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Hey everyone, going to do some frank talking with you all about the feature.

My taking it over wasn't planned so much as a necessity to keep the contest moving - and I readily hold my hands up to say that things didn't go as planned at all. There's been a lot of hiccups, tools that I needed that I didn't have access to, a lack of entries, and as with any job you've suddenly inherited without warning you tend to go, "I wonder what happened to art gallery this wee- oh crud, that's me!"

That said, Slash stepped in with the sensible idea of asking you guys what you want to see changed since new hands means it's a good time to hear new ideas, and we're taking some of those ideas on board:

We've fixed it so that I can edit the Art Gallery page - which will be a massive help since now I can make sure the information correctly reflects the current theme, and gives a permanent place outside of the news post to see what's coming up.

With the up-coming theme list it will also state whether that week allows Aywas stock or not, so you know and can prepare for it properly. I think it wasn't announced before so that it was definitely a piece of work that entrants had done in that week, rather than prepared beforehand, but we're interested to see how this will work for everyone. More entries means more winners, because I'm meant to pick 6 people, and as you can see I haven't been able to so far!

I will also be trying to think of prizes ahead of time and adding them to the page too - this part might take a couple of days because there are so many amazing shiny things to choose from to enthuse you to enter. The prize will be at least 20GP in value.

The time limit had already been extended to two weeks and it seems that while it wasn't noticed, it was something that people wanted to see happen, so that will be kept. We'll see how we do with this, hopefully the extra week (and therefore extra weekend) will help everyone.

I'm going to take a day or two to set things up so I'm not rushing it and potentially forgetting information that will be important to the people who want to enter, and when it's all ready I'll post our Cutthroat Winner (and since there's only one, I do think they might have slain their competition... oh my...) and get everything started on our new schedule.

Thank you for your time in reading this, I know walls of text are the least appealing thing to see in a news post - but if you've gotten this far then you now know to skip over to the Advent Calendar for a gift for getting this far ;)

Posted by Eve (#2775) on Tue May 3, 2016 5:47am

Comments: 25

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Admiral (#55523)

Posted on: Tue May 3, 2016 8:46am

This sounds like a lot of great changes (along with keeping what's already good)! Personally it's my skill level which has kept me back from entering, but on the other hand I won't get better at drawing unless I use my pen more, so I will try to enter this week's contest.

Oh, and thank you for the advent calendar gift. Fingers crossed it will give me another fetail! XD

Admiral (#55523)

Posted on: Tue May 3, 2016 8:47am

One change: maybe link to the art gallery under world or community or one of the other main headers. Because I ALWAYS forget that's it in the games part of the forum, so it disappears from my mind and view.

ChaosAzeroth (#43055)

Posted on: Tue May 3, 2016 10:21am

I never bothered cause I know I can't win. The one time I did enter it was flooded with entries and I lost. x3 I'm not as good as others on here.

Voluspa is on Hiatus (#67552)

Posted on: Tue May 3, 2016 11:19am

Ok, I've been reading through the suggestions under the Welcome to May post, and Rorro's suggestions from 2014 and I'd like to add a few suggestions:
1) Prize tiers, like with gourmet foods and other games that give SP maybe the top entries could get 3 SP (with six entries, that'd be 1 and 2), next tier (place 3 and 4) gets 2 SP, and the final gets 1 SP. All get the same item prize.
2) Some people feel like they cannot participate simply for not "being good enough". I understand the feeling but wouldn't want anyone to feel shut out due to it. So maybe there could be an "Honorable Mention" as well, which does not judge by quality but by things like originality, choice of materials/technique or just being extra fun. Not sure about the prize - perhaps the item but no SP or the other way around (1 SP).
3) I also like the idea of being able to see all entries and not just the winners. And I think each page of the gallery should show one theme, regardless of the number of images. (I think all pages just show 6 images now? With one page = one theme the theme can be listed as a heading at the top of the page) - and while I'm on the subject of gallery pages PLEASE make all the little squares (page links) the same size lol, it just bugs me how disorderly the page looks.
4) A couple of other things I'd like to see that would presumably require quite a bit of reworking of the gallery code, is A) a page where I can see all my submissions I ever made and B) a search function where you can see submissions by theme or by artist. As it is, you just have a list of numbers that don't really tell the viewer anything.
5) Finally, and maybe most importantly :P I would LOVE to be able to click some sort of like button on images I enjoy seeing. Maybe a heart or a paw print or some such. The likes wouldn't have any other function but to tell someone you like what they did so they wouldn't win anything extra for getting many likes. But as an artist I'd certainly enjoy getting the random notice saying "someone liked your alidae" (or whatever the theme happened to be).
Oh and I do like the suggestion someone made of an "annual gala" type of thing.

TheLittleBlackCat (#72439)

Posted on: Tue May 3, 2016 1:08pm

I agree with @ 67552 , though what I was also thinking was, couldn't people have the choice of picking 1item out of 3 chosen items chosen by a mod? Another idea was like a box of items to pick from for the winners (1 item per winner) so like first come, first served for each winner? Also, I don't know if this has been done before, but why not an "ara v. Ay" theme? I understand there's ara v at pets but if there's already been that theme, sorry.. >~< npc v. Npc in with a normal battle or a Pokemon aywas theme would be funny too XD " PET, I CHOOSE YOU!"

TheLittleBlackCat (#72439)

Posted on: Tue May 3, 2016 1:08pm

Voluspa (#67552) .

I still haven't gotten the hang of linking but I'm trying

Squirrel Teilchen (#34278)

Posted on: Tue May 3, 2016 1:17pm

For me the reason I have never taken part in the gallery is the feeling of not being good enough, like... my quality is years (decades...) away from all the artists on site. :D

I got the feeling in the past that only high quality entries ever win, but I might be wrong with that? I liked the Easter Egg coloring contests, because there were prizes for stuff like most original, most creative, most colorful...

Phantom Butterfly (#14055)