Dream
Zakobon
Still Thinks It's Christmas
Posts: 123
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Post by Dream on Jul 5, 2011 22:28:34 GMT -5
I'm fine with what they picked, although I actually like Chip and Hovind better. Congrats on the Honorable mention with Cola, ashlamuness!
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Post by in·clover on Jul 6, 2011 3:24:23 GMT -5
It's an animal (flesh and blood), whereas in Legends animals have never been anything more than animals. Be it pigs, horses, cats, or racoons they all act like animals with no higher intelligence. The Birdbot/monkey mascots are (or seem) robotic in nature. Is it not a robot? I can't really tell. The body's all segmented, but I guess that's just the drawing style. Maybe the devs will robotify him, though. I hope they do. Ironically enough, the two entries I was rooting for were both animals, with descriptions making them seem at least somewhat intelligent. But it was only kind of hinted at, and done in a cartoony/humorous sort of way that was forgivable. I wouldn't mind that so much, unless it were a more serious entry with animals that talked and regularly engaged in long dialog with the rest of the characters. That's where I'd draw the line. Trying to guess at it in order to understand their selections, or even better, designing entries based on those imagined criteria is silly. People should just focus on coming up with something they like. For the most part I agree. But obvious things like " Mascot Contest"... That should be the one thing to bare in mind. If you're designing something that's meant to represent a bunch of misfits, it would just make sense to think along those lines. I did enjoy seeing a lot of these, though. Even though barely any of them struck me as mascot material, some of them might have made interesting characters outside what this contest was asking them for. I would still love to see Tron Bonne's vengeful Bacon in Legends 3 even if it were just a cameo, or at least something similar to that idea.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Jul 6, 2011 10:20:59 GMT -5
After my intentional shock over which entry had won, I had warmed up to Tinker. He's actually not really bad at all. Not what I had expected, but not actually bad at all.
BTW, am I the only one who didn't receive any points from entrying this contest, or would it take awhile before they'll add the additional points?
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Arne
Fritto
Ghost Zakobon
Posts: 64
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Post by Arne on Jul 6, 2011 12:01:19 GMT -5
Arnie sounds affectionate Arne is pronounced something like aah-neh in case anyone wonders. The winning design feels pretty safe. Personally I find strange designs more memorable and appealing, but they're more prone to failure too of course.
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Post by Avegodro on Jul 6, 2011 17:04:10 GMT -5
Well I have to say I was a bit confused by their selection. But, Tinker is a good mascot and I can't wait to see him in the game. Congrats to the honorable mentions and runner ups and to everyone one else. I had fun helping to create Rivet and hope that we have another chance to collaborate again.
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Post by Rockman Striker on Jul 8, 2011 16:43:24 GMT -5
As usual I wasn´t happy with the winner, but then I started seeing their good points and charm and such, I honestly want to see this one almost completely redesigned, maybe a bit more mechanical and less toony, and I got a feeling that the devs will make it bigger, Data or Servbot sized, it´s too small to bother detailing the 3d model. (the 3ds screen isn´t too big either)
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Post by Blues on Jul 9, 2011 2:20:29 GMT -5
'Tinker', eh? To be honest I had no idea the thing even existed before it won, so that came as a slight surprise to me. Looking at it a bit it does seem to have a bit of potential to become a strong design. That said, I'm currently waiting for the inevitable redesign before I give a final judgement to the 'lil mascot guy.
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Post by Raijin on Jul 9, 2011 23:02:32 GMT -5
Because you demanded it: Mascot Stats! I wanted to post these before the winners were announced, and I almost made it. I had copied down all the English entries last Saturday, then got cocky and decided to go through the Japanese ones as well. I got down to the last 50 or so when I had to run to catch a train, where I spent the next four days riding the rails of western Canada. Good trip, but it'd be nearly a week before I got the chance to wrap this up, and by then I'd missed the big finale. Oh well, hopefully there's still enough interest in the mascots for you to enjoy some amusing number crunching.
