Why has there not been another Olympic style contest between forums for years now?
polycounter lvl 12
Why has there not been another Olympic style contest between forums for years now? I understand why polycount pulled out of dominance war V. but why has no one tried to organize a new competition between the various 3d art forums? They looked like fun. I'm just wondering because I did not get into 3d art until after everything fell apart.
Replies
same with kickstarter - they tended to crowdsource money towards actual game development, rather than a single art piece tournament events for a while, although I made this part up bc. I haven't been a part of the scene quite for a while, oop @ me.
I remember in college checking out all the Dominance War contests, going through all the threads, talking with other students about the big time entry's, how things were done, talking about the year before and so forth.
Mini challenges will never have that sense of epicness. Nor will they draw the large titans of the 3d art community out to compete to see REAL art competition. Which is the best. People love to compete and if you have a big enough stage it will bring out the best of the best.
Agreed...those motivated me a lot in the beginning and really pushed me each time I participated. I really got a lot out of them following and participating in them. You also get to know a lot of people through it which is pretty awesome. That being said, the smaller challenges do present a good opportunity for people just trying to learn stuff and are better than nothing. I think companies will continue to sponsor the occasional big competition so there will still be somewhat epic comps here and there...but winning dominance war is kinda legendary...
While I personally think that one doesn't need such challenges to get oneself motivated to get things done, they sure had some great side benefits, one of them being that a DW win can enable/speed up the process for a work visa. Although there are other venues for that too now (like releasing popular educational material).
All that shouldn't prevent one from organizing one's own mini contest though
My thoughts exactly. It's not necessary but, man, a big part of me misses those style of "faction" contests. While you can do your own thing, like Haz and I did years ago to some form of success, there's a difference between working with your friends on something versus being put in a group and having that level of competition.
Committing to prizes seemed like a huge problem, and was generally a dumb idea. It should never have been a motivator (did DW1 and 2 even have prizes? Posters, maybe?) and when you start asking for donations to fund something most people never asked for...it becomes a little shaky.
Either way, if PC put on a DW style contest (CIVIL WAR??? TEAM ADAM VERSUS TEAM BEARKUB VERSUS TEAM R13????) I'd 100% join.
I do miss the days of dominancewar and the like. Dont care at all about the prizes either, i almost always skip reading the price section, i just want one of them polycount balls yo.
1. To maintain any interforum comp, you actually need other sites with which to compete. The global art community just isn't filled with a lot of forums these days. They're hard to keep afloat because, as they get more popular, funding and moderating them becomes a beast. Not enough art forums? Not enough factions for "the war." It would certainly be possible to do a intraforum comp, but you lose that thrill of competing camps.
2. Video may have killed the radio star, but Facebook killed the forums. Why be a part of a modest sized forum when you can join a much larger community? One community. No overlap in membership, as you would have with forums. Look at where the major forums stand these days. PC seems to be healthy as ever, but the same can't be said of many of its competitors. CGTalk is in a period of existential crisis where even the (still massive) membership is beginning to question whether or not it should continue. GameArtisans is a ghost town, a pale shadow of itself. 3DTotal might as well not exist if you look at their post count. That's just a few of the major sites.
3. Prizes were a huge motivator for a lot of aspiring artists. Yeah, more seasoned artists don't need that sort of push. However, prizes drew in a lot of new blood. Unfortunately, economics got in the way. It wasn't so much that the prizes were getting bigger, but that the global recession hit everybody hard. That period between 2007-2009 probably forced a lot of sponsors to reevaluate how they were spending their money. Sponsors do this sort of thing as an act of self-promotion. Unfortunately, when the economy is in the toilet or on the path to recovery, not a whole lot of people want to buy what you're selling. The cost to benefit ratio probably wasn't worth it.
4. Organizing a large comp is a pain. It's not just about coordinating with other sites, but managing things on your own end. While the global art community is larger than ever, ironically, there aren't as many people who have the time to play moderator these days. Forum leadership is at an all time low on some of these sites, which makes wrangling members during a competition particularly tricky. If only for a short period, competitions drive up membership. With little internal leadership & moderation to control that traffic... chaos & confusion.
5. The "state of the art" has gotten increasingly more complex over the years. Ask a game artist from 1995 what a triple-A realtime 3D model should be like and he'll probably tell you something like 250 polys and a single 256x256 texture. Ask another one from 2005 what the AAA game model would look like. The 2005 model would probably be 20x more detailed and use a series even larger, more detailed maps. Move ahead to 2015 and the specs for an A+ game model have gotten even more high end. This is often why smaller comps seem to fare better these days. Less epic comps mean less epic requirements. AAA specs have almost become too large for a comp.
6. On top of that, an individual artist competing in such a comp needs to be more skilled than ever. In 1995, all you probably needed to know was 3dsmax & Photoshop. That was it. Your whole jobe could be done with just two programs. Today, to complete a given work from start to finish, I need anywhere from 5-10 programs. To complete a comp, just knowing how to model & hand paint a basic texture map isn't enough. You now need to know how to sculpt. You also need to know your map conversion techniques. You might even need to know how a thing or two about shaders or procedural generation. The list goes on and on. Being a generalist is harder than it's ever been. Forget about winning. To even finish such a big comp, you've got to be at the top of your game.
7. Epic comps are also a huge commitment for the competitors involved. If a comp lasts 2 months then those are 2 months that can't be spent working on other personal pieces. An entry might make for an excellent reel piece, but it can be a distraction. Sometimes, as an issue of demonstrating your range and flexing your creative muscles, you want to create a few smaller, more diverse pieces instead of one massive one.
For the TLDR crowd....
- Too few sites to compete against to make for a CG "world war."
- Facebook became the forum killer. Facebook replaced forums.
- The Global Recession hurt sponsorship & prizes.
- Big comps = Big pains. Not enough organization between or within forums.
- Just like game art IRL, game art comp specs have gotten crazy.
- The number of skills required to compete/complete such epic comps has become so massive.
- Big comps = Time Drain.
I'd love to see big, epic comps make a comeback too, but I'm not sure that there's a place for them these days.