Board 8 > Round 3 match pictures???

(+) Yeah! (+)

So... is there going to be a topic made for that? Or have the pictures for Round 3 already been decided?

There's like 4 hrs till Round 3 is supposed to start.
---

SBAllen tweeted me that he's just using Zen's gifs for the rest of the contest.
---

@SBAllen I'll be honest..
I know, we need to thank you for the contest, and we do, but..

Your lack of communication ever since the contest started sucks.
We asked about Joker, and you didn't answer
We asked about the yellow pick background in the "your bracket" page for incorrect matches, and you don't respond
It took you a while to even let us see points in the beginning of the contest

And your silence regarding match pictures is the worst. We said that some match pictures sucked ass (like Joel), and you didn't give a shit.
We asked for a new pictures for round 2, and you didn't give a shit
And now we ask for Round 3 pictures..and again, we don't hear anything from you

It's almost like you just said "here, have this contest and fuck off"
---

Yeah I'm with Nanis here, the pictures are one of my favorite parts of the contests and not getting new ones is really disappointing
---

I mean, this is how much he cares

Last post on Gamefaqs was more than a week ago
He also stopped voting in the contest ever since division 4 of the first round
This contest is pretty much on auto-pilot for him while he is doing whatever, why bother with match pics?
---

we have 3 hrs to go till Round 3... I hope someone made the custom match pics for R3?
---

I'm with Nanis too. Everything he said in his post was spot on.

What makes this more embarrassing is that this not a new trend. SBAllen's lack of communication and incompetence was one of the bigger stories of the 2013 Character Battle, how his wife somehow got involved messaging the League of Legends subreddit? Led to the infamous MoogleKupo "allen is so fat" post that I wish was archived.

In 2011, he did not communicate well on the issue if Mario & Sonic could be a rivalry. Made a bracket about video game rivalry without mentioning probably the #1 or #2 one....

And to quote Ulti from his writeup on the 2017 contest:

"He asked for blurbs that he eventually scrapped. No systems were ever put into match pictures. There were bizarre match pic choices that directly cost some entrants matches. The vote totals were the worst ever and the majority of the matches were record blowouts. "

He is NOT learning.
---

>Why does the site admin not care about his userbase of ~2000-and-shrinking ungrateful assholes more than he does his actual life
---

Logience posted...

>Why does the site admin not care about his userbase of ~2000-and-shrinking ungrateful assholes more than he does his actual life

Did you ever read your post
"Why does a site admin not care about his own site" is pretty much a good question and I don't understand why the fuck do you think your cynical attitude works
---

@SBAllen thank you for giving us a contest at all. I love them, especially the character battle, and missed it during the five year absence. This one has been pretty great so far, and can't wait to see where it goes from here. While I'm not completely insensitive to some of the concerns of others, I'm sorry they are being so rude and blunt about them.
---

Nanis23 posted...

Logience posted...

>Why does the site admin not care about his userbase of ~2000-and-shrinking ungrateful assholes more than he does his actual life

Did you ever read your post
"Why does a site admin not care about his own site" is pretty much a good question and I don't understand why the fuck do you think your cynical attitude works

Because Ive learned the hard way that being ungrateful to people who dont respect your opinion only makes things worse.
---

UltimaterializerX posted...

Not gonna lie, having a contest off from making match pics for every match is nice. Saving it for later stuff is fine by me.

Especially if you had to make 4 per day.
---

sooo... match pics? Or same picture from Rounds 1+2?
---

Underleveled posted...

@SBAllen thank you for giving us a contest at all. I love them, especially the character battle, and missed it during the five year absence. This one has been pretty great so far, and can't wait to see where it goes from here. While I'm not completely insensitive to some of the concerns of others, I'm sorry they are being so rude and blunt about them.

Same here.

I dislike the decisions regarding the match pic thing. But I'm not about to insult Allen when he decides to keep doing contests after the living hell that was 2013, and makes this really good bracket. Also he does listen to people's feedback, such as the demand for a 24 hour 1v1 contest. And he's doing this for free (heck, he's paying for it), when I'm not even sure if this contest provides traffic for the site.

Screw the haters. Thank you Allen. But yeah, maybe you should have a little more transparency with your decisions.

I'm kinda bummed. Making match pics was one of my favorite things about the contests. Zen even dubbed me the Piczar! ;_;
---

honestly fuck SBAllen for these lazy match pics
---

Pics aren't worth insulting him over, the contest itself is a big deal by itself.
---

Allen's never cared about this site. Bare minimum effort to keep it going all the way has been the paradigm since the CJayC regime ended. This isn't new!
---

tbh, the fact that Phoenix Wright vs Kirby won't have a unique match pic is going to be one of the biggest negatives of this contest for me
---

Also, the idea that as the Lead Admin for this site he needs to post on the message boards is the funniest thing I've read in a while.
---

ZeldaTPLink posted...

Underleveled posted...

@SBAllen thank you for giving us a contest at all. I love them, especially the character battle, and missed it during the five year absence. This one has been pretty great so far, and can't wait to see where it goes from here. While I'm not completely insensitive to some of the concerns of others, I'm sorry they are being so rude and blunt about them.

Same here.

I dislike the decisions regarding the match pic thing. But I'm not about to insult Allen when he decides to keep doing contests after the living hell that was 2013, and makes this really good bracket. Also he does listen to people's feedback, such as the demand for a 24 hour 1v1 contest. And he's doing this for free (heck, he's paying for it), when I'm not even sure if this contest provides traffic for the site.

