by Erdadi3 » Tue Jan 19, 2016 8:36 pm
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.