Winners Announcement of Interior Design Contest: What are your Thoughts?

[Dustytome]

The gpose entries should be removed.
It's a very specific rule they put in place.

I think those should probably be disqualified too. While they did state the idle camera could be used and the idle camera has a lot of the same features as gpose, they did specify they didn't want anything modifying the look.

Finally, in regards to usage of the idling camera (/icam). Idling camera may be used to take your screenshots.
Please note that the group pose (/gpose) is not allowed as we do not want any additional lighting or effects added modifying the actual looks of the interior design.

[Luna_Ariana]

I dislike people who clearly broke the rules appear to have won. While a minor change like picking your flowers is one thing, it's unfair some were overlooked when other contestants knew they couldn't make any changes.

Another odd decision is winners where one room has nothing in it. Just seems a bit odd, though I suppose if they showed off more of the other rooms, it evens out.

Ye this bothers me a little aswell. When my Friend and I checked the 3 Winners from Cactuar one had the Mahogany Bunk Bed in their Basement while the other Person had the Greeny Partition you get from the new Saint Arboretum (Hard) Dungeon. But oh well still made the House goodlooking tho! ^^)''

About the Gpose part... yes they really need to disqualify people. The Idlecam tho I dunno. It's mostly a Cam placed randomly in a place yet you cannot tweak with the color nor zoom in or out for that. Can't tell what other people think of that tho.


But oh well since the Contest is over I think I can share my House fully now and not with 6 Images only cause tell me how to take 6 Images only when you decorated A Mansion with many Aspects? Oo https://imgur.com/a/g8Mw4d4
(and yes it actually contains glitches so i'm guilty on that ooops)
Eitherway now we can atleast redecorate freely without bad feelings of a Disqualification

[Dustytome]

About the Gpose part... yes they really need to disqualify people. The Idlecam tho I dunno. It's mostly a Cam placed randomly in a place yet you cannot tweak with the color nor zoom in or out for that. Can't tell what other people think of that tho.

Type /icam in game and then press * on the numpad. There are less options than gpose, but it still lets you do color filters, screen effects, depth of field, limb darkening and frame effects.

[Louvain]

I think all the houses are really gorgeous so hats off to the winners. But like others I share the same disappointment that JP got its own set of winners whereas NA and EU were combined.

Also, the blatant lack of regard for their own rules (ie people modifying their house before announcement + gpose users) is frustrating. I've been holding off on the Halloween and 4.4 items because of these rules but I guess it didn't even matter. :/ As far as multiple winners go, its, whatever I guess? it seems kind of pointless though, to get the same rewards 2x on a character.

[Bullet_Bill]

I would be perfectly fine and dandy with the results if they hadn't selected a lot of winners who broke the rules (be it on gpose/screenshot manipulation or modification, content of the screenshots as I think I remember a mod here saying you should only take pics of your interior, as stated here, or house layout and content changes before result announcement).

I'm also not really fine with NA and EU being grouped together while Japan has their own contest. Re-reading the rules, it does say that both NA and EU contestants can enter, but the fact there was a thread for EU entries and a thread for NA entries made me think there were two different contests for each "continent". But that's on me, I guess.

I do not really like how they chose 50 winners for each category and not proportionally to how many of each type of house there is in the game. That means you kind of had a higher chance of getting picked if you were entering as a medium, or even better, large house contestant.

I'm also more than a little on the edge regarding the usage of glitches as some of them cannot even be done, or very hardly so, on all platforms where the game is available, glitches the developers have tried patching time and time again. But, eh, that's less bothering me than the other points above as it's more of a grey area.

I would like to hear from the contest organizers and judges about the issues that were raised in this thread.

Finally I'm not sure what to think about how a fair number of people entered and won twice (or more, congrats!), effectively "screwing" over other people from having a chance at the items, but on the other hand, that was a possibility and written down clearly in the rules (one entry per category).

One thing's for sure now though, I'm not participating in an XIV-hosted contest again. Or if I do, I'll make sure to break the rules :^).

[HyoMinPark]

The rules said you could have multiple entries as long as they were different properties, i.e. you could enter your FC house, your personal cottage, and you apartment room since they’re all diff locations. That some people won multiple times is unsurprising as some people are really really good at decorating.

Honestly, though, I think one with multiple entries should only be able to win once. After all, the prizes are all the same, and what is someone who wins 3 times going to do with 3 copies of the prizes? Multiple entries are fine to give you "more chances to win", but if your large personal house is chosen as a winner, I don't really agree with the practice of you also being able to win in the Apartment/Private Chambers AND medium FC house category. You already won one category; let other entries win in the others.

That's me, though.

[Rokke]

Honestly, though, I think one with multiple entries should only be able to win once. After all, the prizes are all the same, and what is someone who wins 3 times going to do with 3 copies of the prizes? Multiple entries are fine to give you "more chances to win", but if your large personal house is chosen as a winner, I don't really agree with the practice of you also being able to win in the Apartment/Private Chambers AND medium FC house category. You already won one category; let other entries win in the others.

That's me, though.

I'm so used to the prizes being 1 pick from the rewards list I actually forgot that the winners got the full set. In that case, yeah thats kinda lame.

