Those designs just hurt my eyes and my soul.As someone who is a semi-active member of the Stygians group, seeing them mentioned in this thread really made me smile. Not only can I clear up a bit of confusion of what you happen to be seeing, but also plague you with more awful, no-good, cluttered to Hell and back designs that happen to populate the species.
Overall, though, the community is extremely tame, and the owner (Zoomutt) is deeply invested in making it a fun and engaging experience for everyone. One of the biggest perks to the group is that obtaining characters is completely free, so long as you (or someone else, through commission) put in a modest amount of effort. Tiered MYOs can be purchased in the Patreon shop for the modest price of $25 for an uncommon MYO (limited to 2, grants access to non-restricted uncommon subspecies) and $30 for a rare MYO (limited to 1, grants access to non-restricted rare subspecies). Other game items can be purchased for a similar price, and the Patreon reward system grants additional prizes on top of monthly rewards for lifetime milestones. Accumulating in-game currency, potions, etc. ranges in difficulty depending on your playstyle, but there are always users looking to trade and offer their creative services for the right price.
If I had to give it a rating, it would be a solid 7/10. The way that some of the events have been handled and the prize distribution is a bit wonky, and it can turn into a currency sink every now and again during mini-events, but the beauty of ARPGs is that you simply don't have to participate. It also has its fair share of auction whales, and plenty of staffmembers have overly expensive designs that they do nothing with, though that's to be expected from any closed species. Probably the worst thing is that there have been rumors that staffmembers get a cut of all auction sales, but I cannot confirm nor deny this, so make of that what you will.
Stygians are both, and this fact is poked fun at quite a lot because most of its more prominent members are from the era of subeta and neopets. They are deer-based creatures with canine heads, but there are several subspecies that change the general proportions/base traits/etc. Highlights include:
All can be found on-site, with attached overviews in regards to traits and whatnot. Source.
Shameless Animal Crossing rip-off. There were a handful of Animal Crossing-based rewards given out during a completely unrelated event due to New Horizons launching around the same time, which upset a lot of users. One of the rewards was so bad that the owner had to create two new varities of items to fix it, and even then it keeps causing them problems regularly.
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I have seen several of these things, and they very rarely turn out to be a nice, well-balanced design. I'm sure something could be done with it.
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It's a cat, but also not really. This basially says, "Felines have a canine skull, not a cat one!" Staff has had to clarify this multiple times in the past, because people rightfully get confused.
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It's Cats, the musical. From the supspecies information: "Page Stygian have human shaped skulls/faces, but they still have a thin coating of fur on their face. While this fur can be any color, it should not appear to be missing or flesh-like."
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Oops! All bones! Trait allowances (AKA how much you're allowed to add on top of the basic design) is extremely restricted for this subspecies. It's literally just bones...
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Take a jellyfish and make it worse, but also remove all of the traits that make it a jellyfish. At least a lot of the traits for subspecies are completely optional...
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The artist responsible for this design is not actually Zoomutt, but Waschmittelpulver — Zoo simply hosts a myriad of guest designs on her main page in lieu of using the dA group. This isn't to say that Zoo doesn't have her fair share of overdesigned characters, but a handy feature of Stygians is that all characters come with a free "avatar form" (either a human or animal that can be used to represent the character in art and writing)... unless you happen to purchase a pre-made one, in the case of the ugly lion man (credited to artist Malusdraco).
They tend to be pretty lenient with avatar forms, so long as the color palette and general theme is the same. This is how so many overdesigned characters are made usable: by literally not using them at all.
Waschmittelpulver is definitely a "designer" Stygian artist, and their designs are considered some of the most valuable in the group. I think they may be even more valuable than the owner's designs, given their complexity and general... look. Enjoy some more of their designs, in no particular order:
edit: deleted some images I chose not to include.
