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

[Rowde]

I'll admit that I only skimmed for my name, so I didn't realize that the same ppl won in multiple categories.

This should not have happened.

Sure ppl were allowed to ENTER into multiple categories, but they should have only been allowed to win in ONE. Once they won in a category, they should not have been allowed to win in a second.

Since prizes are now doled out to the character associated with forum handles instead of specifying receipt, that means that the additional items they win are just unusable items to sit in their inventory for the most part. Though I'm sure someone will chime in and say they like having multiples of the earring so they can have on in storage, and one in glam dresser or on char... you only NEED one to glamour on anything.

[Zombiee]

Find the results of this competition very unfair too and i will now think twice about entering any forum comp in future. Merging both EU and NA was a little frustrating but what gets me that people have won after breaking rules that were stated specifically. I agree with others that having multiple prizes being awarded to the 1 person makes it even more unfair. Also wtf is with the two entries where one has a photo of an empty floor and the other has a photo of the exterior xD

[Edax]

I feel kind of bummed out that I probably disqualified my entry because a Large Shirogane Plot went on sale after the contest was closed and I bought it. Having to own a house and not making any changes for 2-3 months sort of alienates the very type of players who want to participate in the contest. It would have been very easy for me to have proved that the photos of my small plot were indeed owned by me.

[Luna_Ariana]

I feel kind of bummed out that I probably disqualified my entry because a Large Shirogane Plot went on sale after the contest was closed and I bought it. Having to own a house and not making any changes for 2-3 months sort of alienates the very type of players who want to participate in the contest.

Ye but you managed to get a LARGE Plot and even in Shirogane which is really rare. Contest can come again within the time but when would a Large pop specially when you can get a chance to it? So a big Congrats on getting THAT dear! ^p^)/

[Sigma-Astra]

No, NA and EU appear to have been lumped together. I find that unfair, frankly, since the two regions combined are larger than JP by almost double, if you go by unofficial censes. Which means the amount of people who could have won from each region was sliced in half (assuming they did 100 from NA/100 from EU).

Why am I not surprised that once again, SE is bias towards their own country. This is why I refuse to enter any more of their contests, they're grossly unfair against non-JP people, and the sad part is they know it and don't even care.

[Anidae]

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.

How many servers directly shows the hard cap on capability to enter the contest in this case, as judging is based on a property and not on a character. The limitation is set directly as how many houses are on each server, which all contain the same four housing districts with the same number of wards and same number of houses and apartments and so on. Each server has a hard cap on how many small houses there are TO enter. Capability to do something doesn't mean that people WILL do it, and so an increased interest in submitting their small houses demonstrated by the NA/EU people can be from a number of factors (population can be a factor, as can JP people choosing not to submit more than one entry or perhaps not wanting to submit anything to start with, or perhaps they have less question about the rules because they're not being translated from another language, or maybe they are just rereading their own entries better and not having so many people repeatedly going "hey can you delete that last post, my pictures aren't showing" and people posting ALL of their entries into one thread). The amounts of POTENTIAL entries are similar. The opportunity was made the same. But as Edax pointed out, the nature of the contest alienates the very people it was supposed to attract, and that can also play a role in dissuading large portions of the community from participation.

[Sigma-Astra]

How many servers directly shows the hard cap on capability to enter the contest in this case, as judging is based on a property and not on a character. The limitation is set directly as how many houses are on each server, which all contain the same four housing districts with the same number of wards and same number of houses and apartments and so on. Each server has a hard cap on how many small houses there are TO enter. Capability to do something doesn't mean that people WILL do it, and so an increased interest in submitting their small houses demonstrated by the NA/EU people can be from a number of factors (population can be a factor, as can JP people choosing not to submit more than one entry or perhaps not wanting to submit anything to start with, or perhaps they have less question about the rules because they're not being translated from another language, or maybe they are just rereading their own entries better and not having so many people repeatedly going "hey can you delete that last post, my pictures aren't showing" and people posting ALL of their entries into one thread). The amounts of POTENTIAL entries are similar. The opportunity was made the same. But as Edax pointed out, the nature of the contest alienates the very people it was supposed to attract, and that can also play a role in dissuading large portions of the community from participation.

I think you're grossly forgetting how bias they are towards JP entries in the gear design contests every time it's been run.

[HyoMinPark]

Capability to do something doesn't mean that people WILL do it, and so an increased interest in submitting their small houses demonstrated by the NA/EU people can be from a number of factors (population can be a factor, as can JP people choosing not to submit more than one entry or perhaps not wanting to submit anything to start with, or perhaps they have less question about the rules because they're not being translated from another language, or maybe they are just rereading their own entries better and not having so many people repeatedly going "hey can you delete that last post, my pictures aren't showing" and people posting ALL of their entries into one thread). The amounts of POTENTIAL entries are similar.

What you’re insinuating here is that half of the NA/EU entries were basically people making mistakes with their entries, or asking questions but not submitting anything. That’s not the case though. There was significantly higher submissions from NA/EU compared to JP because more people play on NA/EU compared to JP. NA’s playerbase itself is larger than the entirety of JP.

And even with the hard cap on physical houses in the districts, how are you going to apply that cap to apartments or private chambers?

The categories for this contest—for both region and estate type—were not proportionate at all.

[Anidae]

I think you're grossly forgetting how bias they are towards JP entries in the gear design contests every time it's been run.

Oh, no, I absolutely believe in there being bias. Don't get me wrong, I do. However, that's why I specified that for this particular contest, the hard cap on entries is made similar by the fact that it's based on property, which is finite and in similar amount between the division, and thus the overall potential is made similar despite wildly different populations. Further, I went on to point out that something that was not made even (and a place where the population difference would be seen more) is specifically in the ratio of winners to entries in the different size categories, given that they decided to make it 50 from each when there's a wildly different number between number of large houses entered and number of [insert any other size, really].

[Anidae]

What you’re insinuating here is that half of the NA/EU entries were basically people making mistakes with their entries, or asking questions but not submitting anything. That’s not the case though. There was significantly higher submissions from NA/EU compared to JP because more people play on NA/EU compared to JP. NA’s playerbase itself is larger than the entirety of JP.

And even with the hard cap on physical houses in the districts, how are you going to apply that cap to apartments or private chambers?

The categories for this contest—for both region and estate type—were not proportionate at all.

I'm not trying to insinuate that literally half of NA/EU entries were doing mistakes in their entries, though I can see how it comes off like that. I could have worded better. I was trying to point out that population's not the only factor, nor is it the most egregiously disproportionate way they split their winners for this contest. I don't know the state of JP server housing to know how crowded each ward is on each server, so I can't comment as to whether there are just literally half as many homeowners as there are available homes. My point was to say all things equal (that is, if we were to assume the wards not including apartments just as fully booked on the JP servers as they are on NA/EU), they are capped at around the same point we are. (There is a cap on apartments, though it's made to be large enough that it won't be reached, and FC rooms are about the same, so yeah, population will absolutely factor into those.) But the ability to enter doesn't mean that someone will.

My argument was not meant to be "population has no bearing whatsoever," but rather "there are at least limits for how out of balance that can be, whereas the 50-for-all-sizes split doesn't care at all about balance and is significantly more egregious, but no one's saying a thing about it because everyone's so set on the problem being NA and EU being combined and JP having its own." And thus, as unpopular as I knew my argument would be, my personal takeaway on the original poster's "what do you think of JP having its own" was that there was a bigger problem than population sizes since at least those had a hard cap.