[Luna_Ariana]

Honestly, though, I think one with multiple entries should only be able to win once. After all, the prizes are all the same, and what is someone who wins 3 times going to do with 3 copies of the prizes? Multiple entries are fine to give you "more chances to win", but if your large personal house is chosen as a winner, I don't really agree with the practice of you also being able to win in the Apartment/Private Chambers AND medium FC house category. You already won one category; let other entries win in the others.

That's me, though.

Not just your Opinion ^^)''

Saw a Video of a quiet known FFXIV Youtuber and showed that with the Multiple Winners 24 Slots have been gone by them. Which means that 24 more people could have won too.


But yeah... Square Enix did this all. Best is to see what they actually mention to that. :x

[Anidae]

Is it ok if someone won in more than one Category?
I applaud SE for allowing us to enter multiple times by letting us have one entry for each category. However, I don't find that it's ok for someone to win in more than one category. Winners get a package that includes ALL of the pictured prizes delivered to the character on the entrant's forum handle. Anyone winning more than once is getting extra packages of presumably unique, non-tradeable, character-restricted items with no in-game value. It doesn't reward a single winner more to get extra packages of these items because the package contains everything already and can't be shared, and so any single person winning more than once only serves to prevent other people from getting these items. 17 people won twice and 3 people won thrice, effectively removing 23 winning slots. 11.5% of the winners were repeats. Given the general aesthetic that can be found among the winners and just how many entries there were, surely there were 23 other players who were equally deserving of winning in those different categories.

Is it fair that some Winners broke the Rule by modifying their Entry by changing/adding Furniture?
It's not fair, but they may not have known. It's arguable as to what properly constitutes a change in SE's eyes when it comes to interactive items such as flower pots and foods. I remember some thread in the Housing section of the forums in which someone's friend believed "no changes to the submitted estate" just meant that you couldn't change to a different property. The problem is that the rule in regards to furniture changes--"Do not make any changes to your estate until after Sponsor reveals the winning entries"--wasn't made clear enough for there to be any general consensus on what they meant. People just agreed that it was not touching ANYTHING if you wanted to avoid your entry being disqualified. One winner even said that they decided to go ahead and change decorations, accepting that they'd probably be disqualified for it, and they were surprised to find that the judges had already decided that theirs was a winner. Looking at how things turned out, either changing the furniture was fine after all or there are some winners that should have been disqualified, and the true clarification on that has to be provided by the organizers of the contest.

However, what wasn't unclear were the rules on the submission pictures: "You may not use the group pose in-game feature" and "You may not alter the images in any way." Given that there are entries that DO appear to have been altered using group pose filters or functions (see here for examples someone else gave), that's far more of a user-side broken rule.

Is it fine that JP gets their own Section while NA & EU goes all together?
Unpopular opinion, but yes. As far as I'm concerned, population size between the regions matters far less than amount of properties available for this particular contest. This contest is based on the decorations of the houses, not on the outfits of characters or on drawings or anything like that, so the population difference between NA/EU and JP doesn't matter when there's a hard cap on how many properties are on any server. NA and EU together have 34 servers as opposed to JP's 32, so the odds of winning may not be the same, but over 94% is close enough.

The only thing that makes it easier for a JP user to win than an NA/EU user based on population is that it may have been easier for a JP user to OBTAIN a home in the first place. Really, if fairness based on population is a concern, the problem is more Large vs Medium vs Small vs Apartments/FC rooms. There are FAR fewer Large plots than Apartments or FC rooms, yet winners were split evenly to be 50 from each category of home size. The people with the most advantage to win were those with mansions. Arguing that more NA/EU users would only have apartments or FC rooms than JP users, while tempting, still just shows that there's a disproportionate amount of large properties winning compared to apartments and FC rooms because they decided to split it to 50 from each category. There's no clear evidence that the 200 winners of NA/EU were split evenly between NA and EU. If they decided to do 200 winners each from NA, EU, and JP, then EU users would be more than twice as likely to win than NA users based on available properties (since winners would be chosen among 10 EU servers as opposed to 24 NA servers). It would make more sense to either judge all sizes on all servers equally or to judge based on number of entries in each size. (Example: if there are 100 large houses entered and 1000 FC rooms/apartments, you'd expect 1 large house winner for every 10 FC room/apartment winner.)

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Is it fine that JP gets their own Section while NA & EU goes all together?
Unpopular opinion, but yes. As far as I'm concerned, population size between the regions matters far less than amount of properties available for this particular contest. This contest is based on the decorations of the houses, not on the outfits of characters or on drawings or anything like that, so the population difference between NA/EU and JP doesn't matter when there's a hard cap on how many properties are on any server. NA and EU together have 34 servers as opposed to JP's 32, so the odds of winning may not be the same, but over 94% is close enough.

Population does matter. Looking at just the small entries, JP has 34 pages whereas NA and EU combined for 71+ (I only accounted for English and French entries from EU). This means NA/EU contestants have 50% less chance of winning just because they condensed two entire regions together but didn't for another. How many servers how no bearing on the amount of people entering the content. It simply made winning in a region outside Japan significantly harder.