there immediately. I expect that this process will extend beyond the initial voting period, and I'm very open to suggestions on how to handle it.

Since we're now taking user submissions, it also means the new images could entirely deviate from what is available as a microbadge.

By default I plan to experiment with applying a pixel-art scaling algorithm to embiggen the current microbadges by a factor of 2x-4x. Hopefully we can automatically improve the sharpness of some icons without damaging their appearance.

TL;DR

We're moving flairs to the new emoji system, and taking requests for changes new flair.

In this thread: discuss, nominate new games for flair

Next week: vote on new game nominees, start submitting higher-resolution flairs