Featuring in 3.0

Honestly I don't mind the collaborations that artists do. If an exceptional toy box comes out of it we are all better served for it.

And if all the great artists collaborated in a single submission that would mean 4 places for all the others.

Seriously though, of course that abusing this method just for the intent of guarantying a potential summit entry is an abuse and wrong.

Reading the suggestions above I think the best method would be to award an "half feature" for collaborations, even if there is more than two people involved. I think that would be enough to discourage those who are trying to abuse this and not discourage the others.

As for me, I just submitted my first ever toy box. It wasn't a "smooth ride" but I am glad I did it. I even learned where was the menu to submit the toy box as I had never seen it before.
I'm looking forward to build more, improve more (continue to watch semerien's youtube channel) and eventually get at least one tiny little toy box featured during 3.0.

However, to me there is a bigger problem here. It has to do with the visibility of the good toy boxes that aren't featured because they don't fit a particular week's challenge. I think that the team should show on the Youtube channel other good toy boxes that are made by the community. Honestly, the good ones should even count as a feature. That would have a beneficial effect on the diversity of submissions.
Sometimes we have a good idea that does not fit into any announced challenge and even if it is built, submitted and approved very few people will ever see it, experience it and that is a shame.
It doesn't need to happen every week, nor does it have to be a pre-determinated number of toy boxes, but maybe twice a month feature one or two or three good "freestyle" toy boxes would be a good idea.

Well, looks like this is getting interesting... I will try to give my opinion and propose solutions.

I agree that with Disney Infinity 3.0 it has become a problem for newies to feature. So it is our responsability to analyze what is happening in the community and why we have reached this point. Personaly I am really sad when week after week a lot of the comments in the top 5 videos are in the line of "It is not worth trying, always the same people win". This needs a solution ASAP.

We have to go back to previous year to check why the competition has become so hard. The main problem is that the top 5 and featuring Toy Boxes were used past year as the tool to decide who was attending the summit. Around June it was announced that everybody with at least 7 boxes would be invited to the summit. So featuring past year was very important after all.

Now this year, it is logic to think that featuring as much as possible will give you a ticket to the summit... A summit that has not been announced! This is one of the problems, to think that featuring will be used again as the way to determine the attendees to an hypothetical summit (that may not happen!!), only because past year it was done this way. We do not know if there will be a summit this year, we do not know how attendees will be chosen in the case there is a summit, but there is already a rough competition week after week because of that. This rough competition leaves newcomers almost no chances to make the Top 5 and get a featured box. Nobody from past year summit wants to be left behind, and that leads us to the scenario we have at the moment. Some artists will agree with this, others will say that they only build for fun (cough cough) but we have to look at this reality, the summit has become the main goal to feature week after week. IMO the Summit started only as a marketing tool, but now it means much more: friends, opportunities, special events, A LOT OF FUN, etc. And this is what nobody wants to miss. I do not see a clear solution, maybe stopping buildingfor a while and let other people to get engaged? Oh yeah, we could do that, but what if there is another summit this year and you need X features to attend? Who would take that risk? We cannot force eachother to stop building, so we have to look for other solutions to allow new people in.

In my opinion the current system is very rigid and closed. So, my proposal is to replace the features with points, making the system much more flexible and with more opportunities for newcomers. The idea would be to create an artists ranking system based on points instead of features and facilitate the access to that ranking. This would require minor changes in the Top 5 format, like making always honorable mentions (3 honorable mentions would be great!). For example, it would be nice if each week the top 5 artists receive X points each, the honorable mentions Y points each and the rising star Z points. I am sure a lot of people will find this system very interesting, specially new artists. Entering the ranking now would not be tied to the top 5 (at the moment, if you are not in the top 5 you don't receive a feature point) as honorable mentions would count as well as rising stars. The ranking could be used for fun, and in the case a new summit happens the community could look at it and use it as reference. Please and again, this is only a personal opinion and doesn't reflect what will happen!

