Changes in Workshop
polycounter lvl 7
Why it seems to me - wrong is how items looks now in the workshop. We spend time to making that our models looked better and the people vote for them but often they don't look the same in the game!
I think it would be better if the screenshots for the page in the workshop been made inside the game client automatically or with the options of changing the position of the light and cameras (Like Ward portrait setup in game client). That is thumbs items looked like in the store Dota 2
For example
- Then everyone would be on an equal footing regardless of their page design.
In this case, the people would vote for something that really looks good namely in game and not for the how you design submission thumbs.
As well - it would be stimulus to improve the quality of the Workshopers items themselves.
And main promotional material remained Loadscreens
What do you think? Maybe I'm wrong.
I think it would be better if the screenshots for the page in the workshop been made inside the game client automatically or with the options of changing the position of the light and cameras (Like Ward portrait setup in game client). That is thumbs items looked like in the store Dota 2
For example
- Then everyone would be on an equal footing regardless of their page design.
In this case, the people would vote for something that really looks good namely in game and not for the how you design submission thumbs.
As well - it would be stimulus to improve the quality of the Workshopers items themselves.
And main promotional material remained Loadscreens
What do you think? Maybe I'm wrong.
Replies
But this might lead to the workshop getting plain.
That would give people a way better idea of the model quality and not hide it behind pretty thumbnails.
Don't get me wrong, I love pretty thumbnails. I make fancy thumbnails as well, but I would also like to have the option of seeing the in engine set as an option is all.
.02
It's just like saying to a car company "don't advertise your products", simply try and sell with photos that are not modified by photoshop, that don't have sexy women near them, at auto shows just show cars, say bye bye to the girls and elaborate commercials.. etc.
Or like saying that in magazines, and publicity photoshoped pictures should be banned.. magazines would just be filled with "normal" girls.
"Then everyone would be on an equal footing regardless of their page design" what makes you believe you are not equal? everyone has the freedom to present in any way shape or form they believe works best, like selling any other product, some even have marketing devices at their disposal like a well known artist uses twitter, facebook, etc to better sell his/her's product.
If you want to be equal, item creator names should not show anywhere, players would not promote sets, you would just be forced to use some presentation method from in game, and all items would simply look like you have shown there..
The number of people buying items would drop.. everyone would lose.. I don't think that will ever happen.
Do not confuse the store and workshop. Yet they serve different purposes and the aim of the workshop to show & vote and not selling!
For sale we have dota2.com/store - and for advertising Valve use your Promo art I don't propose to abandon it.
then you are ignoring all the hundreds of thousands of people voting in workshop? you think their vote doesn't matter? Showing something is selling. In the store yes most items are equal like you say, they all have the same kind of icons and stuff. You are discussing the workshop, not the shop.
You are SELLING your stuff to valve and the voters, simply saying "look how many people love my item and just think how well it would sell" and valve looks at results and thinks "hm he may be correct, lets add, or not"
Votes are important and they are the main workshop filter.
But if the people vote only for the beautiful previews, and not for what the item is actually in the game - I think it is not correct.
After all, if a set is well made that should be enough !
I since 2012 in the workshop, and from the beginning it has not been an advertising platform. For me, this is exactly Workshop. You have a different view.
i heard that workshop votes don't actually correlate to store sales. plus the promo images'll still be used, just ingame.
It's kind of the same with the steam workshop.. when there was less money to be made, less contributors, people did not need to sell stuff, a few years later, the market expands, a lot more money are made (or so I think) and of course competition starts.. competition => advertising is needed
(I believe you can see this in the prizes of the contests as well, take international for example.. they don't get to 10 mil by showing good games they get there by advertising and selling stuff on the side)
Now of course each magazine is free to make that choice or not, whereas the proposal discussed here would be an automatic system which comes with its own issues, as it can be limiting and wouldn't quite be a good representation of the top-down game view anyways...
From there I quite like the current state of affairs, where we have the option to use either raw or touched up screenshots. It's up to the artist ! And I am very interested in committing further to the raw approach. As a matter of fact we actually did just that with Bounchfx for the helmet thumbnails of our recent Bloodseeker set. Straight screenshots from the ingame loadout screen - no Marmoset render or paintover involved.
If I am not mistaken, CSGO gun skins rely on the same idea, with all the screenshots being taken from the editor.
It's good when you see how it looks before go on item page. Now it works like "Oh, good thumbnail, I will go and vote it/Bad thumb I will not vote". And after this it's probably will be like "Everything is similar, it makes sense to go and vote more"
Personally I'd like to be able to fully preview the models outside of Dota 2, and the model viewer doesn't really work for me. If Valve provides a version of Hammer or similar utility that we could preview and upload our models from, they could enforce some use of the utility for the thumbnail and preview images.
