H2H8 / H2H8 Round 4 Match 2 - Icons vs. UltraRealists

North Face - It's always kinda hard to like a park when it can end your season and at first I automatically disliked it, mainly due to the messy landscape which is made up of too many of those horrible 1K objects... I really liked the hacked drop ride and how peep friendly the park is. The cutway stuff was nice detail, enjoyed the glass walkways. A very nice park, just for me a little too messy and it's not a very creative overall theme, but you did inject it with creative ideas.

 

Guell - Awesome work Zack, I love the photo-realism you went for with this and it's pulled off well. The archy was very high level with great detail. Best use of that path yet, made me happy to see that. The rides could have been a bit more outside the box, but they were solid. Just wish you could not leak! Congrats on the win!

 

So H2H drama... we have had worse. I mean, we still have two skilled parkmakers banned from the site over a past season of H2H. Good point by Six Frags tho, no unfinished parks yet, that's amazing. G Force also makes a good point that we have yet to see anything massive yet, in fact I would say last season didn't have a real 'OMG' park, maybe AF a bit. Those are getting rare, DAW was the last true one. Overall I think Trav and the admins did well handling the mess with this match. Not an easy job running H2H. I hope to see all teams stay motivated and have an outstanding end to the season.

MY boy scoop coming in with a fire park (same goes to bright side, I just talk a lot of shit to scoop). Granted I didn’t vote for it but it was still one hell of a park. Since I have more time coming up I may start making video reviews or just a super long one. We’ll see.

Im immensely proud of Scoop and MrB for the park they produced, which is my favourite of ours so far. You both stepped up and delivered and for that Im very grateful.

Well done Shogo for creating Park Guell, was fantastic and captured the essence of the real place.

Wow there is some crazy stuff going on. I've started a road trip since the voting was halfway over and had no idea what was going on the last 3 days. This thread is crazy and I really wish there was more talk of the parks... Especially since this is basically my first release.

I'll do a behind the scenes type thing once I'm back home but I gotta say, it was great working with scoop and he was generous with sharing the percentage. He really did a ton of work on this and I love our park. Thats all until I'm back from my trip.

PS. I discovered that Silver Dollar City has a gigantic cavern under the park so turns out our park is pretty dang realistic in that regard. Lol.

Park Guell
I grew up in Barcelona and used to visit this place almost every month. You nailed it. Honestly, I'm just shocked by how well you captured the Gaudi spirit (without even knowing the place IRL I suppose). I was deeply convinced it was alex who built it, I'm very surprised. I've been rather critical with your work lately Shogo but man, sometimes you can produce incredible pieces of RCT. The foliage was exquisite as was the whole composition/multilevel landscaping. It was very smooth and everything constrasted perfectly for me. I didn't had a problem with the textures. Archi is incredible as always with you, it's still your strongest point. A very fun park to explore with some amazing and unseen aesthetics, this is what I want to see during this contest. I'm probably influenced by my childhood experience here, but it's probably the park I enjoyed the most this H2H (but I don't think it's the best sorry, even if it's probably in my top 3 ). 
 
North Fork Mountain Park
Loved the black launched roller coaster and the underground free fall. Good work overall but too uninspired and too much 1k and weirdly contrasting stuff. Still good work to everyone who built on this park, I can feel you had fun building it ! 
 
All the drama
I have to say I really appreciated the drama here. I really liked how everyone was suspecting everyone and how representative it was of the community. The strongest point of this whole conversation was V1 being V1 again and trying to cheat because he can't accept being defeated. Man, please stop hating everything... It's just a game. Okay it involves true talent and design skill sometimes but it's still not a reason. I hope you're not like that IRL but I don't really care. 
Well, if I had to rate this drama, it would probably be something like 85%/yes because that's some next level shit right here. 
 
More seriously, I don't care that much about who did what, we are playing Roller coaster tycoon 2. I'm more concerned about the community as a whole. I'm mostly disappointed by the admins by being so offensive and, for some, using crude language. I don't think it's very appropriate. This place could be so much better if it was better moderated and more focused in trying to bring us together. Sorry I had to say it. 
 
Also I agree with you Recurious, there's rules and they have to be respected but I don't think the Icons were that bad. I'm not supporting what happened, it's disappointing to see players who can't accept to be defeated but come on, do they deserve all of this drama and to be bashed like that in public ? It's not like they harmed anyone or like they cheated votes for presidential elections lol.
 
I've been completely missing all the leaks and all the off-stories of this H2H, I don't really understand why Shogo got banned and why all the other members who also made shit are impunished/not severely sanctioned like him (but I rode all these stories very quickly so maybe I missed what Shogo did which was so bad). 
 
Can't wait to see other great parks.

I think your mixing creativity an inspired up julow. I was very inspired when building this.

Scoop, you yourself may be confusing inspired and motivated. By saying it's uninspired, Julow means it doesn't look like much of it was particularly based on anything specific. It's not inspired by something else. You can be motivated and energetic about building without having a model you're basing (either the part or the whole) on.

"Yea sucks for shogo, but for the ultrarealists it makes no difference, your team still profited from his cheating."

 

Leaking my park is not cheating. It's breaking rules, and if anything it hurts my.... their team. How would I or the UltraRealists gain any advantage of leaking out Park Guell?

