As in the title already stated, the Chinese Skin Contest Winner (3rd Place) D.va Skin was stolen from another Artist and therefore got disqualified.
Following this disqualification the Abyss Anran Skin got promoted to 3rd Place instead.
I'm confused how a Baby Dva skin with seemingly no mecha skin even won anyway. If you were going to steal someone's character design like that why not use it on any other of the copy/paste Asian heros like Kiri or Juno where you'd actually be able to see it longer than the 3 seconds you live after losing your mecha.
to be honest, given what I had read (Though, I will admit that I didnt read too much into it, as Overwatch news never really mattered to me) I had it in my mind that BLIZZARD had stolen art for a skin. so the more you learn.
China legit doesn’t care about the theme 95% of the time. They just want to put women (and some men I guess… Ramattra) in maid outfits or fantasy dresses and maybe make some extremely loose excuse for it somehow
Maid Rammatra is hilarious and sad at the same time because Ramattra serves humans by doing all housework (but at least no one wish all robot kinds dead if Crisis never happens).
At least the skins we actually got in game were on theme. Seems like they pick and choose regardless of who wins because I don’t recall that Vendetta skin winning
Who does the judging here? Actual question. Even if the submitters don't care about the theme it's a failure of the judges not to filter out people who ignore the rules of the contest.
Even if it leaves the most scuffed assed drawings it should still prioritize the people who stick to the theme.
(Though really I know in reality it instead may as well just not have a theme in the face of skins that will sell)
They really need to just not bother with the theme. It makes the skin selection feel too limited and almost nobody follows it. Just market it as a fan skin bundle, not eveything needs to have some tidy theme in the shop.
Here is the description if you're interested: The Lore of the Skin: From Battlefield to the Deep Sea
Without the threat of the Omnic Crisis, the world did not need an army of fire-wielding soldiers to combat rogue machines. Consequently, Anran never had to live in the shadow of her parents' war legacy or train for military defense.
Instead of weaponizing her abilities for combat on the surface, this alternate timeline imagines Anran utilizing her pyro-kinetic talents for high-tech deep-sea exploration and marine research. The Abyss Environment: The "Purple Abyss" aesthetic represents the deep ocean trenches (the midnight zone or abyssopelagic zone), where light cannot penetrate. The "Purple" Fire: Instead of her traditional hot orange and red flames, her gear and abilities emit an ethereal, bioluminescent purple energy. In this alternate history, this serves as specialized under-water thermal energy used to withstand extreme oceanic pressures, navigate the dark trenches, and study deep-sea environments.
Yeah the design makes zero sense in context of the description. It feels like they came up with this and then realised they needed to make it fit the theme and threw together a story.
Hell if they just said "lol she became a runway model" it would have made more sense to the design choice.
This description makes it worse, bro she’s just a flashlight. They put her in this fancy, completely impractical dress to send her to the bottom of the ocean to use her as a human flashlight. They 1000% made the skin first then bullshitted a reason for its existence.
Both designs draw from the celestial maiden motif. Draped sleeves and "fantasy maiden like" is a well known theme there. It's like saying someone made a knight in armor and another knight in armor is a copy. Nope.
Secondly, you zoom in and the genshin girl has ribbons, leggings, and more of a kawaii maid cafe motif going on with those shoes.
Anran here is pretty cookie cut xianxia/celestial maiden.
This is not just about the theme, the design literally follows all the philosophies Genshin/Honkai use in their skins, huge lean into fantasy despite the future setting, all the flowy bits meant for third person camera perspective, It even has the stupid hair in the back that splits into two to make animating easier.
A lot of the entries doesn't follow the theme. Honestly, they should all be disqualified if the artist doesn't give a valid reason why their submission fits the theme.
yeah the judging criteria seems pretty low in general. I dont want to sound too mean but that Anran costume is pretty generic too. I've seen plenty of fan designs that are better than the ones blizzard picked.
Okay, then I'd just say the same comment but change Blizzard with Netease. Point is the standards are pretty low considering how much Ai/plagiarism and generic skins made it through.
Thats the story of this skin: The Lore of the Skin: From Battlefield to the Deep Sea
Without the threat of the Omnic Crisis, the world did not need an army of fire-wielding soldiers to combat rogue machines. Consequently, Anran never had to live in the shadow of her parents' war legacy or train for military defense.