So, with a proposal to fix that problem, it is time to talk about the other topic... the collab groups. One of the things I want to point here is that as you already know we are 2 persons under the same artist name, but also under the same spare time, system, TV and responsabilities. I don't want to make people think it is not an advantage, but is not like two separated artists, at all. Now, as I said before, featuring this year has become very important just to be in a good position in the case a new summit happens and featured boxes are used as the tool to determine the attendees. Past year, the collabs were very sporadic and only happened in the last few months before summit. The community loves them and they demonstrated it in the summit making the competition a collab, so collabs happen and will happen (and I like them!). The main problem now is that when one of these collabs was placed in the top 5 past year, a feature point was given to each artist in the collab. Again, this year it is logic to think that the same system will be applied and it could be used as a mechanism to feature as much as possible. So we are in the point where collabs have been with us since week 1 of Disney Infinity 3.0, and they are not something sporadic at all. Please don't get me wrong! I like collabs, they are fun and I am proud to work with friends in big projects, but they can also be easily abused and we as a community have to avoid that. So, what is my view about it? It has been already posted here, but a solution could be to divide the point(s) of the feature between the artists who participated in the Toy Box. Should it be applied to every collab? I do not know! That is something that must be judged and valorated by the community team. Anyway, I have already made a collab and will do more this year, for sure.

My big concern about all of this is that it is already mid January :/

Now those were my thoughs, you may share them or not, but the reality is that the community is having problems and we have to check for solutions, it is our responsability.

Kind regards.

I have been trying to think of a solution to allow new artists to feature more. The idea I keep coming back to is a separate top five for featured artists. Featured artists would be the artists with more than X features.

I know this solution would have flaws though. First of all, in the case of the count towards the summit, this would skew the results and allow extra features for the top artists because they are competing against a smaller group. It would also double the number of features per week. If the feature count resets with each release and they continue the process of counting features towards the summit, it could be quite a while before newer artists are even seen. This would continue the trend we are currently seeing. Therefore, it would probably be a count that rolled over to the next release. Finally, this, like the other solutions, could put more of a burden on the DI team. They would have to track more artists and add extra time to TBTV to cover the extra boxes.

I am sure I could find more issues if I dug deeper but I thought I would throw it out there for discussion

@pjhaan Interesting. Just wanna point out that it wouldn't allow extra features for the top artists because the top artists are competing against, well, the other top artists.

It actually is skewed more towards the lower tier who would only be competing against other unseasoned artists. Easier to place in a top five where no one has more than say 5 features under their belt.

@mighygitis - I thought it might allow featured artists to get more features because there would be fewer artists in that group. I thought it would take ten features to join the upper echelon but that was completely arbitrary. The competition would indeed be tougher but the percentages is what I was basing my statement on.

For example, if there are 20 features artists and all twenty entered, they would have a 1 in 4 shot at a feature. If 50 newer artists enter, they only have a 1 in 10 chance of featuring.

I would take 25% odds over 10% odd every time...

It would have to be a lower number such as 2 or 3 to get in. If they competed and only 5 entered. It would be a guaranteed win unless there was a few others. Most of the artists dont do one every week. I would say on average we have been doing 2 a month except for a few of the artists.

This is such a great topic! I love erdadi3's post. I think the the weekly top five needs a makeover.. and..alas.. I have no idea what it should be. I have only entered twice this year after entering several times towards the end of 2.0. Not because i didnt think i would not place, but because I really have just been having fun with the game. Every week you guys all crank out these amazing levels, and I love playing them. There is a group of top artist (I am definitely not one of them) that will win week in and week out. And they should, they have the best toy boxes. I do think it's a problem that the newer artists can't get in there though.

When I first saw that you guys all went together on a box for the force awakens challenge I said "shoot, I should have tried to enter". I have no problem with the collaborations, it just means better levels and more new artists trying to get in. Win win, haha.

Maybe some kind of tier system or something, I don't know (maybe semerian could build something out of logic gates that would give us the answer. All I know is I looked to see what each and every one of you build every week and love playing.

I do hate to see people just not build because they know they don't have a shot at getting featured. The more people that build the better.

Also I think it is great you all are talking about this. We truly do have the best gaming community there is and I don't want that to change. Keep on discussing and I'm sure everyone will come up with something.

Keep churning out those levels so I can play them!