Well, with the last update of the once 36x36 avatars, that grew into 80x80 ones - The size of the upload still remained limited at 20kB Maximum. Now, for an 80x80, 20kB seems enough for most. But, the number of pixels are doubled, and the size grows too then. If you want a JPEG avatar, you're going to save it as "Low Quality". Otherwise it's going to be too large. With my avatar, having over 256 different colors - It's a real pain, trying to get the avatar to the accepted size. With GIF's, it's difficult, with JPEG - Downgrading the quality(Photoshop wise) to 3[min.](AKA 80x80 >> -20kB) will be your only way out. What i'd like to see, and maybe an group of others, is an upgrade from 20kB max, to 30 or 40kB maximum seeing that the size has been doubled.
The size limit is fine if you know how to work programs like photoshop. If you save your files for the web instead of just saving them normally, you will still maintain the same picture quality with a drastic reduction in size. You can also upload them to external image hosting sites like photobucket and just link to them here on GameSpot. A maximum file size increase would probably hurt GameSpot's bandwith quite a bit as well, considering how many users there are on this site.
The number of pixels is actually almost 5 times as much (4.93827... to be more precise - 6400 versus 1296). You can use The GIMP and save JPG quality 90 for the 80x80 images and still likely be within the 20 KB limit. For animated GIFs, you can still have many frames (and depending on color count and complexity, it can range from 20 frames to even 100 or more. Mine is 24 frames and 11KB in size but is 80x60 instead. It's surprising just how much you can get into a single image. In fact, even uncompressed, you can fit a 24-bit 80x80 image into the 20KB file size allotment (it would be 19254 bytes as a BMP image).
The only time you would have trouble is if the image is larger than 80x80 such as 400x300, but even JPG quality 80 can get some of these within 20 KB. If the 20 KB file size limit is an issue, try hosting it at imageshack or photobucket. It's strongly recommended that you shrink (scale) your image down to something with 80 as the largest dimension.
i dnt think this is really necessary...the vast majority of avatars (or at least those that have actually been scaled down to a sutiable size) can fit onto the GS servers if you compress them, maintaining a fairly good quality; and even those that don't can still be used thanks to external uploading sites...
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