Screw the haters. Thank you Allen. But yeah, maybe you should have a little more transparency with your decisions.

All of what both of you said. Thank you for everything you do to keep these contests and this site as a whole going, Allen. Even if it doesn't seem like it sometimes, we appreciate it.

Tag, I have some thoughts about this Ill share when Im at my computer
---

On one hand, PR stuff is kind of outside the boundaries of a "head admin" job, generally. On the other hand, you'd think they'd be able to hire somebody to do PR stuff for a major site event, or something.

The thing that bothers me about the lack of communication re:match pics is that it's something that could have been dealt with really easily before the contest even started. "We're not using user-created match pics until round X, until then we're just using these ones that you can see in the bracket." Instead, not only do we not know anything until the round starts, but we still don't know if there'll be user-submitted pics at all.

I'm not going to call Allen incompetent when he's already doing stuff outside of his standard job describtion like running the contest, but I think it's fair to discuss/complain when stuff could be done better.
---

Alright, here's my thoughts on the whole thing:

I don't expect to get custom match pics, and since the beginning of the contest I've said the odds were low.

As you can see from the URL of the match pics:

https://gamefaqs.akamaized.net/images/x/char/14.png
https:// gamefaqs. akamaized .net/ images /x /char /14.png

We have a directory just labeled "Char" and under that no other subdirectory. The character pics are just numbers going from 1-136, the number of entrants in the contest. There isn't a subdirectory before that labeled "R1" or anything. It's just 136 pictures.

So right off the bat you can assume he wasn't planning to do more. In a lot of ways I get it, we had people going off on paulg for the Vincent pic and calling it "sabotage." Yes, we've had "pic sabotage" before, but none where we quite went off on a user that badly and savagely. The dude basically had a breakdown in the middle of it and responded with "yes, I did it, and fuck all of you!"

I don't believe paulg actually intended to pic sabotage. My take on it was that we'd used all the pics possible for most characters over the course of 7 years, and he wanted to do something new. I did this all the time. I used Old Man MGSV Ocelot. I didn't mean to pic sabotage, we just only had a handful of Ocelot pics.

Of course, Allen is ultimately responsible for choosing the match pics, and as we saw through his choices of "anonymous user"-made pics, he was probably sick of some of the weird or bad shit we were churning out in 2013. To be fair, there were 247 characters and it was hard to get art for them, but when even Ulti isn't making stock pics with stock Smash art, you know there's a problem there too.

So Allen cuts out that factor completely. No more "sabotage." No more waiting on B8 to make pics when all we do is submit weird fanart or straight garbage. It's just Allen and he made the contest and he made the pics and he is in complete control. There's no more harassment of any user but him.

That being said, Allen totally dropped the ball with pics this year. Some of them were alright, and you can tell the pics were low-effort. He used a lot of the stock Smash renders cuz they were already done. But as you can see from Joel and Ammy's pics, he didn't put a lot of time into doing proper renders. They're really messy. I'm not talking about his choice of pics, but you can see he didn't spend more than a few minutes actually making the pics presentable. It shows a lack of care in what could be a big determining factor in a close match.

If Allen wants to do the pics, go ahead. Board 8 really has run the well dry, but I'll admit that in the 5-year gap between Character Battles I had been stocking up on new pics for classic CB entrants to debut in this contest. I was excited to see some new art on the front page. Match pics were also an excellent way to get involved and learn new skills. I taught myself Photoshop because I wanted to make match pics the first time they were open for user submission.

Me, KP, Ulti, we all figured it out because we love these contest and this community. I taught a Photoshop class at my college using the skills I learned from making match pics. I still use Photoshop to this day. I taught some users here how to make pics. Picsmithing is a huge part of the culture now, and it's an absolute shame it's been taken away.

But I want you all to take a step back, think about all the intentional pic sabotage, think about all the people who harass Allen and other users, think about all the weird shit we've submitted (myself included, lol Katherine hentai pic) and you'll understand why Allen did what he did.

That doesn't excuse the poor quality of the Allen Pics, but hopefully everyone here understands why they may have been necessary.

sorry i didnt spellcheck this post much but enjoy
---

Yeah communication is the issue.

I think b8 has shown that while we may complain we're happy to help him with absolutely anything contest related that he might ask for. Pictures, bios, blurbs, corrections, checking the bracket and nom form, even naming the contest itself (hi!). We don't see that stuff as a chore, we want to do it.

So if you're gonna not do normal match pics that's totally fine but it'd be cool if it was communicated, especially when people ask repeatedly. Then people can know when they're going to need to get to work. Would just be nice I guess.
---

i feel like you guys are being a little overdramatic
---

banananor posted...

i feel like you guys are being a little overdramatic

Nah man... it's Round 3(!) already! We're very far into this thing.
---

ZeldaTPLink posted...

I dislike the decisions regarding the match pic thing. But I'm not about to insult Allen when he decides to keep doing contests after the living hell that was 2013, and makes this really good bracket. Also he does listen to people's feedback, such as the demand for a 24 hour 1v1 contest. And he's doing this for free (heck, he's paying for it), when I'm not even sure if this contest provides traffic for the site.

Screw the haters. Thank you Allen. But yeah, maybe you should have a little more transparency with your decisions.

plus one

I am happy to get any contest at all, and anything beyond that is an added bonus. Is it perfect? Nah, but it's pretty good IMO, and I don't think we've ever had a contest that had zero hiccups or issues >_>
---