Prizes for Costume Contests

In your opinion, what is considered a "worthwhile incentive" to get participation in a costume contest?

When I first started CoX, the prize money seemed a lot smaller. The prizes for costume contests I hear about now are usually for billions of influence. Should that be a requirement to get people to come out for a costume contest? Is it really a turn off to offer a few hundred thousand instead of billions? What about recipes as prizes?

I'd like to start holding regular quarterly costume contests, but don't want to have to become an influence farmer to do so. I was thinking about having seasonal themes for each contest and a special themed costume contest on Veteran's Day (in memory of my father) and Halloween (my favorite holiday).

I'm looking forward to your input.

I cannot speak for anyone else. However, I do not participate in Costume Contests for the Rewards. I simply enjoy seeing the occupation of a server come together and show off their various creations. Many times this leads me to inspiration for my next costume (dont worry folks, I would never rip off your unique and amazing looks!). I remember one time I was at a CC and was asked to throw out our favorite Emote. I threw out "the chicken dance" emote and won a little bit of INF. The payout wasnt that great but the chance to say I use to dance for INF was priceless! (I was young and needed the INF to put myself through University)

In any event, are larger Prize Pools gonna draw a larger crowd? Probably. Please do not let this deter you from organizing smaller CCs though! I love this feature of the Player created content! I have organized very successful CCs for less than 10 million INF. With some proper planning, you can make a CC very fun and interactive which will ultimately draw more players over the long term.

Also, you may check out my Forum Thread.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=241718

Please feel free to post there any CCs you would like to organize. I am really trying to revive these events. I believe they offer a great opportunity to show off the creativity of our fellow players that capitalize on the wonderfully diverse character customization abilities we have.

Personally, I go to look at what other people have done and to see what ideas they've had. (I'm fond of textures so that's a particular interest.) That's my incentive; inspiration.

I suspect most people go for the cash though.

The themed idea is a very nice touch. Certainly means more effort goes into them than 'turn up with the usual cossie'.

Try and get it in 50 MotD maybe? Also in broadcast; not a huge fan of that it can be old spam fast but might be very useful for this. It would be great to see newer players benefiting from the inf. I remember winning a few mil fairly soon after I started; peanuts to most people but a LOT to me at the time.

Thanks for keeping this sort of thing alive.

I don't think billions of inf is necessary by any means. In fact, I'd enter a cc with a top prize of 10-million if I had time and thought I had a shot.

That said, you probably won't get a HUGE turnout for a cc with a top prize of 10-million, but folks will enter it.

IMO more folks will enter it if it's on one of the lower population servers, and/or it's redside. i think the more unlikely it is for a cc to occur, the higher the turnout will be, even for modest prizes.

Of course if you're planning a cc on redside or a lower population server, and you want a decent turnout, do a little advertising ahead of time. Broadcasting a previously unannounced cc on Guardian in Mercy Island probably won't bring too many folks out.

I personally don't care much about the prizes as I view it as more of a social event than a chance to score big. Between prize levels and time, if I cared about the cash I'd be better off spending that time farming or playing the market. I've hung around at some CC's with ridiculously low prizes just to inflate the crowd size.

I've never thrown a CC but, if I did, I'd go a minimum 30mil, 20mil, 10mil (1st, 2nd, 3rd) to expect a decent turn out. I might not care much about the prizes but I'm sure anyone who has been to CC's can tell the stories about people throwing hissy fits over prize amounts or winners. If I only had a few million or something, I'd maybe advertise it for characters under level 10 or something where a million can still keep you in DOs/SOs for a few level brackets.

The only real problem I have with most CC's, is they are held Blue side. So then to enter a villain I would have to take it Rogue.

But I try to make most CC's. Prizes are nice, but not required.

More CC's Red Side would be nice. Though you know the prizes do not have to be huge. Even one mill is a lot to a new character. You never know till you try.

Takeaways: With enough planning and promotion, people will participate even if the prizes are small. The more I am willing to offer, the better my turnout should be, and the better my chances will be in bringing in top designers. What would really be appreciated though is allowing more Red-side involvement.

Thanks everyone, from your replies, I’ve decided on the following format:

Main Judging:
Judging will take place a cooperative zone such as Pocket D or the Rikti War Zone to allow for Red-side contestants and audience members. Contestants may enroll themselves in one of three division or leagues. The leagues are currently: First-Timer, Casual Contestant, and Old-Hat.

Contestants will be judged on Creativity (coming up with an original look or showing a unique use of a costume piece), Presentation (how well did you esthetically tie the costume pieces together with color and style), and Use of Theme (does your costume fit well with the theme of the competition). Each competition will have three judges. One criterion is assigned to a single judge for the duration of the competition. Each judge can award up to 10 points per contestant for their category, based strictly on the category they are assigned to.