I mean, I like that the loading screens and painted thumbnails make the workshop look really pretty, but if the ultimate aim is getting 3d models into a game then surely the workshop voting needs to be more about the items themselves than the presentation. The items are the product after all, and not the marketing imagery. In a fair few cases the marketing imagery is the equivalent of false advertising anyway, and in the past people didn't even bother looking at the in-game images. Enforcing the use of game or utility generated images would make it easier for people to inspect the product they'd eventually be paying for properly.
That being said, DotaHattery (which is excellent, though i've not gotten round to submitting stuff to Remixx before) goes a long way to filling that gap. I suppose Marmoset might take a big hit if they made this change as well XD
Anyway I give up trying to explain. A change like that may not be in Valve's best interest, and neither the artists participating.
I see it - Having finished item you open Dota 2 Client
Loading a model and choose the desired angle, the light and the position of the camera (it is also possible to do the other things transparent or hide them if necessary) and then click Done, a screenshot of an item is automatically attached to the post in the workshop as a Thumbnail
Mmmm... I don't agree with this premise at all.
Unlike the majority of workshop voters Valve gets to see the exact items in-game on their end. They have access to the model and texture files that get submitted, and will ask for the items to be resubmitted if they cannot be viewed. I know this from personal experience. So all this marketing imagery on the workshop is highly unlikely to be part of what Valve uses to judge if they should "invest" in our items. In fact long ago they used to make our marketing imagery for us. I guess that there's way too many items for them to do that now however.
In the years that I've been doing this stuff, this to me is how the process works:
1. Workshoppers advertise their items to voters on the workshop
2. Number and quality of votes help Valve filter out which items they should inspect
3. Valve makes the inspection of the actual game items and they decide what should go in
So as far as marketing imagery goes, the only part where it matters is when artists are advertising items to voters on the workshop. Now that's not a bad thing, however over the last 2 years or I've seen so many cases where people are voting on the marketing imagery rather than the items themselves. And in so many of these cases the marketing imagery looks nothing like the actual items. This is false advertising, and in the business world is illegal. Many people don't even see the items because we very intentionally place our screenshots behind marketing imagery, because we know that's how this workshop works. And I think that should not be the case.
If the purpose of the workshop is to filter quality items for Valve to choose from, then the workshop voting should be based on the quality of the items and not their marketing imagery.
Don't get me wrong. I believe load screens and concepts should really be part of the process. I'd like each workshop item to look like something out of an art book - concept, sculpt, finals. However I believe that how the finals are showcased should be enforced using an in-engine view and that the finals should be more visible to the voters. An in-engine segment for e.g.
tl;dr Marketing imagery is more for workshop voters than for Valve. In fact Valve used to make the marketing imagery for us.
This would work too! I just would prefer a more robust set of workshop tools along with it
Just compare for yourself the current content compared to the content we saw at launch. Not bad for just a few months. Awww, and they even have some of their own workshop collectives starting up as well. It fun watching it grow from the outside like this. I can't wait until we start getting some CSGO SFMs to showcase their work, that's going to be so awesome.
Same thing for TF2, it's grown a lot in the years and if anything just showcases the potential of what the workshop can truely offer. Just look at some of the community made 'updates', there is some absolutly stunning things there. I don't understand why you would ever want to put limitations on something like the workshop.
Even so, it would be nice to have a free cam in the protrait for people who want to have the actual view icon.
Personally I don't like the "Advertise to consumers" because I suspect that they just vote based on marketing images rather than actual ingame stuff. (Side note: DotaHattery is probably the best way to let people actually see the items up close, which can aid voters into deciding)
Even though votes don't "matter" they do give a give information such as popular items and maybe even consumer base. Valve can just grab some cash by importing the most popular regardless of quality (lenient standards).
The workshop isn't about advertising submissions, its about weeding out the bad submissions from the good ones. Its more about quality control rather than advertising.
That couldn't be farther from the truth. It's a community driven market where the community decides what they want to see added to the games they play, and valve pulls the trigger if they agree with the community.
If you don't like marketing that's fine, no one is holding a gun to your head saying you have to do it. Nor does marketing an item prove to be more beneficial, I've seen some really fantastic sets with bare bones presentations do just fine and get accepted without a problem.
The beauty of the workshop has always been the freedom it offers. It should never be about equal ground, doing that will only hinder it's growth, it should however be about equal opportunity. And the workshop in its current form allows for that perfectly. If I choose to go the extra mile, the workshop happily allows me to do so. Adding restrictions will simply remove lots of that freedom.
I still believe that having at least one nice presentation picture is important, but I do hope that the Valve folks in charge of reviewing sets look past that when it comes to deciding wether or not an item gets accepted !