First off, I should mention that I didn't carefully read every entry's description/comments, didn't have time for it. I mainly skimmed the text blocks for key words and otherwise let the pictures tell the whole story. As such, some of the data may be inaccurate, like how many can fly, since I couldn't always gather whether a design's cute little cartoon bat wings were meant to be functional or not and rather than pore over the description for a definitive answer, I'd often just guess so I could quickly move on. This also means I wasn't able to gather numbers on the backstory trends like how many used lame fanficcy theories about the Elder and Master systems to lay their difficult groundwork. I would have liked to. Let's just say there were a lot more than there should have been.
Also, I didn't get as much detail on the Japanese entries because of course I can't read their descriptions at all. So Japanese entries without images are mostly recorded as names only unless I saw a recognizable word like "koumori" in katakana that lets me know to drop them into the "bat" column.
254 entries in the western Devroom, 7 of the western entries were incomplete, 5 were jokes (one of which was after the deadline to boot), 2 were abandoned, leaving 240 valid entries. 214 entries in the east Devroom, which were all valid as far as I could tell. 454 mascots total. Nice that the amount of entries on each side were so close this time. I think for all the other events one side always greatly outnumbered the other.
7 threads posted that were not entries. The usual trolls, idiots, and "HOW DO I GET SERVBOT NUMBER!?"s.
CoA had 35 collaborations, of 2-3 people. CoJ had 8 teams of 2-11. The Japanese side seemed to have fewer teams, but the teams they had were much larger. Not sure what all those different people contributed.
65 (16 A, 49 J) valid entries had no images. As usual, I think these are practically forfeit. You don't want to discourage people from submitting an idea just because they can't draw, but at the same time all the people that can draw are the only ones that are going to leave any impression. The way collabs were encouraged this time, it would have been best if all of these people snagged artists to help them. In the Japanese case, only 11 of the 49 had details I could identify and use, leaving 38 mystery mascots that may fit into any of the below categories.
93 (63 A, 30 J) mascots that were friendly reaverbots, or not-so-secretly evil reaverbots, or in a couple of cases, weirdoes wearing the carcasses of reaverbots as armor.
60 (48 A, 12 J) mascots that served as homages or references to non-Legends concepts. This number was much lower than I expected, and even the number I got was from being pretty loose with my definition of what constituted a reference. I counted names like "Rush" "Beat" and "Batton" even when the designs didn't have much to do with the classic versions beyond that. I counted a lot of Arne's entries because he comes right out and says what he based them on in his notes, but he put enough originality into them that you can't even tell where the inspiration comes from without him telling you. Out of all of them, the only really egregious examples of reference-making were the ones that suggested an actual Batton from the 20XX era, the ones that suggested MMZ Cyber Elves. Most of the contestants thankfully realized a certain degree of originality was required for a mascot character.
139 (74 A, 65 J) mascots that were bats, or bat-like robots, or in a few cases other animals that basically dressed and functioned like a bat. Predictable enough. A lot of participants argued that even though it was too on-the-nose, it would have been dumb to make anything but a bat to represent a group with "Bats" in their name. Well apparently the Devs disagree.
197 (118 A, 79 J) mascots that could fly. This was a given for most of the bat entries (there were a few explicitly flightless bats), but there were also many birds, hovering robots, rocket-surfers, and things that were evidently floating for no apparent reason.
Other common animals included: canines - 43 (25 A, 18 J) with 7 wolves, 6 foxes felines - 28 (13 A, 15 J) bunnies - 15 (10 A, 5 J) cat/dog - 1 (samuel's Fooyat, based on a komainu statue, a lion dog, so I guess it counts as both) cat/bunny - 1 (Ivan's superfluosly-named "Trigger", the flying cat-bunny) lizards - 13 (8 A, 5 J) counting dragons and dinosaurs. birds - 12 (7 A, 5 J) 4 owls moles - 10 (6 A, 4 J) many went with the "digger" theme and defaulted to this as the appropriate animal. squirrels - 7 (6 A, 1 J) pigs - 7 (6 A, 1 J) sea creatures - 7 (3 A, 4 J) including an eel, a goldfish, a squid, an octopus, a shark, a crab, and a hermit crab. bears - 6 (3 each) pandas - 3 (2 A, 1 J) nope, not counting them as bears tanukis - 5 (4 A, 1 J) One of these, SIMSteven's Crafty, was explicitly based on the "tanukis" that appear on Manda in MML2. Nobody pointed out that those are actually red pandas. plants - 5 (3 A, 2 J) including a venus fly-trap, a squash, and a chunk of sod. frogs - 4 (3 A, 1 J) one of these, Arne's Darchron, he described as also being sorta a cat and a cactus, so you could also add one more each to the cat and plant groups. ferrets - 3 (2 A, 1 J) Tinker wasn't the only one. rodents - 6 (2 A, 5 J) 3 mice, 3 rats, and a hedgehog. one of the Japanese ones was a cross between Data and Mickey Mouse. penguins - 2 (A) Pitch requested this count. kangaroos - 2 (A) skunks - 2 (1 each)
and of course 16 of these animals were simulaneously bats.
