well I was told that the master skin program was broken, so thats why the backup of master skins, and then the release of them in consession.

and im pretty sure we were told about this? if not......my bad.

some people have this idea that master skinners must make thousands per skin.....nuh uh no way at all, my first cheque was 30 bucks....and thats not a lie. and then the bank had to convert it to australian dollars so i recieved 20 bucks .... so i wouldnt exactly call us money grubbers, far from it.  Hell go to renderosity or daz3d some time, most stuff there is over 10 bucks and can max into the 40's and even 70's.

I think the op should sit down and try to skin a windowblind, then make the icon set that goes with it, and the cursor and the rainlender and the sysmetrix, the object doc, the wallpaper, ect ect ect......its alot of work and the only thing we require is a bit of respect for our status......

and if you still dont get it, refer to my optimus prime comic!

It's always good to know where people are coming from as some people's origins are a bit of a mystery...

I'm reading this from the back seat of my limo. Actually my assistant is reading it to me.

Pour me another glass of wine and read on.....

just an opinion here, but it would seem that some of the master skinners are updating some of their blinds to operate with win7, which also just happens to bring their skins back to the front page and hopefully additional revenue. making a blind for all three operating systems and the testing involved seems extreme, but...

I appreciate master skinner's blinds, they do provide a variety of interesting graphics to draw inspiration from. this was especially true when I first started out skinning, seeing something that was unique and saying to myself, "I wonder how that was made", and then making it. many of them set the bar for achievement.

should the master skins be separate from the free skins, sure, only if you want minimize their exposure. then they would be like other products that are sold here or better yet like subscriber skins. I've looked at subscriber skins once, can't tell you the last time that I looked at what stardock was selling (ads are autojunked) and I've only bought one master skin and that was years ago.

personally, I like the competition.

Maybe u bought u the wrong ones

I cant imagine any Master skinner saying black text on black bg was on purpose unless there was no way around it.

  A refund on something u cannot return would just lead to abuse I reckon.

Master skin uploading was broke for about 2 weeks or so.  During that time there were about 4-5 Master skins that were backlogged because of it.  That is one reason so many came in within a week.  I could have elected to release only one per week, but I chose not to as that is not fair to the skinners nor the people would are interested in the skins.

This is what I see this morning, and I really don't see a problem here.  If you are a subscriber you can display up to 60 skins per page, so you won't have to see so many Master Skins.

Neil is slowly but surely removing any barriers to having to put up with text ending up unreadable...but it does still happen...all areas of skinning are not yet under complete control.

vStyler is correct...I cant imagine ANY master saying unreadable text was by design...sometimes its unavoidable due to the limitations of dark skin design...or just some unseen aberration of the OS.

I have often encountered places in windows where the same text color is used over light,dark and medium backgrounds...try skinning your way around that without some compromises in pure readability.

Now if all you want is nothing but lite baby blue skins and white backgrounds we gotcha covered...cant see sales being very good after the first 2 or 3 tho.

Speaking of sales...money grubbers?...geez. I am disabled...this is it for me,I'm lucky to be able to scrape out a skin here and there to make a few bucks on.NONE of them have earned what they were worth in effort to make yet.

We are at the end of the quarter and I just passed 250$...yup,I'm rolling in dough man.

So I guess you can afford that Penthouse I've been hearing about now huh! Man....some people just have all the luck!

Lets also not forget that in addition the Master Skin scheme is provided by Stardock to help pay for the WC website, so you are not only supporting the skinner, but also helping fund this website.

On the original topic I think that it's simpler to group WindoBlinds skins together - master or not. There really aren't many Master skins compared to free skins, although I expect they may become more prevalent than they have in the past. And I expect that the ratio of Master skinners to no-master skinners is very low. Maybe they are more prolific?

The only real difference from the general punter's point of view is "free or not free". If there wasn't a scheme to sell them, then they would just be in the list along with all the others. Segregating them will just mean they won't get looked at.

Interestingly I got an email from someone this week disappointed that they couldn't buy my master skin because they were too young to have a credit card... so would I please just send it them for free. I haven't decided how to reply to that one yet...

(Ess gets back onto his personal yacht and tells his Umpa Lumpas to feed more caviar to his pet unicorns.)

Wait, what?  I fail to see the logic of that statement.  Technically, you'd actually be able to see more Master Skins per page wouldn't you?

If you are displaying 60 skins, even with a full week of Master skins, the free ones will far out number them.

Yes. Technically.

I think he meant fewer Master Skins as in a smaller Master/Standard skin ratio. So by his logic, you would be seeing fewer master skins compared to regular skins and therefore, fewer Master Skins.

It's upside down... but it still makes sense to me.

EDIT: Ninja'd... TWICE! OMG. o.0 

Ah....slow but eloquent....

...OK....

....only slow....

Well, to tell the truth, I have 4 Masters skins ready, but decided to just space them out over a period of time.

I uploaded my Aeon docks April 30th, and the site was still having upload issues. That was 1 1/2 months ago. When the uploads got better, that's when I decided to upload (last Wednesday) and it looks like everyone else did also.

Yeah, I am not even a Master, but I think Stardock gets around 55% of each sale, and selling stuff at $4.95 that means a Master gets a whopping $2.23 a sale!

"Clog up" the WB gallery with as many Master Skins as you like, I can handle it, Bring 'em On Baby!

Last 2 quarters for me were 35 and 40$...but I hadnt done any work(masterwork I mean) so it wouldnt even be 1000$ for the last years worth.

This quarter saw a boost from updating ecoLogical...and it should even improve more from an update to Knot Vista if I can finish it before the end of the quarter.

But health and appointments are looking to make it a next quarter update.

Oh,that eco update that boosted me a couple hundred bucks took me about 3 weeks of solid work...spread out over months. Yup...I'm living the american dream.