Fashion report - great concept, lousy implentation.

#1 Your players aren't made of gil

Stagnation is bad, but speculation is worse. Watching your one size fits all item get jacked kills it for poor players. If that item is out of their reach because it's not easily obtainable then it kills participation and incentive to experiment.

#2 Weekly limit.

See above, market price spikes are bad enough, (removing dyes from scoring is a band aid solution) but 4 tries a week with ambiguous hints on top of the one size fits all solution means good luck finding it without cheating.

#3 It's Fashion report, not fashion 'Reddit'

See both above, the scoring is so tight on it's demands for that 'perfect' item, to the point where one shiva item works but another doesn't for a 100? The heck?

#4 Class locked challenges / items.

Now throw on top a one size fits all where you need the right class to get the score? Again, you're needlessly locking your minigame behind some stupid arbitrary restrictions. And you wouldn't have to if...

... #5 Variety is the spice of life, and a workable minigame.

What just killed me with this weeks?

The moonfire halter is part of the 100 score. but the faire joi is a 1 star? I understand one is a craft, and one is a seasonal, but BOTH are moonfire fair items. The logic behind the scoring here does not match your hint at all.

The hat though was the kicker. The angler hat is this weeks perfect.

So I challenge anyone to try and justify to me how one straw hat is the part of a perfect score. But the Capeline hat, another straw hat, another hat that screams summer, is somehow a 1 star?

One thing I love about 14 is the variety. Glams, things to do, ways to level, to get tomestones. But in this regard fashion report is a failure in it's current form.

I would feel sorry for any new player on his first saucer visit trying, he wouldn't stand a chance of success between the market and this level of nonsensical scoring. Look at it from that perspective too.

Reaching a perfect score of 100 is indeed very hard and/or expensive. There is however no need to reach that score more than once for the achievement.
Getting a score of 80 is significantly easier, but still not trivial, so it is a good thing that just showing up in whatever you happen to be wearing will still net you 10,000 MGP. Free MGP is nice.

As for "cheating", we are clearly told that we need to talk with each other for this minigame, so looking at reddit, or this forum, for hints on what to wear is not cheating - it is playing the minigame as intended.

It's not hard to make gil. If you're feeling poor, then you're not taking advantage of the things that have come your way or you've been spending your gil unwisely. Things that might be junk in your eyes can be valuable to someone else if you just sell it on the MB. Ask others for ideas on simple ways to make gil.

I wonder what constitutes cheating to you considering from the very start SE has stressed that we're intended to work with other players to figure out what the targeted items for the week are. This is a MMO. You should be working with others toward reaching your goal instead of trying to do everything solo. Good thing there are other players who do understand this and are happy working together to find the right items each week.

The Fashion Report scoring is based on the item style model, not the item source or material. That's why one item from Shiva will work but not another - those items don't look anything alike.

There's nothing wrong with having some weeks class locked as long as all classes get represented in the long run or there are weeks that are class agnostic (and we've had a few). There's no extra repeatable reward for scoring 100, just the one time achievement. The repeatable rewards only require a score of 80 or better. As a player who doesn't own SB and only has one DoM/DoW job to 60, I've still managed to score at least 80 in all but 3 weeks (though one of those weeks was the first week of the Fashion Report when we didn't understand we needed something equipped in every slot even if not a targeted slot or I would have hit 80 before using up my 4 attempts).

As for this week, go back to my response to your point 3. It's style, not source or material. The Faire Joi looks nothing like the Moonfire Halter/Vest. The Straw Capeline looks nothing like the Angler's Hat for all they're both made out of straw.

SE doesn't need to justify anything to you. Their game, their rules. If you don't like the way it's set up, don't participate. Or better yet, get in the spirit of things and play it as intended. It's not that hard, especially with the dedicated group that works to figure out items and dyes each week. There should be some effort required to get the best rewards. If you're not willing to put in the effort, you don't deserve the reward.

By the way, my little low level alts are perfectly happy with their 10k MGP they get just for showing up to be judged. When you're just starting to get into Gold Saucer, that 10k is a sizeable amount for no more effort than to walking up to Masked Rose and going "judge me".

The BiS items for a perfect score are pretty weird.
You would think something like "Allagan Fashion" could be any Allagan piece of gear, but instead it's a very specific item and everything else is either lower points or no points at all.

As far as needing the buy the items, it's actually pretty nice that there's a reason to buy/sell/craft these really old glamours now. Unfortunately the price inflates quite a bit, but that's what happens when you have people sitting on 100m+ amounts of Gil with nothing to spend it on.

Before making any changes to the way the fashion report works, they should add reasons to actually do it.

I always chuckle when I read that the fashion report is "too expensive". There's literally zero reason to get a 100-point set more than once, which means you might spend a fair chunk of change once, and if you're spending much money to get 80+, that's your own fault.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Raldo

I always chuckle when I read that the fashion report is "too expensive". There's literally zero reason to get a 100-point set more than once, which means you might spend a fair chunk of change once, and if you're spending much money to get 80+, that's your own fault.

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And if youre in any way a Glam-gamer, you can wait for a week where the "expensive" piece is one you already own. My 100 point week i literally had everything but the dyes(and i had a couple of them too) in storage already. Think i spent more teleporting to beast tribes to pick up the remaining dyes then i did on the dyes themselves.

When they announced the Fashion Report, I thought it would be a system where you had to come up with an outfit for a certain theme, then get ranked based on how well you fit the theme. Indeed, that's how the Fashion Report actually presents itself in-game. In reality though, it's just "match the slots". They just pick a handful of slots, and one or two items to be "correct" for those slots each week, and if you wear anything except the correct pre-chosen item, you lose. This doesn't encourage people to be creative or get into glamour, all it does is make people check online to find the wanted items for that week, and then buy them from the MB. The fact that rare and expensive items are so often chosen to be "correct" makes me think they wanted fashion report to stimulate the economy for glamour items, but that's still a dishonest and annoying way to do it.

Even if the MGP reward was lowered greatly, Fashion Report would be a lot more fun and a much better piece of content if it was more flexible, but I suspect part of the reason they made it "match the slots" is because it would be too much effort to go through all the gear in the game and score it properly according to each theme. I guess this is the problem with trying to make a computer judge something subjective like fashion.

Considering it is fashion, I would consider your examples of straw hat A is a perfect score while straw hat B is one star as an example of something we see in the real world.

Option A is the real thing people are after. Option B is a knockoff that’s similar and might pass for a casual observer, but for a true fashion snob, it’s worse than wearing something entirely different.