Comparing to Rivet we had 14 (10 A, 4 J) mascots that employed a screen or some other kind of digital display for the face.
18 (11 A, 7 J) mascots that wore Met-helmets, or were Mets.
84 (55 A, 29 J) mascots wore goggles.
57 (46 A, 11 J) mascots wore scarves.
28 (23 A, 5 J) of the above two groups wore both goggles and scarves at the same time.
11 (9 A, 2 J) employed drills. Can't have enough drills with any event, can we?
There were 184 male characters and 34 female in the western Devroom. 19 entries made a point of using gender-neutral pronouns (sometimes they slipped and said "he" but I could tell they were trying for "it" so I gave them the neutral status). One of them, Kaerth's Kally, used the male pronouns constantly, but capped it off by saying it wasn't meant to have a gender but he didn't want to refer to it as "it". 11 entries have uncertain gender. Some deftly avoided the use of pronouns in their notes. Some just didn't include enough notes to provide any way to tell. Franz's Bats Bots entry had multiple characters based on each team member, with one girlbot for Aero and the rest were guys. A couple were just frustratingly vague by using pronouns like "he/she" or including a note that basically said "this character can be whatever gender you want, I don't care".
I didn't get any data on gender for the Japanese side. Due to lack of gender-specific pronouns in Japanese, I'm guessing a lot of the entries were able to get through the description without providing any clues anyway.
I found the gender distribution for this event interesting. Since most of the designs were cute animals and robots with no secondary sexual characteristics, gender didn't really have to be set in stone for them. In this scenario it's best to avoid the "it" classification even for non-sexual machines, because when it comes to the cute sidekick mascot, you want to humanize it any way you can. Referring to their companion as "it" just has a negative, devaluing connotation even if it's technically correct. Furthermore, if your design is some gender-transcendant non-anthropomorphic creature then it likely comes off as a creepy monster more than an appealing mascot.
Knowing that your androgenous mascot ought to fall into either the M or F category to be sufficiently relatable, most naturally default to M. I know that's chauvinist, but that's currently how most minds in our society work, to the point that the ones identified as female tend to stick out more. I started keeping track of gender when I got the impression the ladies outnumbered the gents. When the numbers soundly contradicted that hypothesis I realized my mind was just falling for the "Men Are Generic, Women Are Special" trope. Tsk.
Common names: Batton - 3 (J) Beta - 3 (2 A, 1 J) Bit - 7 (2 A, 5 J) Byte - 3 (A) then there was one J entry with the name "Bit or Byte", I think he couldn't decide. Bolt - 2 (1 each) Bright Bat - 2 (1 each) Drake - 2 (A) Flare - 2 (A) Hack - 2 (J) Hatch - 2 (1 each) Jet - 2 (J) Load - 2 (1 each) Mare - 2 (J) Memory - 7 (J) Rivet - 2 (A) Rush - 3 (J) not counting the troll post from the guy named "True" Search - 2 (J) Shine - 2 (J) Sonar - 3 (1 A, 2 J) Wrench - 2 (1 each)
The most used name is tied between Bit and Memory. I guess a lot of the Japanese Devroomers felt "Memory" was the most appropriate counter to "Data", and many of these were Data lookalikes.