Instead of weaponizing her abilities for combat on the surface, this alternate timeline imagines Anran utilizing her pyro-kinetic talents for high-tech deep-sea exploration and marine research. The Abyss Environment: The "Purple Abyss" aesthetic represents the deep ocean trenches (the midnight zone or abyssopelagic zone), where light cannot penetrate. The "Purple" Fire: Instead of her traditional hot orange and red flames, her gear and abilities emit an ethereal, bioluminescent purple energy. In this alternate history, this serves as specialized under-water thermal energy used to withstand extreme oceanic pressures, navigate the dark trenches, and study deep-sea environments.
I’m a big fan of the skin itself but the lore is some bullshit lol. Besides the tiny fish particles I’m getting NO “deep sea” or any water from the skin. Feels more airy.
Also very dumb one. If you’re doing deep sea exploration, it would be better to keep to a red coloured scheme as most deep sea creatures can’t see the red spectrum so it would make her invisible for the animals she’d would be studying. And bioluminescence is usually blue/green with some occurrences of red and even yellow but I have never heard of a purple one.
These contest are always extremely comedic. Winners get announced and a day after half of them are disqualified. Dead by daylight had the same exact problem lmao
They opened up the voting again, including the accused submission. BHVR outright said they had no conclusive evidence to prove that the Yun-jin outfit was AI generated, but since a lot of players had voted without any knowledge of the possibility of it being AI the voting was reset and opened up again.
AI usage, plagiarism, skins that don't follow the theme at all... This is such a disaster it becomes funny.
I'd also disqualify the skins that have nothing to do with the theme like the Anran one, skins that don't follow the rule shouldn't be qualified and even less end up on the podium.
Another poster said that the artist gave the Anran skin some kind of underwater exploration backstory bullshit but I'm not seeing it. It really doesn't give any aquatic vibes at all—honestly it feels like an outfit from Honkai Star Rail or Genshin Impact.
Yeah like in general I'm not sure about the other skins either. Cat as a Doordash delivery bot for a fast food place sure, but some of these took so much liberty with the theme that it lost all meaning.
This kind of thing usually happens in any user-submission kind of competition so it’s really up to the organizers of said competition to weed stuff out along the way. At least they seem to be doing that. Although I wonder if this is a more prevalent issue in CN versus other regions were they to run the same sort of contest.
Honestly recycling the theme for 2nd round was such a baffling decision, still way less compared to the absence of a similar contest for western players.
Hell yes im glad to hear. Saw the op from the original artist and I think they said they did it in 2015? It was very obviously a carbon copy, it was so shameless and blatant I couldnt believe it.
It was a continuation of the theme from last time, "if the omnic crisis never happened" although most people are just submitting whatever they feel like I guess
Doesn't make sense but people rather vote for concepts they actually like. If you're making a contest of a specific theme you should have judges, not the community voting for what they like the most cause in the end... they are not gonna care about what the theme is when people submit these concepts. Animal maid was not really how I imagine Juno at all if the omnic crisis didn't happened. At this point just make a concept art contest and let people choose whatever, why put it one single theme
I agree, at least the first time around the skins felt appropriate (firefighter wuyang, fitness coach vendetta, housecleaner rammatra) whereas all the winners of this contest look "cool" but none of them really embody what the theme was meant to be
Why do all anran skins have to keep the arm flaps? We talk about keeping the silhouette but then you look at OW1 skins having greater diversity. Blackwatch reaper ditches the hood and cape completely, a lot of Cassidy’s skins scrap the poncho completely as well, why do we keep Anran’s flaps for everything!!
I think in part because the arm parts are , with the fans, the big anchors for Anran's silhouette. Reaper can lose the hood, he had the coat and huge shotguns in a recognizable pose. Cass will always have some variant of a big cowboy hat.
Anran without the arm flops is just a form fitting track suit and that's not distinctive
Exactly. Silhouette includes the standard pose of the character, reaper has both arms extended with a gun in each hand and isn't going to to be mistaken for Tracer.
Anran without sleeves is a bad angle away from looking like Kiriko, with the way she holds the fans not being that different to the Kunai and Ofuda.
