sakamae wrote:The masses vote for the winner. That's what the derby is all about. Make sure you are voting for the designs you like. The same artists seem to get printed, because they have a good idea of what gets high votes here, which historically isn't difficult to figure out. Encourage more people to submit in the derbies and you will see other people winning. You can't win if you don't play.
Faulty logic. Creating more submissions that one considers to be good does not increase the chance of them winning. Besides, there are plenty of very good submissions, but the problem is inertia. Shirt.woot attracts the sort of people who like the shirts that shirt.woot offers. If shirt.woot consistently offers LCD pieces, they attract more LCD customers, who vote for more LCD pieces. For those of us who are not LCD customers, we drift away from the site when it consistently offers really terrible designs (as far as our tastes are concerned).
I used to buy an average of three shirts a month from shirt.woot. Now, I buy an average of zero, and my buying patterns haven't changed. There just hasn't been a shirt worth purchasing for many, many months. There have been several in the derbies, but they never win. Things that appeal to the LCD customer win instead, which do get sold, since that's where the marketshare is moving.
Personally, I was happy when Seki was banned for blatant plagiarism, and was hoping that would extend to RamyB for his part in performing the blatant plagiarism (as well as instigating harassment of the original copyright owner of the work plagiarized). That imposes a shift in the inertia that would hopefully allow the artists that create work that I would actually buy to win a bit, which helps shift the customer base to people with tastes closer to mine than the LCD. Sadly, plagiarism appears to go unpunished beyond removing further sales of the shirt in question, and allowing shirts like this (which is a rehash of Fractal Tree, mixed with an idea stolen from the pre-derby discussion thread, as others have pointed out) to win.
I think this shirt is lackluster. Despite looking like it should have motion in the falling, there is none. The proportions are off as practically everyone has said. The colors are garish and look nothing like real leaves. The placement is bizarre.
This shirt sold out, but that's because the audience that shirt.woot has attracted is now almost entirely composed of the LCD variety which doesn't care much about anything like that. It is very hard to get shirts that are, in my opinion, worthwhile to print, because the other people who use this site like this sort of shirt. Yes, that is how the system is supposed to work. It also means I have no incentive to check here every day like I used to, or to get people excited in this site. When someone comments on one of my cool shirt.woot shirts, I no longer tell them where they can buy it. Partially because shirts like them don't win anymore, but also because they're no longer even on the Reckoning.
The above is pretentious. It is also true. (At least, until the mods hack it up or delete it for mentioning the recent plagiarism incident.)