Common contributors: CoA - abbas(4), Adam(2), Akane Jones(3), Ancode & Servbot 3997(5), Antumbra(3), Axl-fox(2), Ben-Hur Pilotti(2), BlackIvy(3), Bubbles(2), Chawzee(2), cold52(3), David (3), Dwayne(5), GabrielT(2), Graham(3), HandlebarOrionX(4), Invader Dan(5), Ingwaz Seishu & viperxmns(2), Jeremey(4), Joshua(2), KentaroPJJ(4), Kicker(2), KokO(2), mac_jsus(2), Master_M(5), MegaGoemon(4), MegaSword(2), MLT(2), Arne(7), Olawale(3), Press Start(4), R.Case(4), Rad(2), Risen(2), samuel(4), Skybane_Zero(5), Steffie(2), Terrence R.(3), Timothy(2), ToTheMoon!(2), Tron Bonne(2), Zach Storm Eagle Eye(2)
Only two different users named "Alex" this time. Also two Austins, Davids, Jordans, Samuels, and Sebastians. Plus three Daniels and Kyles.
CoJ - B.C.C(2), CAPKobun(2), Harapekomi no Mushi(3), Hashitaku(2), Hi-GO!(2), keaton(3), Masa(2), Midoriko(2), N@O(2), Neida(5), o.s(2), picture drawer(4), Pirotoshi(3), qiqam(2), Saikyou no Koburero(2), Shibashou(2), Tanuki(6), Usuke(2), Yoru no Teiou(2).
Congratulations Arne! You narrowly beat Tanuki in output.
Finally a couple special mentions:
SteelyDusk's "Chyao" gets the award for "Most Vague Design". Description couldn't decide if it were male or female, or what animal it was (maybe an otter), and lacked any other common distinguishing factor. It was practically invisible.
Tron Bonne's "Dashe" narrowly loses to B.C.C.'s "Kinyanko" as "Most Unsettling Tribute to Female Community Icon". The former is a computer with Dashe's personality, the latter is a cat with Kinako's head.
And the award for "Most Reccurring Themes Jammed Into A Single Entry" goes to Japanese MMLS rival CAPKobun and his team of 9 with their Data-diaper-wearing bat whose name is Memory!
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2011 2:42:09 GMT -5
Thank you very much for posting the mascot stats for us, Raijin. I was quite curious myself about which themes, names and genders were the most common for each Devroom.
I had once wondered whether anyone would've posted after the the event; but chalked it up that their post would've been a bit after the deadline because of timezone differences if it ever had happened. But, I've noticed today that someone did post well after the deadline.
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Post by Raijin on Jul 10, 2011 13:36:21 GMT -5
Right, that guy that posted just this past week isn't in my stats because I had already compiled the numbers before he posted. You could add one more to the western "invalid" pile because of that, plus any more that still get posted in the future?
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Post by Dashe on Jul 10, 2011 14:05:47 GMT -5
I don't know whether to be more weirded out that "Most Unsettling Tribute to Female Community Icon" had enough entries to warrant a category, or that a tribute to me would actually qualify for the category.
Also, CAPKobun had a team of 9? And they allowed it? Damn, Japan gets to have all the fun.
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Post by WhiteWindow on Jul 10, 2011 14:23:19 GMT -5
I lost in "Most Unsettling Tribute to Female Community Icon"? Dang... I knew I should have went with the original plan of duct taping Dashe's head onto Rush's body.
Anyway, good read Raijin, great work.
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Post by Loken on Jul 11, 2011 14:15:36 GMT -5
Great stats as always Raijin! This event had so many simular mascots, I'm glad we have the numbers on them. It was hard to keep looking through the submissions because they were all the same for the most part, I got to point where I would say 'Oh, another bat' and hit the back button.
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Post by Avegodro on Jul 17, 2011 12:00:40 GMT -5
Thanks for the list of statistics Raijin, its nice to see everything broken down like this. Dang...139, that is a lot of bats, makes me wonder what the next 'bat' will be for the next event. ;D Anyways I was watching MMLA the other day and spotted this in the corner of screen. Its the band of monitors inside the cabin ( or is it cockpit? ) of the flutter. You can see them during the cutscenes after the sea tower and before the Gesellschaft battle. It looks like Data's face, anyone else ever notice it?
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