Hello all,
I need a bit of help, though not in regards to painting…well, not this time anyway. After another extremely long hiatus I did a paint recently, which I’m relatively happy with - simple though it may be. Now, back in the glory days when the community here was thriving, long before it was brutally murdered, there was a weekly fantasy paint competition which was a lot of fun for us painters. It was on the Fantasy Paint Booth page, stickied at the top. So, after getting some positive feedback on my recent painting escapade, I did what I used to do and had a look for the competition with an interest in entering.
I probably don’t need to point out that I didn’t find it, because we can all see it isn’t there. But there is a gallery in it’s place…now, I won’t go into how utterly useless the entire concept of a communal gallery on a forum designed to showcase individual projects is, instead I’m just going to say how pleased I was that I saw a mention of the weekly competition in the OP. Great! It’s in the community events section, that makes sense I guess, a place to unite all the corners of the community in weekly events. It took me but a moment to mosey on over to this new and exciting place. Now, I may or may not be an idiot, it’s still rather too early to tell as far as I’m concerned, but I get to the community events section of the forum, and all I can see is a bunch of locked threads listing previous winners.
From what I can understand these are the very disappointing winners threads, new and improved without pictures, because we can all agree the best way to showcase the ultimate talent of the community is to not display their work along with their name…or whatever logic there is behind that (which also renders this whole section of the forum pointless, I’m only speaking for myself but I would actually like to SEE the winning masterpieces). Anyway, I have looked and looked, but I can’t for the life of me find where to enter one of these competitions anymore, despite the aforementioned possible mental inadequacy, I still feel as though it shouldn’t be this difficult to find what at one point was such a popular feature of the forum. It baffles me that it has been removed from it’s position and hidden away behind a series of clues to follow that seemingly only lead to a weekly list of names that is of no use to anyone.
Like I say, I may be just blindly missing the obvious, and normally I would just let it go and move on with my life, but I find it infuriating that such a simple yet enjoyable community feature has been made obsolete. The removal of both storefronts AND the auction house means that the painting community relies all the more heavily on the forums here to spread word about designs, which would be nice if the forums weren’t simultaneously dying. Enjoying the custom made artwork of the game is more encouraged than ever before, whenever you buy a car you’re encouraged to try out someone’s hard work - if you can find it among all the 5-10 layer shovelware…and it’s all free, which somewhat defeats the purpose, in my humble opinion.
Now, I don’t know why a lot of people started painting, so I’m only speaking for myself here, but way back in Forza 2, I saw a Mario livery which I loved but it cost an absolute fortune on the Auction House. So I had a go at recreating it instead, and it turned out pretty well. I was proud of it at least, so I came on here looking to show it off (while giving credit to the original’s painter, of course) and the whole world of what could be done with these simple shapes was opened up to me. Ninja Gaiden was coming out at the time, and there was a competition someone from the community was running for the best livery (also obsolete now, sadly), so I had a go, and it was a lot of fun. I entered it into the weekly competition too and was one of the lucky winners, and after that I was hooked. Painting and selling, and then collecting some more incredible works of art. Some were made available for reasonable prices, others were limited, and had juicy auctions which could last a long long time, but my god the art was worth it. That has all gone, and with it so has the community it seems. This is why such a seemingly simple thing as not being able to find the weekly contest on the forum is just impossibly frustrating.
So there we go, a long rant. It wasn’t intended as such, I promise, and I really would appreciate some direction in finding what I’m looking for. I hope Turn 10 find some direction of their own to get the community thriving once more. Sadly it seems they have gone down the socialist route, which doesn’t really work in a competitive environment. It’s a game, people want to ‘earn’ things, and have collections that aren’t available to everyone. People want to be rewarded for putting time in, and we all love being appreciated…but sometimes it’s not enough motivation. A new disgustingly well painted limited edition however, was more than enough reason for me to pick up my own brush and paint my arse off in the hopes of having a chance at it - whether it was through community contests or just simple trading. Perhaps it’s nostalgia, but there is no reason it should be.
Fix it, Turn 10. Please.