I will preface this post with this: I didn't submit a design and I barely use my castle (since I primarily play on a different shard now than it is located) and don't have a keep, so I don't have much of a dog in this race. I started to build something, but between the crashing and the other demands on my time, it just wasn't worth it. Building a custom castle for a contest caught my interest and attention from the very first announcement (a year and a half ago...), but I wasn't able to give it my best effort and that's my problem and no one else's.
I highly doubt I will be converting my castle to either of the winning castle designs (assuming these are the final winners). They just aren't to my taste as is, and I will leave my criticisms of the designs at that.
However, I'm not disappointed in the results of this contest--because my expectations were set by everything that led up to this. This contest has been consistently unthought and ill-communicated from the very beginning, and every step has been painful and wasteful of player and dev time. No part of this contest seems to have been operated with any kind of forward planning, critical thought, or quality control. It's been so consistently poorly executed that I have actually wondered if it was being deliberately mishandled for some reason.
And so I reiterate:
I used to be against castle customization, but this contest has changed my mind.
I'd rather walk past the odd crystal Borg cube or lava/swamp/waterfall monstrosity than watch this train keep wrecking and players continuing to be disappointed over and over again.
I got genuinely excited for this contest when it was first announced, and that is really the worst part of all of this for me because ultimately it has done more to erode my faith in UO than just about anything else I can think of (and I can think of some doozies)... the sheer mundanity and obviousness of failure of vision and logical planning is deeply discouraging and bodes poorly for the game's future. This contest should have been an easy slam dunk, not a painful exercise in confusion and time-wasting. It could have been done.
Rather than recount an exhaustive breakdown of everything that went wrong, let's posit what SHOULD have happened:
- Some kind of castle/keep customization tool should have been available BEFORE the contest was announced. That could have been what we had on Test Center. It could have been a standalone utility or even an emulator given provisional approval for this purpose. It should NOT have been guesswork, photoshop, or graph paper and happy thoughts.
- Only AFTER the tool was ready and tested (or at least CLOSE to ready) should there have been an official announcement. This announcement needed to include, FROM THE BEGINNING:
- A clear deadline for entry.
- Clear and reasonable criteria and rules. For example:
- A theme: for the first contest, for example, only actual castles/keeps of classic UO building materials would be permitted. Future contests could include Tokuno, gargoyle, or other materials, but an initial narrow focus would simplify selection and probably result in higher quality comparable structures. If possible, adjust the aforementioned tool to only include permissible materials each time the contest is run to eliminate any doubt.
- All floors and rooms must be accessible by foot. Teleporter tiles allowed, but not as the only means to reach a given area.
- Building must be structurally sound and complete. No missing corners or dangling floor tiles or stairways to nowhere, etc.
- No unwalkable flooring tiles (water, swamp, lava).
- No non-housing tool pieces should be visible in the final design. No furniture, no deco, no ladders, no crafted stone addons, etc.
- At least 75% of the plot must contain structure. Lawn or empty plot may make up no more than 25% of the ground level of the plot.
- Materials used together should be complimentary in the vein of classic UO art and buildings.
- Entries should be designed with general use in mind to offer players the most versatility if the design is chosen.
- Entries must be in good taste and conform to the TOS. I think this is the only rule they actually had. It's good, but insufficient.
- Clear standards for what buildings would or would not be eligible for conversion upon contest completion. Some people waited a year and a half in anticipation only to find out at the last minute that the rock in their courtyard would keep them from being able to convert anyway.
- Entries should be as anonymous as possible, but possible for anyone to view in full.
- A panel of judges would choose three castles and three keeps.
- Devs would be best, and (hopefully) the most impartial.
- Alternatively, I would suggest EMs, imperfect though that may be. They should, ideally, not know whose entry was whose. They should definitely not be judges if they or anyone in their family or closest circle of fellow players made the cut.
- Alternatively, if player voting is considered a must (which I could understand from the perspective of players wanting to participate in the selection):
- All invalid and low-quality entries should be eliminated, leaving only high-quality valid ones for perusal. Around 10 or so would be pretty good, unless there was just an incredible output of amazing work.
- There should be one stone for castles and one for keeps, and each account gets one vote on each one. With a strong purge of invalid entries, what is left should be high enough quality that even if voting shenanigans occur, which they will (please see the endless drama from governor system for more details), at least we'd end up with something decent.
- The best way to vote for this, actually, would probably be for the voting to take place within the house sign of an actual prodo castle or keep. If you have a castle, you can vote, one time, for a castle design. If you have twenty castles, you can vote twenty times for a castle design. This would ensure that the people most invested in an alternative design would be the ones choosing rather than people voting for their friends or whoever paid them the most, or a pack of trolls picking the worst thing they could (which could easily happen, and I'm surprised didn't). I don't know how feasible that is programming-wise but it would surely cut down the vast majority of the voting problems.
I'm sure that could be elaborated upon for further clarity or adjusted for practical behind-the-scenes considerations I am unfamiliar with, but you get the idea. Preparation before launch and clarity throughout. Yes, there would still be complaints. There will always be complaints. But with enough clarity up front there is less room for them, and probably less validity unless something truly messed up is happening.
This could have been done so much better. But I'm not disappointed, because that implies I expected better than was delivered. At this point and on this topic, I didn't.
So I say yes, customization for all, because this contest as executed has been a huge expenditure of both player and dev time for a highly debatable result and a lot of disappointment and anger. To be done
well, something like this requires a lot of thought and effort and coordination and dev time, and frankly I think that time is better spent elsewhere given the small minority of players affected by alternate castle/keep design possibilities.
- and at the end it's our choise if we want to change our plot to crap or leave it as it is.