The argument should be the same for reaper. His large cloak and hood are part of the silhouette. If the weapon is the main signifier then why should they be limited?
Kiriko has her large apron thing as part of her silhouette yet they are free to remove it for skins like Athleisure.
I understand the arm flaps are a part of what makes her identifiable but I’m just saying the design team does not always have to adhere to it.
The Street Fighter skins for example, don’t follow the strict silhouette rules. Hanzo Ryu and Cammy Widow being big ones
Why do so many Chinese skins from this contest have flowing fabrics and cloth as part of it? Do they not play the game? These types of skins are just gonna translate poorly into the 3D models.
That Anran skin is gorgeous, but so, SO, off theme. The Chinese side of this survey really decided to do whatever they wanted. The last few with Ram, Vendetta, and Wuyang were understandable, and I quite like Ramattras. But with this skin it showed that they just slid in an opportunity to try and just make a general skin, and slap some water lore on a FIRE type to try and make it fit the theme. That little story wont be in a bio sidebar to explain to everyone when the skin is made, y'know. 🫣
I'm surprised this didn't wait until Monday. Seems like both the US and the China side thought this was urgent enough to drag people out of their weekends for.
I'm not complaining, I just didn't expect any word on it until Monday.
I know this surprises people on reddit sometimes but these games are made by people that work in an office that is generally staffed monday to friday and most workers, especially management, are pretty much not on the job at the weekends. You get a skeleton crew of 1 or 2 people on the support team that usually double up as server maintenance and that's that. Network sysop will have the on-call phone if something goes seriously wrong.
Again, what about this situation specifically would require people to come into the office? This whole thing could very much be handled in a few email exchanges or a zoom call. They're not actively making the skins or patching them into the game theyre just picking another option from the selection they already have
That's still multiple hours of work for half a dozen people on a weekend that crucially do not want to be doing the work and have no obligation to. Posts don't get made magically by themselves, people are not immediately magically reachable on a non working day, fully filling people in on the situation, exploring and reading the community reaction, and making an informed decision is all something that takes time. Then how to respond to it, getting in touch across 2 time zones in a minimum of 2 different languages where one timezone is literally the middle of the night whenever the other is during the work day. Then that company needs to go through the same process you just went through, come to their own informed decision, decide how they're handling it based on their own community and the very obvious cultural differences, etc etc.
i do wish that these contests happened anywhere else too. Sucks that China get to have an input in skins and they never do it elsewhere? Like I get the China dick sucking. And I get the Net Ease Dommy Mommy stuff going on.
but like, why not? Sure stuff like ai skins and art theft may happen, we just deal with that if it comes and double check before announcing results. But it just feels like a waste to not involve the entire community more.
I don’t want that Anran skin either it’s just fantasy slop. It’s well designed for sure but that kind of style is so overused in all of the fantasy games in China and absolutely nothing to do with the theme lmao
Honestly genshin template is uninspirering in its own spec way, anran’s skin here is very mythical chinese overly used flowy design. Put that in an ad in a chinese gacha game and I couldn’t even tell you it’s an overwatch character
LMAO it’s bad not in a “it’s ugly” way but in a “I literally see this concept reheated in 20 other Chinese gacha games to the point it’s so overdone it’s actually slop”. Even the artist herself said that she recognizes that this skin she made isn’t sticking to the literal theme of the contest and she’s willing to step down to give her position to someone else that deserves it so maybe take it up with her if you’re so mad about an opinion you see online 🤣
Sorry I’m Chinese and I see too many Chinese games with the exact same boring ass concept that gets forgotten a week after it comes out? If me saying this is overly done and you somehow immediately come to the conclusion that I want her in baggy clothes and short hair I think your issue goes way deeper than a guy saying the boring concept art is boring lmfao
Honestly I’m surprised the ai ones were disqualified.
This is a Chinese skin contest, a skin contest hosted in China, and last I checked China’s pretty AI friendly, so a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
It’s a shame the Doom skin with the boxing glove didn’t make the cut, but hopefully they’ll use it as inspiration for a future design. As for that karate-themed skin I think they might have tried, but for some reason, they absolutely refuse to change the glove design.
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u/CuteGrayRhino 16h ago
Lol. Good. The plagiarism was blatant.