You and Andrew are pretty much right - it's all pretty much self imposed, but it's also driven by the sheer amount of competition. Lots of artists fighting for very few chances to get their items into the game, so its natural to find ways to maximise our chances by doing everything we can.
I'm thinking that this mentality is also because we don't get feedback from Valve, so we don't know what's important to them and what's not. In the end we have to try everything at our disposal. Same reason for the explosion of custom animations and particle effects about a year ago. This is especially so for the not-so-well-known artists. Basically the artists other than your Anuxis, your Don Dons, your Jeremy Kleins.
Personally, I don't have too many items in-game so it's hard to compare. However any of my items that did get into the game were all highly rated. The last I recall not-so-highly rated items getting into the game were back when we got the polycount singles item chest, and another chest when Valve specifically stated they were looking at new artists. It definitely feels like as lesser known artists you have to force your way into Valve's vision by giving them a product so good they could not possibly look elsewhere. Since then of course it's gotten a lot harder to track how well items are rating since the system now longer shows stars and votes.
To add to this, what I've experienced is that if an item does not have at least 1 good marketing image, and a good thumbnail it simply doesn't get votes. In the past before the voting queue this was worse - such items wouldn't even get views. I can use the recent submission of my TA hair item as an example. With my terrible, rushed marketing image it continued to get votes since it was present in a set with the other New Bloom hairs. However it lagged behind them pretty noticeably. A day later we swapped out my image with one touched up by Foxclover, and the votes immediately jumped back to being in-line with the other items.
If my assumption based on my limited experiences is right, then lack of marketing imagery does negatively affect items getting into the game. The only set I've seen so far to use purely game imagery for thumbnails has also not gotten in. This is all circumstantial evidence of course, and I continue to hope to be proven wrong.
I'm not saying to abolish marketing completely of course. I think a good balance would be to have a separate section for in-engine images generated by Dota 2 itself or a workshop tool, and to have the thumbnails generated by the same means:
If Valve did this and also let us upload custom backgrounds for the thumbnail the process for thumbnails would be identical to what people are already doing with their items, just minus any additional brushing. And they'd be faithful to how the items will eventually look like to boot.
LOL.
I mean, if people are already just looking at marketing images and not bothering to scroll a few images down to look at the in-game ones, it'd be pretty hard to convince them to download a mod to see your items wouldnt it :P
If something like the DotaHattery would work, then we pretty much have an ideal solution already. I'm not sure how much of the traffic goes to the hattery though. Maybe someone can do a workshop views to hattery hits comparison? Someone who had something on the hattery for New Bloom.
On the flip side voters are definitely getting more conscientious about checking in-game views. A lot of people called out the New Bloom TA set for e.g. which I would have as well. So that's definitely a good thing.
Kinda hard to say without an actual test run. But that's just me, I like to test thing just to see what happens. Sometimes the results are suprising. I mean, as crazy as an idea as it is, it does temporarily solve the issue of allowing the community to view your items in game while we wait for something more official to launch in 2020.
On one hand I appreciate it because it allows me to look at sets up close, but on the other hand, it is still quite far from the experience of previewing items from the game loadout and pre-game screens. FOV, camera angle, interface and overall responsiveness all play a part, and because of that I am sometimes hesitant about using this service for promotional means.
I kinda want to play with is this sort of things though :
https://arqspin.com/gallery/toys/
It certainly feels a bit like something straight out of early 2000s internet, but it might be worth trying ... Inserting a looping html5 video presentation captured from the loadout screen could work well too ...
Most people who buy dota 2 items want to show off to others so having a mod for your item is not a big problem in terms of losing buyers..
That's half my argument whenever I present it, the other being people who mod it might not have bought it otherwise. So they're an increase chance of sales as well.
The nice thing that TF2 has is a mod database that (haven't tested but seems apparent) creates the mod by overwriting a pre existing item in the game. So the user just picks the item he wants to replace, downloads the file and simply drags and drops into your your directory witH a simple -override_vpk in the launch options. Something simple like that could easily appeal to those who would otherwise have a hard time with it. Check it out, it's a pretty neat tool.
The thing is we don't have something like that for Dota.
More on topic though, half of the time most people who browse the workshop don't even go further than the collection page, it seems. I notice that every time someone links to a collection on reddit or etc there are still comments that question how to see the set's in-game screenshots. Maybe if the collection pages were more comprehensive with what they show, and included the bounty of in game screenshots everyone takes, then the actual workshop process would move further away from large painted screens and back to the actual models themselves.
To be honest, though, I've always been much more of a 2D artist. Making and painting loading screens legitimately makes me happy; it's not something I do because it would (and does) boost my workshop items scores. It's a cathartic feeling after finishing a set, and just being able to sit down and paint something, and I'd be really sad if this fell to the wayside completely.
