The voting for the tier 5 skin should be different (video)

Great Vid Shenmoki I feel very similar to you about this situation. I wanna start this with a little look into how the Chronos community skin went down. Bear with me if you're reading this it's probably gonna be a long one.

So the Chronos skin was for one god, and this factor alone is extremely important, this was already a 2 step process vote, the fans voted for chronos then they got to vote from a selection of skins. I don't actually remember how many there were but they should have had less choice from the start due to the factor of it being about one God, too many choices can really split the vote and it can end up in a really awkward scenario which is what i believe happened with the Chronos skin.

The Reason I think this current scenario is different is because having such a small choice, when they initially promised 10 choices anyway, really limits the community to their choice of God, something which was avoided beforehand by having the community vote for the God they wanted. Now having only 3 choices of gods let alone skins alienates a lot of the community off the bat. Now everyone who doesn't care about Sol, Goobis or Kuku isn't going to want to vote and of course this makes them feel like they had no input. This as opposed to the chronos case where absolutely everyone got to vote because they had all the choice in the world and then after that the majority still got to vote yet again as chronos was the majority vote. A much better scenario where the community had a lot more input.

For example, you had up some Sol skins, a Zeus skin, an Agni skin(mine<3), the Janus, nox, freya and of course scylla. Now imagine that all of those skins you had up and the ones chosen by hirez were up there(hypothetically). Obviously no god duplicates so no 2 sol skins or 2 nox skins or whatever because that would be unfair. Now think about how many more people would have wanted to vote, they had a choice of so many more gods to pick from. So as to how the vote should have gone down after this point, I honestly have to say I wouldn't know, but if this was for the community I think they would get the most out of it if it was done in rounds. To make them feel even more involved because a lot of this is about how people feel, to put it bluntly they are trying to appeal to their community in the process and of course they need to make the community feel like they matter for this to work well. They should also have taken longer to give all of the skins reformatted designs of equal quality - this is so important. You do not want one skin to look drastically better than any other in its technical execution (I will talk about this again).

Now one thing that really bugged me from the get go is that they actually let everyone see all the submissions, typically this would be a hidden submission thing so that the company (hirez) can control it how they want but still let the community feel like they are the ones making the decisions. Which in my opinion is not a bad thing at all but I’m certain others would differ on that opinion. This would have stopped any backlash like the we want wallwalker hashtag which totally taken over the comments and pon pon's twitter as no one would have known they existed if they weren't picked.

So I now that I have somewhat explained how I feel this could be handled better for each party's separate interests I want to move onto the actual concepts they gave us to vote upon. Some of this may sound Snobbish so I apologize if that's how it comes across. So first I want to comment on the designs they gave us, the Anubis and Kuku basically each end up looking like alternate versions of Fafnirs ultimate which is a major fuck-up in terms of design as they are no longer recognizable by silhouette which is extremely important in a moba game where every character should be quickly seen, recognized and processed. Think about the Archon and the Ragnarok, each of these skins look like their host gods and they look like that for a reason. Keep in mind these artworks were created by hirez to market these ideas towards us, so these professionals are very aware of these design implications. After that each of these skins is rather drab in design and doesn't bring much new to the table, a lot of the fan skins were actually quite experimental in things such as ability based or passive based form changes which we have yet to see from a Tier 5 Skin. The Anubis skin is sigh just another demonic skin, as much fun as these can be to design I don't think i need to say that the community have expressed that they are quite done for the time being with skins of this theme. The Kuku skin is the funniest imo, as you said it turns him from a dragon into a dragon, and then from a small dragon into a bigger dragon. Extreme lack of design compared to some of the submissions here and I hate to seem spiteful but I find this one laughable (it's like asking us if we want to vote for a dog Anubis skin or a lion Anhur skin). Now the Sol skin, as I see it, is the only viable skin, it is the only one that looks like Sol and the only one which the community ever expressed any interest in, the original artwork is actually quite beautiful. Though as you said they've presented us with something that not only doesn't look much like sol in her initial stages but only like a Tier 2 if her final stage. Which is really very underwhelming though I do believe that the FX work they could do on this skin may actually make it a worthwhile contestant. For all these skins are worth however I've decided to abstain my vote.

There is another point I have to make about the artwork they showed is and this is going to directly correlate with the time they took and the amount of choice we were offered. So this is mostly about the quality of the artwork they presented for the vote and will get pretty technical. The Kuku concept is the simplest of the 3 so I will start there; now this is a very simple design and very rough sketch - i was actually surprised that it came from a hirez employee. This is a piece of artwork that could be done in under an hour by any high level artist, I myself am adamant I could do this in such a time-frame and I am an intermediate amateur student. This is a bit technical but the line quality itself was rather poor and would typically be described in the field as chicken scratch and the values used to define form and shadow were extremely inconsistent - the main reason i was surprised. Now the Anubis skin was done using a very common and time efficient method known ask masking, this allows the artist to define an idea with a rough sketch and then apply their strokes to a mask beneath the sketch, it's like a way of automatically colouring between the lines. Not only that but the concept was done using rough iterations of the same initial sketch the only sketch drawn from scratch is the final form. What I'm saying in blunt terms is that for professional artists these concepts are all extremely easy to do and very quick, so why if they had more time than they initially requested (they were late on the vote) did we have so little choice if the concepts were so easy to acquire. I myself could have done 3 of the Anubis style concepts in one day If I was pushing myself, they had many days to do this and multiple artists so what was the problem. This is the most confusing part to me. I didn't mention the Sol concept as it was more advanced but still used a 3d bashing time saving method to make a polished looking concept fairly fast. A lot of the submissions were actually nicer looking not only in design but technical execution.

Now here is where i want to disagree with you a little, they do not pick the prettiest concepts, as they shouldn't. They should also not pick the most up voted because that would be unfair to the people that can't draw as well, however what hirez seemed to mess up here was picking ideas that were as interesting as some of these more up voted concepts. I feel like this whole thing was a major flop and may have hurt the community’s chances of having a choice in further cosmetics due to the backlash currently being thrown at hirez. I feel like people should identify the real problems and not just focus on any specific concepts as their argument so that hirez can get the high quality criticism it deserves. Otherwise they are just scared away from dealing with us at all.

Apologies for the fucking essay, I'm just extremely passionate about this stuff. Great vid. Important subject, I'd love to hear your expanded thoughts.

/r/Smite Thread