Maybe to explain this a bit more as it seems to have been misunderstood:
I’m not talking about voting for whatever, I’m talking about taking the list TTV prepared, and voting based on that which of these are actually wanted and which aren’t.
Yeah, but I don’t think that’s really applicable here. The issue isn’t that people dislike the build of the mocs. Sure, many people don’t like the Helryx moc for the lack of knee poseability and arm fragility, but that isn’t the issue they have with the canon contests, because as you said, the builds are just builds.
I can buy the set that became Norik not being meant to be Dume, he’s just a case of two parts being reused. But the other? Forgive me if I straight-up don’t believe Greg in this situation, considering the shared colour layout with Lhikan, the shared chestplate with Nidhiki, the shins being the same piece as Nidhiki’s arms, the speartip being the Chronicler staff, which is the Staff of Light (AKA Nidhiki’s claws) folded in half, and the entirely new mask being designed after a Vahki head. Greg and Bob may have rejected the idea immediately, but whomever designed the set was absolutely gunning for Nidhiki, not a random new Toa.
The art is solely there to appease Dorek. If he wasn’t so stubborn about 3D-printed parts, we wouldn’t have art contests. At most, art would be included in the MOC round, like it was with the Hagah, but as we’ve also seen from the Hagah, art entries would almost certainly lose (Though I maintain that Perp could probably have won at least one character if he didn’t insist on doing a single cut-up group shot for his entry images instead of individual pieces).
The art generally gets less entries, less votes, and less attention. Compared to the MOC portion, it’s an afterthought. A lot of emphasis was put on the art for Helryx because of the desire to “fix” the winner, both the actual one and the expected one, but aside from that… the MOCs are the draw and the focus, and always will be. We’re not getting floods of fanart of the winners, but we are getting people replicating the winners or making their own modifications to them. Heck, we’ve gotten 3-4 builds of the runner-up of Artakha, while the only entrant for any of these that’s inspired a lot of art was Hoseryx, and even that was just a mix of bandwagon mentality and a desire to “prove” that the design could look good and thus voting for Hose wasn’t just memes and spite.
Also I guess there’s the Blouks crowd not letting go of their inferior choice.
The art definitely salvaged what’s otherwise a pretty bad Helryx design (That is a Voyatoran with the proportions of Sonic the Hedgehog, you can’t change my mind) which Bukkey then recreated excellently in plastic (even if there were still better Helryx designs that lost because the community wanted the second coming of “LMBs make Greg canonise Gold Good Guy”), and was a lateral thing for Artakha (in that I think both art and MOC are equally good), but with the Hagah… the art is… worsening what are mostly easily buildable models.
Sure, the 3D-printed masks are an obstacle to some, but 3/4 Hagah are generally really easy to build. Based on their models, anyway. Bomonga is the exception there, people that aren’t dedicated MOC-makers probably don’t have five black Metru torsos to spare. I am a dedicated MOC-maker and I’ve only got three of the things. But beyond an ever-growing shortage of those parts, he’s still easier to make than Artakha is.
Replicability has been a big goal with these contests, and that’s one area where they’re infinitely superior to the old BS01 and BZP contests, if you want to build a contest winner from the TTV era, you don’t have to wait a decade for Vahki6 to post instructions. The breakdown images are there to make sure there aren’t illegal techniques and parts hidden inside the model’s guts, yes, but they’re also there so that fans can build the characters.
The Hagah MOCs are fine. Most of 'em are a little boring, comes with the territory, Bomonga is a bit weird but he looks fine enough (I don’t have a problem with Bomonga’s build, my issue was that Double was able to get away with thumbing his nose at TTV because they weren’t paying attention, and then when this was raised, Meso basically said “Well you all voted for it so we’re not going to do anything.” It’s not that Bomonga is bad, it’s that Bomonga proves you can break the rules and not get punished for doing so if you win before the mods notice). But then the art has a decent chance of changing things that don’t need to be changed, and just make these characters from a toyline hard to make as toys, because some artists went “Colour ratios tho”.
3 Likes
If it was just an non canon MOC contest, is there a reason for someone on the other side of the world to talk about this while not sleeping?
I think the problem is that LJ and Meso don’t tell us why they’re busy these days.
We are people who can wait a very long time if we know why.
if eljay and Meso are away for a long time, they have to let us know their current status.
I’m sorry we seem to put too much pressure on them- but
I think that’s one of the things they should be responsible for as community managers.
and I suggest that when the voting for the art contest begins, the voting for the remaining characters should be held right away to re-determine the order of the contest.
As some people are concerned, Tuyet is a very easy character to infer her image, as in the case of Hagah, and it can be a boring contest again.
I think what we need now is very free-to-make contests, people have become too hard during hagah contest.
