3 reasons the Hairstyle Contest really ruffled some feathers...

[To the Devs]The reason the contest upset many, me included, was the over-representation of finalists from Japan. 3 additional points:

1) The EU and US aren't going to have the same aesthetic values.

2) Hairstyle variation for popular styles is fairly limited.

3) Males and Females tend to have different aesthetic values.

In Summary - There is a few ways the Dev Team could have been more inclusive. Separating the contest entries by player region, granting each region one hairstyle to represent them. Also worth considering is making aesthetic categories for each gendered hairstyle, like "Casual or Formal", preferably also including categories for people of color or ethnicities which have difficulty emulating Eurocentric or Asian hairstyles. Further, judges need to be accurately representative of gender in society. Human sex ratio across the species is 1.01:1, with all 3 contest regions combined averaging about 52% female and 48% male.

c'est la vie

this hairstyle crap is still going on? no more community involvement please. fixes the problem right there

The devs know how much time and resources they can afford to spend on responding to basically a fluff contest. I do agree the voting could and should have been done in a different format (this Like as many as you want but only one counts system just didn't work or make sense) but expecting the devs to do several times more work just to respond to a fun contest is sort of silly.

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Originally Posted by Kolaina

this hairstyle crap is still going on? no more community involvement please. fixes the problem right there

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Sadly, this may be true, but I do hope it's not the message that the devs take from this. I've seen it happen in other MMOs. The devs try to do something nice, maybe much it up a little and the players revolt.. so the devs just don't do anything similar ever again.

Some of the Japanese hairstyles though were presented nicer. Could be the very reason they got more votes.

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Originally Posted by Nektulos-Tuor

Some of the Japanese hairstyles though were presented nicer. Could be the very reason they got more votes.

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Yeah, I think this contest was less about the hairstyles and more about who could draw a prettier picture. I think the male one will translate nicely to an in-game model, but that female one seems like it's going to be so bland and blah.

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Originally Posted by Reinfeld

Yeah, I think this contest was less about the hairstyles and more about who could draw a prettier picture. I think the male one will translate nicely to an in-game model, but that female one seems like it's going to be so bland and blah.

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Maybe. I kind of wish the female one could be used on males. We don't have many feminine hairstyles. Feminine hair would look really great on Miqo'te males.

I also want more male hair on Lalafell females and more female hair on Lalafell males. More unisex hairstyles for those two races.

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Originally Posted by Nektulos-Tuor

Maybe. I kind of wish the female one could be used on males. We don't have many feminine hairstyles. Feminine hair would look really great on Miqo'te males.

I also want more male hair on Lalafell females and more female hair on Lalafell males. More unisex hairstyles for those two races.

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Or more cross-race hairstyles in general. I have long hair IRL (looks like my character's actually) and for me, at least, the choices of long hair available on Male Hyurs sucks. They've come a longer way in adding more long hairstyles, but I feel like most of them don't really look that great. Au'ri Males, on the other hand, have an excellent choice of long hairstyles and I wish they'd let the other races have them as well.

Wish they used the poll system they have...:/

What could have been more fair was having one winner per region (NA, Japan, Europe).

And let's emphasize that about 50% didn't understand / read the "only your last vote counts" thing.
Assuming that most didn't deliberately vote on multiple entries to skew the results.

Mmm. For me it was just sad that I was not allowed to enter, even though I am classified as 'EU' on my account.

Having the devs arbitrarily pick who made it into the finalists didn't help either.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

Having the devs arbitrarily pick who made it into the finalists didn't help either.

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Ultimately the developers will pick who wins and who loses in the first place. They picked pretty well but missed some really cool ones. The issue is though, I think the PS3 REALLY limits what they can do, and some would look weird in polygons.

I mean, whats worse. Not being picked, or your hairstyle being picked, winning but when its actually in-game it looks bad because of low polygon count?

The thing is too that you could made the best hairstyle of all but if it cant be implemented in the game why choose it?

The community got to present its own hairstyles.

Just saying, that's a thing that would never happen in pretty much any other videogame.

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Originally Posted by Hezhi

The community got to present its own hairstyles.

Just saying, that's a thing that would never happen in pretty much any other videogame.

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yeah I thought this was great. While I agree the method of voting was extremely lackluster and should be improved - I don't understand all the complaining. I guess people are just upset "their" hair style didn't win.

I think the most disappointing point of hairstyle voting was that it wasn't accessible to everyone (the forum ban hits very easily, I was one of said excluded players).

But I do not agree with the fact that males and females should only vote for their respective gender. I am a female IRL, but my main character is a male. I would've liked to have a say and vote the hairstyle that I would've most liked for him, even being female. It would've been VERY discriminative to separate voting by RL gender.

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Originally Posted by Kolaina

this hairstyle crap is still going on? no more community involvement please. fixes the problem right there

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Amen.

Could things have been done better? Maybe. No system is perfect. At the end of the day, we're still getting free content designed by the community, for the community. Perhaps results were skewed, but it still stands that this was a great opportunity for the community to design its own content.

Seeing so many complaints and so very little positivity concerning the matter really doesn't look well on us.

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Originally Posted by Reneta_Xian

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So from what I am seeing here, your saying people voted on the same style stretched over the entire game. No one will agree on the same styles all the time regardless of location, even if they only polled one group they would still have different opinions. Can we please drop it now? We all voted, we have our winners, done.

My biggest issue is that "only the last Like counts" was announced after myself and around 2000 others had already voted. I read the rules before I voted and it said nothing of limitations, so I picked out a few I liked. Unfortunately my vote went to something other than my #1 picks.

I think as soon as this "first Like" came to light, they should have reset the votes and let people do it right. We could have had completely different winners if they had.