Individual scores are added together to give the contestant their overall score for the competition. The contestant with the highest overall score in their league is declared Best-in-League for that league. In the event of winning tie score; any honors and contest winnings will be divided up as equally as possible among those contestants.

Audience Favorite Award:
After the main judging and awarding is complete, all contestants will be asked to join the audience. The top scoring contestants overall will then be asked to participate in a special Audience Favorite Award. Typically, the number of contestants for this contest will be five to ten people, but this may vary based on scores and how many total people participated in the main judging. These new contestants will be asked to space themselves out in a single line in front of the audience. The audience members will then be asked to go to the contestant that they felt had the best costume. The contestant with the most players around them will be awarded a special prize.

Special Prizes:
Throughout the event, special random awards may be given out by judges to various participants of the contest (audience members included). For example, a judge may give hand out a random prize for the That-Audience-Member-really-should-have-been-a-Contestant-Award, the Man-You-Must-Be-Colorblind-for-coming-up-with-that-Color-Scheme-Award, or the Most-Likely-to–have-been-Flushed-down-a-Rikti-Toilet-Award. As you can tell, these awards are meant to be light-hearted, fun awards. The main emphasis will be on the main judging and the audience favorite.

First scheduled event:
My first costume contest will be scheduled for sometime in mid-April. I will post with the actual date and time as things further develop. The theme for this contest will be “Spring Forward”. Based on the replies from this forum, I’m going to tentatively offer prizes at 50 million for Best-in-League: Old Hat, 30 million for Best-in-League: Casual Contestant, 10 million for Best-in-League: First-timer, and 60 million for the Audience Favorite. I may raise this later though.

~Azure

If you'd like donations I'd be happy to throw in some inf for your cause.

Nice to see this coming together and moving forward.

I agree that Pocket D lighting is awful. The only thing I would say is timing the CC so it avoids an Apex/Tin WTF or a scheduled Rikti Raid. I think they run Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

I had a further thought on promotion. As well as the global channels MoTD, could the Raid leaders give you a plug before their raids? Might be worth a shot. Certainly better than spamming broadcast ever hour; just smacks of desparation I think. That would potentially give you 4x50 audience members. Just a thought.

Really looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

Some other thoughts are to allow others to "buy" time slots during your Regular CCs. It might go this way. You set up 5-10 minute intervals leading up to your big CC. You then advertise you have slots open for like 2-5 million INF(or whatever price you choose to set) a slot. Some who might benefit from this are up and coming SGs who are looking for ways to advertise their group. They pay a small fee, front their own rewards, and judge their own mini contests. They get notoriety and you get more INF for your prize pool. Not to mention they will undoubtedly bring along with them friends and SG mates to participate in your CC. Win Win for everybody.

If you know anyone that may have unused costume codes from Paragon Studios' Meet n Greets, those could be a nice prize, too.

Edited because I seen your update after the fact:

I plan on being there as a spectator, since I don't fare too well in those. I love the format you've laid out. If you want any donations of any kind, I'll give what I can.

I try to attend every costume contest I see advertised. I've been known to walk out of a mission to do so. And I don't attend them for the prizes at all.
Bottom line, I LOVE to make costumes and then I love to stack them up against others to see how they fare. I was the kid in back of class drawing all the gaudy superheroes on his bookcovers and refining their looks over the years. I had my own original superhero universe in my head and in several notebooks throughout my teens and twenties. The CoH Character Generator has allowed me to bring many of those crude early works to refined completion.

And I just take a lot of personal satisfaction from walking away with a win. Don't need the prizes or the praise, just to know I created something someone else saw and thought "Wow! That looks great! I wish I had thought of it."

The House of Emerald Strumpets costume contest earlier this month almost took place in Nova Praetoria just so villains could participate, but we weren't sure how many people would be locked out by not having Going Rogue. We ended up having it in Atlas Park (and we were very impressed by the turnout), but looking back I wish we had done it in Nova Praetoria.

Pocket D was voted down because of the lighting, Rikti War Zone because of the ambiance.

Oh... maybe not every time you hold one, but we had some Best Biography categories too, and it was a lot of fun reading the stuff that some folks clearly put some time and effort into.

However, it does slow things up a bit.

Sorry for letting you guys down.

Real life demands hit me rather hard the last few months, and I pretty much dropped out of sight for a while. But I think I'm going to make a comeback. And I really don't want to this idea to die, so I'm going to try to work on getting something together some.

I love the ideas so far.

~azure

Welcome back, Azure!

Welcome Back!!

*gives plater of assorted Bacon and Cookies and Bacon Cookies*