City of Heroes / Villains is having a costume contest. I entered.
I expect there will be tens of thousands of entrants. Many of those entrants are people who have been using the costume creator for years. And those people have access to various costume parts that I don’t. (From veteran rewards, bonus packs, and long-past giveaways.) And of course lots of people are just going to have a better sense of fashion and style.
So I don’t expect to win, but it was fun to enter anyway.
The only thing that I didn’t like was the ambiguity of the rules. Stuff like, “All three screenshots should be the character in the same pose, just taken from different vantage points.” Er. Does this mean the exact same pose? Because their idle animation has a few similar poses that they cycle through. They look around, fold their arms, unfold them, stand with one foot in front, and generally fidget around quite a bit. The wording makes it sound like they need the exact same point in the animation, but common sense suggests that what they’re after is just the character standing and not performing crazy emotes or leaping around.
Another one: “Entrants should crop their screenshots so that only the main character and the immediate background are visible.” Er. Okay. Except: “All attachments must be in 800×600 resolution or better […]” Which seem to be contradictory. A standing character and the immediate background aren’t going to fill 800×600. Should I chop the sides off to meet the cropping rules, or leave them on to keep the size rules? Hmmmm. Again, you can assume that they really just don’t want to have to hunt for your character in a crowd, and that they don’t want some crappy low-res picture.
So, I did my best to adhere to the rules within reason, although you could still make the case that I broke them. As an entrant this is really frustrating. I’m fine with not winning because someone else is better, which is pretty much inevitable. But I want to lose because someone beat me, not because I was disqualified over screenshot technicalities.
My character: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “City of Heroes:
Costume Contest”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
T w e n t y S i d e d