People always want something more... Though I agree with a previous poster, SE should/would stop community events if the reactions are so atrociously poor considering they're taking time/effort to actually allow us to decide partially on something included in the game.

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Originally Posted by Kolaina

this hairstyle crap is still going on? no more community involvement please. fixes the problem right there

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All kind of constructive feedback and criticism is welcome, and that's the point of having a forum. It will certainly help them to fix some of the issues that the contest defintely had (like the "only the last like counts" stuff). They're human beings, not perfect robots that can make no mistake ever.

What I would have liked would have been if they'd divided the options for each gender into Short, Medium, Long and maybe Ponytails/Updos categories and then had an approximately equal selection of each.

That was really all I'd wanted from it.

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Originally Posted by Yshnal

All kind of constructive feedback and criticism is welcome, and that's the point of having a forum. It will certainly help them to fix some of the issues that the contest defintely had (like the "only the last like counts" stuff). They're human beings, not perfect robots that can make no mistake ever.

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because the other handfuls of threads with hundreds of complaints and thousands of tears wasnt enough criticism? how long will it be before people finally let this go?

Well I don't like the look of the males hairstyle that won, it looks too feminine.

It's a hairstyle I will be passing 100%

It's just not my taste, I seen one that looked pretty cool that should have won but it didn't but who cares anyways it was just for fun and congrats to the winners.

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Originally Posted by Yshnal

All kind of constructive feedback and criticism is welcome, and that's the point of having a forum. It will certainly help them to fix some of the issues that the contest defintely had (like the "only the last like counts" stuff). They're human beings, not perfect robots that can make no mistake ever.

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The problem is the vast majority of the threads and complaints weren't anywhere near what a rational human being would define as "constructive". It's almost all bitter, salty whining that gives no [realistic] solutions or suggestions for a better-ran contest in the future.

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Originally Posted by ElHeggunte

The problem is the vast majority of the threads and complaints weren't anywhere near what a rational human being would define as "constructive". It's almost all bitter, salty whining that gives no [realistic] solutions or suggestions for a better-ran contest in the future.

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Is it the case of this one? The OP was expressing his/her opinions and what would he/she do to improve it. Even if some people around here don't agree with his/her opinions or solutions, or find them unrealistic, it was indeed constructive criticism. However it was met with some people (like the one that I quoted) that were, indeed, bitter, salty, and whinning about what is an appropiate thread, without giving back any form of constructive discussion.

"If you don't have anything useful to say, then don't say anything at all". Or so they say. Some posters gave their reasonings as of why they thought that this was a bad idea and why, and some others said what they think that could be improved and done to make it better. But just saying "this again?", "deal with it", "this is crap", and the likes adds nothing to the discussion. That's what I was pointing out.

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Originally Posted by Yshnal

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except at this point the contest is done, and the topic has been beaten to death. yet here we are, with another thread, which was made just after the OP posted in one of the other threads already based on the topic. i'm not bitter nor did i proclaim anything inappropriate as you try and claim. all i'm saying is the contest is done. get over it.
constructive criticism is my suggesting to have no more community involvement due to such negative results, which according to you, i am welcome to say

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Originally Posted by Yshnal

Is it the case of this one? [...]

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No, this thread is actually well done. It gets right to the point and the OP lays out clearly defined ways in which they think the contest could have been done better without sounding bitter, angry, or entitled to compensation. I meant to add a final sentence in my previous reply pointing out I was largely referring to the huge volume of hair style threads resulting from the contest overall and not necessarily singling out this one in particular. I decided against it at the last second and now I'm wishing I had left it in.

Well, I voted for the Female Hair style thaf won and the Male was in my top 3 so I'm happy.

As for me, My "Gibson's Patriot" hair style was implmented back in 2.4 so I'm happy as a chocobo with a fresh batch of Gyshal Greens with the Femal e Hairstyle being implemented next patch.

The whole rules introduced more than a day after the hairstyles resulting in the entire first wave of voters voting for the last one they liked instead of the one they liked best is kind of annoying.

then going back and seeing all the finalists are japanese is a little irksome too

I know the majority of my guild wanted that fancy braided female one to win but their votes got counted towards a different one because they thought it was like the ones you like and no rule sheet saying otherwise

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Originally Posted by Reneta_Xian

1) The EU and US aren't going to have the same aesthetic values.

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We are 1 playerbase, not 3. If you implement 3 separate regional contests what's to stop English, French and german players all getting pissed off and demanding contests by country? Stick to 1 contest for everyone since the 'prize' is being included in the game.

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Originally Posted by Reneta_Xian

2) Hairstyle variation for popular styles is fairly limited.

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Not sure how this applies to the contest, but if you're making a general point, then in general people like what is popular or what is similar to what is popular. So, this is to be expected.

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Originally Posted by Reneta_Xian

3) Males and Females tend to have different aesthetic values.

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And hence we have different hairstyles for males and females. What's the problem?

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Originally Posted by Reneta_Xian

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Fascinating minutia aside, how would you propose implementing a 1.01 : 1 gender spread among the judges? Sounds like someone will have to lose a finger to judge...

This game and it's aesthetic are rooted in JRPGs and Final Fantasy. This isn't PlayStation 'Home', it's not an attempt to simulate the real world. So, why are you pushing this expectation that the hairstyles should be more Eurocentric and/or less Asian? Neither distinction has any place within Eorzea. They don't really have much of a place in general, distinctions such as this belie the global community we purport to belong to.

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Originally Posted by Kolaina

because the other handfuls of threads with hundreds of complaints and thousands of tears wasnt enough criticism? how long will it be before people finally let this go?

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Indeed...and now the obligatory - this is why we can't have nice things. If I were SE, I'd think long and hard before opening this kind of thing up to players again.