I also think there's a massive difference between asking if active members who have already voted in other H2H8 matches who havent voted yet if they will vote, and fishing for inactive members via facebook or wherever, because the people you select out of them will almost certainly vote in your favor. Vote fishing is cheating.

Yes sorry, I was talking about aesthetics. It's full of already seen stuff (doesn't mean it's bad) that's why I used that word. Not saying that negatively, honestly it's still high level stuff for me, probably 70% or something like that because I felt it was made with lot of love.

"Julow means it doesn't look like much of it was particularly based on anything specific."

You see, I kind of want to say how much I hate this attitude. Europeans largely base parks on how geographically accurate they seem; Americans largely base parks on how realistic they seem. Of course those are two very gross generalizations, but both of these drain creativity and force the viewer to judge a park through an unnecessary ideological lens.

My interpretation of Park Guell isn't even very much of either of those two. Most of the stuff in the map wasn't something Gaudi actually made, it was just me half-ass understanding his style and applying it elsewhere. What you're perceiving as "accuracy" is just "good parkmaking"

I also think there's a massive difference between asking if active members who have already voted in other H2H8 matches who havent voted yet if they will vote, and fishing for inactive members via facebook or wherever, because the people you select out of them will almost certainly vote in your favor. Vote fishing is cheating.

Exactly.

I don’t see why people are trying to pretend they are even remotely similar. They’re not.

SHUT UP AND TALK ABOUT THE PARKS!!!

"Yea sucks for shogo, but for the ultrarealists it makes no difference, your team still profited from his cheating."

 

Leaking my park is not cheating. It's breaking rules, and if anything it hurts my.... their team. How would I or the UltraRealists gain any advantage of leaking out Park Guell?

 

Well I assume you got feedback on the things you leaked, which means you did get an advantage. I do agree though that it is not as serious as what we did.

 

 

I also think there's a massive difference between asking if active members who have already voted in other H2H8 matches who havent voted yet if they will vote, and fishing for inactive members via facebook or wherever, because the people you select out of them will almost certainly vote in your favor. Vote fishing is cheating.

 

 

Again, I think its a fine line. In some cases we were definitely over it, and the referee removed those votes. Not defending that. However I do think that there is nothing wrong with sharing your match up with an audience which you think will vote in your favor. For example, in round 1 the match up between Wit's End and DKS, if you would have shared that match up with reddit I think you could have gotten a lot of votes for Wit's End, as long as those people voting had NE accounts before, I think that is fair game. You are just bringing a match up to the attention of your target audience. It may be a dick move, but its not against the rules.

 

That's all I am going to say about it, clearly we are not going to agree. Let's talk about the parks from now on!

Please just the parks. Geeze. Also julow thank you for clarifying, I just hate that word just because of how adaptive it can be.

"Well I assume you got feedback on the things you leaked, which means you did get an advantage. "

 

Trust me, the only people that would have given me actual feedback is Rob, and he didn't because he was an Icon

"as long as those people voting had NE accounts before, I think that is fair game. You are just bringing a match up to the attention of your target audience. It may be a dick move, but its not against the rules."

Absolutely agree with you Recurious.

"My interpretation of Park Guell isn't even very much of either of those two. Most of the stuff in the map wasn't something Gaudi actually made, it was just me half-ass understanding his style and applying it elsewhere. What you're perceiving as "accuracy" is just "good parkmaking"

Very true also. That's absolutely how I feel, this is your proper interpretation of Gaudi and it's a delight.

@recurious

You would think its more of a disadvantage to us because now multiple players on different teams will know what our park is and can then tailor theirs strategically to try to beat us. Its showing your poker hand before you play it. And thats still not even accounting for the people it was leaked to either.

And as for wits end, we didnt do that, did we? Because its a dick move and its vote fishing and its completely different than asking someone whos participating in H2H to vote. Dont dance around it.

Plus if the worst that the Icons got was getting fraudulent votes removed, then you guys got off lucky as fuck because you didnt really face any real consequences for attempted cheating. Thats the point here more than anything else, is that there isnt a sense of justice served for cheaters in this contest. The fact that you are still trying to justify or defend vote fishing because its not technically against the rules is quite shitty. Take Freds advice and shut up.

I think judging parks is honestly a skill and I think newer/less experienced members will just be swindled into voting for the more catchy, attention-grabbing park regardless if it actually is better or not. It's not all of them, but a majority of them. If every rct redditor with coincidentally an NE account would vote, you'd get some pretty shitty match results where the clearly better park loses. 

 

 

Which is why I'm very weary to see names i've never heard of before on NE vote in H2H.... if those become too many and become the primary voting bloc, then all a team has to do is treat h2h parks like a product to be sold to them rather than using parks as a form of expression that the community's job is to attempt to appreciate.

Okay, the voting discussion ends now. If you have anything more to say to each other, keep it to PM's. Let's not ruin this topic any further for Scoop, Brightside and Shogo. There's 1 and a half pages of comments about the park, and 3 pages of comments about the voting. That seems unfair.

 

Shogo, I'll get to reviewing your park at a later date, but I thought it was pretty great. It felt very European, which I can imagine being hard for an American to capture that right feeling. The only thing I wished is that there was more to the Barcelona street. I'd have love to have seen something capturing the feel of Las Ramblas.