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Here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for, fashionistas - your 2019 Masquerade CW Contest WINNERS! Congratulations!
Our nine judge-chosen winners are...
And finally, the winner that YOU chose!
All ten winning items can now be found for sale in the Steamworks Menagerie!
Thank you so much, everyone, for your participation! Both winner and participation prizes will be distributed shortly.
While the contest may have come to a close, there's still a little bit of Masquerade fun left to enjoy - keep on dancing, the Masquerade ends tomorrow at midnight!
I believe I have a grasp of the difference between constructive criticism and opinions. I haven't seen any constructive criticism on this topic, aside from ideas for the staff on how contests like this should be run in the future. (Which is fine, I take no issue with that, just as a disclaimer.) One way or the other though, people should know when their opinion or criticism is even necessary. No, opinions shouldn't be banned, don't fly off the handle when I never insinuated any such thing, but it is up to the user to have discretion in when they need to share their opinion. I believe that if an opinion brings someone down rather than benefits them or anyone else, then it is one that is best kept to oneself.
On my second point, I was originally talking about this post. Then when you seemed to disagree that posts here were negative, I brought up those from the last post as well. I was saying that you need not look beyond this post for negativity, but that there was plenty in the last news post about the contest as well.
Again, I believe insulting art is more complex than just "this sucks and I hate it" but I've already gone into detail on that so.
I didn't call out anyone specifically, though. It's up to you if you want to look through the comments and see who said what, but I didn't mention anyone by name, quote an entire post, ping someone or anything like that. And, other people on the last news post had said similar things of too many entries being "the same squinting eyes" etc. so that wasn't exclusively about one person either. Once again, I consider claiming a piece of art is unoriginal to be a form of insulting that piece and saying all the winners are "squinty eyes" would fall under that. It doesn't matter what word they use or what the descriptor is, it could be "feminine eyes", "soft eyes", "big eyes", what have you, it's still discrediting the creativity and individuality of the art and the artists.
The reason it's different in this case for people to criticize the items however is that these are not staff made items. When it comes to giving feedback and opinions on things staff make (official items, events, plots or otherwise) they are likely hoping for user feedback. They are looking out for what their userbase wants, as that's essentially their job. (Though people are overly entitled to the staff on here as is, but that's a topic for another day) However our feedback is not going out to staff here, it's going to people who play the site as users and who entered a contest for fun/prizes. They not only cannot do ANYTHING with this feedback but let it make them feel bad about their work, as they can't resubmit their entries, remove them, or make a new item to better accommodate the users who complained, but in addition to that, they never asked for this feedback. Did they want it? I don't know. I didn't enter and haven't asked, but I can say that they never asked for half the comments to be about how they didn't like the item they spent hours on.
When I said something about this on the last news post, I had people approach me to say that it meant a lot to them and that they had been hurt by what was being said. That's why I'm so quick to go to bat now and why I'm so upset at how people are behaving. Because I'm painfully aware that they are hurting people's feelings and it really broke my heart to hear and know that.