Although votes now are better distributed, the number of visitors still depends on the author (because of their followers etc..). They worked for these followers and built them up over time. It's just something people have to do, consistently make good sets. The days of making set after set just to get something in are over. It's all on quality now.
Personally, I think the folks at Valve want to setup a similar quality target as how LoL does it's new character skins. It changes the appearance of the character but doesn't confuse players.
Still the biggest issue for the workshop is visitors. With 10mil players, how many are actually voting in the workshop? How many would vote if the workshop was implemented ingame?
good post danpaz, but I think I disagree with the 'it's all on quality now' part. For all we know, it might be in 2015, but the tail end of 2014 and the start of 2015 is more 'it's all on who the tournaments pick to do their items' moreso than quality. There's been a lot of great stuff, no doubt, but there's definitely some questionable stuff as well I feel.
As for your second point, I think it would certainly be interesting to see how an in client voting thing was handled, perhaps if it was just like the quiz, just on one page and if people wanted to participate they can... but at least it would have a lot more exposure. For that, however, I'd like them to keep the greenlight-feed-me-esque voting vs just showing the top 2-3 which essentially does nothing but further promote those that already have enough exposure.
If one feels that attention to their submissions on the workshop was lagging as a result of poor marketing, then they should be trying to improve in that area, not dragging everyone down to their "equal" level. Certainly most people who take the whole Workshop thing seriously consider themselves professional/aspiring professional artists, at least to some degree. I realize I probably sound like a gigantic dick, but this isn't 5th grade.
Sure, there are artists who either intentionally or accidentally (i.e. through a disparity of skill between the 2d and 3d collaborators) grossly misrepresent the look of the actual 3d assets. A recent example comes to mind. If we weren't able to show videos, in-game screenshots, animated gifs, etc., then this might be an issue. When the workshop first started, you had to figure out how to hack the game just to see all of your items on a hero in the game. Thankfully, that's no longer the case.
I'm trying to imagine a workshop as was proposed in the OP, and I don't see what problems it solves. If anything, I can see it further benefiting established names and items associated with large organizations, as you're removing more ways for the artist to help their work stand out. And given the current state of the workshop, I would have to pass on such a proposal.
Valve implementing a tab where you can preview items, that sounds pretty cool but also redundant as we're already capable of providing media of our stuff in-game.
Also, the structure of the CS:GO workshop shouldn't be used as a positive example of anything ever, because it is depressing and painful for your average artist in all ways. Imagine every day is the last day of New Bloom submissions, and everyone's thumbnails look exactly the same.
But yeah, some of the loading screen/marketing art I've seen is goddamn inspirational. The SD set of the OP being a prime example. Seeing the awesome artwork from so many awesome artists come through the workshop is the main factor that's driven me to improve, learn, and adapt over the past three years of doing Dota stuff, and I'd hate to see that disappear.
I feel like if I keep posting over and over someone at valve will eventually notice.
I know it's me being a broken record, but hey, that post is well over a year old now.
Fancy icons and loading screens can't fully mask mediocre art. Valve does test these in game, and if mediocre pieces slip by, ultimately the buck stops with them. Some of the most successful pieces on the workshop have the least amount of fluff associated with them. This is not aimed at anyone specific, but if you are having an issue with your art gaining traction, it may be worth looking at the quality of your own work, and reflecting on how to improve it, rather than blaming a "broken" system.
The only feedback I've ever gotten from Valve or seen Valve give to people is what the items look like in game from the main player perspective. That's what they care about, and loading screens can't cover that up.
@AHelenek
http://www.dota2.com/store/itemdetails/20684?r=c9
http://cdn.dota2.com/apps/dota2/images/store/arcana20684_mv0.webm
So basically, there is now a new kind of preview ! And since it's just a video, it's available from the web browser version of the store too.
I'm not sure if they'll use that for every set.
This is nothing new, valve has been using webm video in the store for quite some time. I believe the DotaCinema pudge set was the first to have such a preview on the store. and I've been told they are more then happy to include videos as long as you provide it in the correct format.
As for the animated store icon, I'm sure that will be a valve only arcana thing.
webm's are really awesome.
(That PA arcana sure looks busy though ...)
And SOME, only SOME of those 10m users expand their interest beyond playing the game. I'm talking about the people who are actually interested in the workshop. That's a really small portion from the whole player community, keep that in mind.
Adding heavy workshop presence in-game could be negative to the majority of players - those who are interested in playing Dota2. It could make the player feel he is FORCEd to vote. Forced to browse through the "workshop". That is not something you want to do.
So yeah, the player is interested in playing.