Hair contest: petitioning

[KasKatta]

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It's actually stated that multiple finalists have the chance to make it in game at a later date. That aside, with only one guaranteed selection making it in game, all the more reason to have a more diverse number of finalists to choose from. So, by limiting the entries, you're saying it is more fair based on the principle that only those with a chance to win get votes? Who determines what has the chance? Any one had the chance. There could be a design out there currently not in the finals that a ton of people would vote for over the ones now, but we'd never know cause it wasn't given the opportunity.

And if a hairstyle won over a ton of unique designs, awesome, well done. But there'd be less a chance for someone to complain over a more open and varied finalist set. If the style similar to one we have in game came out on top, then so be it. But as it stands now a good number of people do not see that varied choice in the current listings.

I don't think I ever said I assumed or believed the majority was unhappy. I did however, point out that a good number of us are; enough to question how the contest was handled. But neither you nor I can say with certain who the majority is based on just the number of people who chose to speak out in this thread. But there is no denying a good number are unhappy. It's now been said that it has even been addressed in the Japanese forums.

[DawnSolaria]

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The only way that would silence everyone is to include every single entry and have forum vote on it, which would be impossible as it would be too time and resource consuming. On the other hand, any method involving any sort of secrecy on SE part regarding selection process will have forum crying for blood.

If we are discussing better way to handle the contest, how can SE possibly satisfy everyone?

[Adire]

If we are discussing better way to handle the contest, how can SE possibly satisfy everyone?

Tournament voting. Start it considerably earlier than when you plan to implement the winner into the game, every so often and in sequence have a thread of 15 entries or whatever random number you need being voted on, the winners of the first bracket compete in the 2nd bracket against each other and so on.

Not time consuming for SE to do work wise, not resource consuming. It could be done the same way they did it this time, using threads and the like system. The contest would only need to be conducted over a longer period of time, but if other tournaments can be done this way, I'm pretty sure SE could manage. All it takes is some planning ahead. It wouldn't require much more effort or working time on SE's part than this contest did. And if it was conducted ahead of time, such as right after a major patch when there are months between it and the next patch, the extra time it took for the process to complete wouldn't matter anyways.

Many other contests are held with this method because of its efficiency and fairness. Don't see why it couldn't be done here.

[DawnSolaria]

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This solution is very time consuming. If the current hair contest is open for vote for a week, then a tournament can possibly take months based on numbers of entries. I highly doubt SE wants a trivial community event that is mostly only visible on the forum to last that long. Again, this contest was suppose to be a simple "get community involved" type of event.
I am not saying the contest should not be taken seriously, but SE would not do month long event to implement one hairstyle.

[Adire]

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Why wouldn't they? Surely they should care about all their community's opinions at least that much.

It's only time consuming in how long the process takes. It's not time consuming in how much time SE has to spend working on it. And it really doesn't even have to be that time consuming. Make each bracket bigger if you have to. Many larger, more complicated tournaments are conducted in a much shorter time than one month. And between patches, SE has a few months.

This would have been far better to do that SE just picking a few random ones and pigeon holing the community into voting for what we like most out of what they like most. We were given very limited choices that were still strongly dictated by SE, that's a poor attempt at getting the community involved.

Honestly, even letting the community pick the finalists and SE pick the winner would have been more fair...

[KasKatta]

If we are discussing better way to handle the contest, how can SE possibly satisfy everyone?

As suggested by Adire, and several others, the way the voting was conducted and the finalist count needs work. Whether it be a tournament style (which can work, and is really only more complex than what we have now with the amount of time needed to vote on each bracket), or simply giving us a bigger pool to select from in general. A bigger pool means more chance for varied and diverse designs, therefore, appealing to the widest possible number of people. You have to take into consideration: if SE received 1000 entries (as an example) then 25 of that number is less than 1%, even combining both categories for a total of 50 chosen is less than 1%. There's something wrong with that picture.

All in all, this whole contest seemed rushed on their part. With the amount of work required to implement things in game, vote, and then even before that, design, the turn around was much too quick. It allowed for an entry that did not adhere to the rules to slide in, reason enough to consider the way this whole thing was conducted was troubled.

I'd also suggest considering more categories instead of just male to female. Long, short, up-dos, even a category for SE character tributes like what we see in the Quistis entry or the Warrior of Light entry, whatever. Variety. Variety is always better.

And in actuality, this method lightens SE's load. Because they spend less time narrowing down the entries, and leave the brunt of that to us, the community, as part of a community-driven event.