Suggestion on future outfit contests

[Kozuki]

The outfit voting season has ended. Whether you are satisfied with the community's favourite or not, I leave it to your choice. Personally, while I don't prefer the winning outfit, I still don't mind having it, cuz it is free and I only play female characters, so I won't be affected by the feminine design for male :P

 

Back to the topic. This time, NCWest shows that they are willing to listen to players: from staff-pick winner only last year, they decided to let players join the picking progress through the previous voting season. Well, while it is still staff-picked, players have more freedom to select what they prefer, instead of being "forced" by what NCWest believes to be the best. I would said this is a certain improvement.

 

However, I think NCWest has made a mistake in selecting voting method. They use the forum's Like system to determine the number of votes, which have some cons:

-Not every player who play in the game visits the forum. Sometimes, they might do the visit to check news about the games, but not necessary create a forum account (BnS Forum creates a forum account based on your account, asking you to make a Display Name), or log in their forum account in order to join the outfit vote. Sometimes they can, but they don't want to be bothered with.

-Not every player who votes has only one accounts. Some has alt accounts, especially crafters. I personally have three accounts, one main, one alt craft, and one to make preset cuz other two are full, thus I can cast three votes if I desire (I did not, though). So the vote won't often ends at one vote per player. Illegally, some might have bot accounts, which can be massive in in number. Or, some might even makes clone accounts to vote more, if they are enthusiastic enough.

-Excluding all negative cases above and assuming it is one vote per person, the legal voters might not even play the game themselves. In the contest rule itself does not forbid artists to call their friends or outsource votes to support them. While this is not something illegal, it kinda feel wrong when you have non-BnS people to vote in BnS community. It is like asking an Asian tourist to vote when he happens to visit US during a President election, if you know what I mean.

 

tl:nr: As long as the voting season happens on a media platform where everyone, related or non-related to BnS, can participate, there will be unfair advantages between well-known artists vs less-known ones. Forum, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit... are bad for fair voting, as multi-voting, clone voting and outsourcing votes can easily happen.

 

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My suggestions for future community-vote outfit season: Make it in-game. This is the only way to involve most of actually-playing players, instead of just part of vocal players in a bigger community.

 

There are two methods I can think of:

*In-game survey:

-This used to be used for player's choice outfit event, so it is already possible to use.

-The Splash in the Character Selection Screen and F1 will notify players the link to access the gallery of outfit voting.

-Gate the choice with a lv50 survey to prevent non-BnS players or clones to easily access voting. For a fresh new account to get to lv50, they either spends a whole day doing story quests, or buy instant-50, which are both hassle just for an extra vote.

-In case someone has multi lv50 characters, then only the votes of the topmost character in the order of character selection screen are counted.

 

Or:

*F10 cashshop:

-NCWest sells tokens with the name of outfit attached. Each token is one-time purchasable per account. Players vote for the outfit they like by buying the right token. At the end of the season, NCWest can check the total sales of these tokens to determine the winner.

-Each outfit-voting token should cost one Ncoin/HMcoin. For non-BnS player, to join the voting, they have to download and update the client, along with other procedures that might discourage them. Then they have to have one HMcoin, which requires them to get at least a gold (from begging or sponsor), then they have to sell that coin through currency exchange. Too many steps make clone and outsider voting a hassle.

 

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Also, not related to the topic, but I think NCWest should have a staff-picked outfit that is not among the winner and runners-up. 

 

This is similar to the outfit Spirit of the Bamboo last year, where it did not win, but was still the community-favourite and get selected as an extra outfit for various PvP and community events

 

This year, you do it oppositely: community-voted outfit as freebie, and staff-picked outfit as community event outfit.

 

[XO]

Okay, but you know there's nothing wrong with it being feminine right? Because saying the fact that the male version is affected by its feminine style is lol.

 

 

I think the reason they put it on forums is because the rest of the regions were allowed to vote? I THINK, or that was the word on reddit. Regardless, if they made it via survey people would just create new accounts with that too. I like that they involve the community, it's a shame that people can't stand losing though.