Survey Results - Polls and future changes.

Here's the 2nd part of the survey.

The has been a hot topic in the past months that is how polls work.

I'll be a 100% honest that I'm not super happy with it right now, and I think it can be improved. Many people pointed out that in the closing comments on the survey, that they were not happy with the polls but didn't really know what to do about it.

A few things that were brought up. 

• Popular characters always winning. 
• people manipulating the poll on really close results (when people had last minute changes to decide the winning character). 
• Flavour of the month characters winning when there's already too much art of them being done recently. 

This lines up with a few problems I've been having on my side.

The vast majority of times, the best artworks we get are the ones that I had time to plan it ahead of time. By ahead of time, I mean coming up the month with something in mind for it. Many of the drawings we get were ideas I started months earlier. So I had proper time to cook it up, make sure it's the best possible thing.

This might line up with pin-up polls when I include suggestions that I already have something in mind for them and they happen to win. It happened in cases like Azula, Samus, Triss, Atom Eve. All those images were planned before even being included in the polls.

What happen when my ideas don't win the polls?
- Option A, I include them on my own schedule some time later if possible.
- Option B, if I can't include them, they might be scrapped and we'll never get them.

So what's the problem with polls?

While most of the time, it's perfectly reasonable to come up with the image in 1 month, sometimes it just doesn't happen. The ideal situation would be for me to postpone the image until the idea is ready.

But I can't do that with images chosen by the patrons, so I have to remake it several times before actually working and the end result might be more "generic". Like the character just "there". While it will always have the same technical quality, it just won't have the same puch. That "thing" that changes the image from good to great.

And I believe most people prefer great images. This is a case of it might be the "popular choice", but it might not be the best result.

So how to fix the situation where I might have good ideas that happen to be shelved, and having to do ideas that are not so good or ready?

For you guys to have an idea, Iris and Maya have around 10 or so images planned for them already. Some might simply not work, so they will be scrapped, some might evolve into something else. But those images really work because they are only created when "they are ready".

This also happens for other images done in the past. More recently, Starfire, Catradora, Korrasammer, Ningguang, Impa, etc. All those images were planned way before actually being made.

There's also several images that I have planned but couldn't include recently for simply lack of space in the months. Lara croft, Esmeralda, Zatanna, Powergirl and Supergirl, Catwoman,  Carmen Sandiego, Samira, to name a few (there were many others over the months/years).

So what do I have in mind?

• Direct the voting suggestion to the voyeur polls (currently the voyeur poll is 100% picked by me + the top choices of the current pin-up poll).  The voyeur images usually involve a sex scene, which is something that hardly ever have "official versions", so there's a lot more room to mix match characters, play with fan ships, mix up, etc.  So I'd use the suggestions that you guys give, to feed this poll instead. 

• The pin-up poll would be the characters I already have something in mind. Using the recent example, Lara croft, Esmeralda, Zatanna, Powergirl and Supergirl, Catwoman,  Carmen Sandiego, Samira could be on a poll. While I usually keep suggestions in mind for future images, they wouldn't be directly tied. For example, many people suggested Chel (El Dorado). Instead of adding her because many people want, whenever I have something in mind for her, she would be included in the polls. 

• Voting for top characters instead of just one. Currently, we have 1 pin-up voted by the patrons + 2 works of my choice + 1 voyeur per month. With that change, there wouldn't be much need for 2 slots of my choice, so I could paint the top 2-3 of those characters in the next month (except on months where we have iris series or something else planned for it, like Mermay or holiday themed images).

• Better quality artwork. At the end of the day I'm not a machine. So it's a lot better for the end result that we have images when the idea is ready to be painted, instead of just painting it because "people want it now".

• Better balance between famous characters and less famous characters. I often get ideas for many characters that are not trendy of flavour of the month stuff, and the end result gets a lot of positive reaction. And more often than not, those characters wouldn't stand a chance in a regular poll. So it could be a good fix for that. Obviously, characters that are super obscure are still very unlikely to see that light of day, because let's face it, if they are obscure, there's simply not much interest on them.

So this is what I have in mind for future polls. The general idea is that instead of directly suggesting 1 pin-up per month, I'd keep those suggestions in mind, and would come up with ideas for them. And when those ideas are good enough, you guys would help me choose the "order" that they would be painted in the coming months. I think this could possibly fix a lot of the issues we are having with the current system.


Let me know what you guys think!