Since I wasn’t in the beginning of contest, I don’t know how this order was decided. but
It’s not strange that there are complaints about the order and list of contests at this time.
In the long run, filing complaints about this is rather a concern about the contest and is helpful for the long-term attraction of the contest.
4 Likes
they think he’s annoying, childish, and has an overblown ego
i don’t think any of that, he was very nice when i met him, but i know there are people who do
I’m 95% certain we would still have art, just because Eljay and Martinez want to include as much of the community as possible. But the mocs would probably be considered at least semi-canon.
1 Like
More transparency is always good and plenty of others have been requesting. Specifically however, I want communication. Communication from the hosts/staff of the contests has been poor, even showing unwillingness.
Should those who want to participate in these events be required to check several unpinned topics on these boards, read most of the post, listen to videos, listen to hours long podcasts (different podcasts at that) that inconsistently come out, or even a potential random Tweet? Look, this isn’t the early 2000’s anymore, people shouldn’t be expected to hop all over the internet to get an update. And if the updates are going to be in multiple places and formats, update all of them.
Also update the main posts of topics. As we’ve seen with the art portion, if not for word of mouth, a lot of people would have missed the art extension. Some still did. It was an unexpected update, it should have been more properly announced.
I work in Government IT, things taking longer, higher priority issues coming up, etc., I understand that all. However, a sentence or two post saying, “Hey guys, things happened, we might not get the next part up until * insert date *. We’ll let you know if things change.” It should be a common decency. And in my realm, a serious offense if an update is not given in a timely manner, even if that update is just stating a delay.
Not a point I made, nor something I gave in the viewpoint presented. So if this to me, or the presentation, I’m not sure where you obtained it. I merely stated why some people are frustrated with the contests not running smoothly. I would argue that templates should be easier, but people were doing everything they could to break the template. A discussion for another day perhaps.
Though to you and others that bring up this is only the third contest and thus should have more patience of improvement, please remember the human element of the participants. Yes, this is only the third one…and this song and dance has been going on for almost two years now. They were setup with expectations of something faster, quicker rotation. And with that much time having passed and major issues still existing. Well, frustrations will abound, even if the next one manages to be smoother.
Then they do what almost every Lego fan yells at the other to do, build it yourself. Why bother waiting for the LEGO Group, Greg, or any of the others to do it for you when the tools are there? Or, failing that, you’ve got Bobthedoctor, Bioniclechicken, and dozens of others who’ve already done it. And in many instance, more canonically accurate than what has, or will be, produced in these contests.
Of course, there are holes to this line of thinking. There is something to be said of seeing Lego itself do something versus a fan and other such things. But from plenty of points, if it’s just to see what the characters might look like, then forcing a canon contest is an extreme way about it just for personal satisfaction.
The potential reasons listed were addressed mostly in order in the thing following it. The first couple paragraphs mostly address the first two goals, with the following sections about community involvement to affect canon being after.
However, depending on your point of view, that still isn’t true. You can still have an impact on how people view canon, even if not official. Much like the commonly accepted appearance of Toa Nidhiki.
Perhaps you’re correct, TTV couldn’t bring in this amount of people. Just like they couldn’t for Sokoda’s Lego Ideas project, relying largely on luck from a random streamer that saw and promoted it. But that’s a fault of TTV. As seen with things like the Bionicle: Quest for Mata Nui, it has had far more reach, brought more people together, and in less time than these contests. And perhaps it is coincidence, now just happens to be when nostalgia and other factors are strong enough that people want it back. More and more Bionicle is randomly brought up in videos and unrelated things across digital media. If something had to be credited for it, at least to the larger picture, it would sooner be the video game projects.
Not my statement, just presenting a viewpoint that is (hopefully) written more clearly than others were able. Though the statements themselves aren’t in conflict.
Imagine a CEO of a company where harassments have taken place for years and then finally leaks to the public. This CEO claims he had no knowledge of the events going on in his company. Which is the worse outcome, to be the CEO who was so incompetent at his job that he didn’t know what was happening or to the CEO that knew about it and looked the other way? It’s a bad look either case.
So, did TTV wanted to do something with the Bionicle fandom but had no idea what to do until random person came along? Or did they have no concerns about community activity and just using this opportunity for clout? If the former, why were they unable to think of anything? If the latter, well, I’m sure most people hope it isn’t the latter.
And while yes, TTV did make that poll topic, it was due to a technicality. TTV needed proof based on Greg’s wording. So yes, they did indeed jump on the opportunity and started working on making these contests as soon as willingness from Greg was shown.
Unfortunately, since politics are not allowed on these boards, I can’t give any relevant examples. But you can look into it yourself, there are plenty who do things to chase clout, build up an audience that then turns on them, and then do nothing (at best) and just rest on their newly found fame and wealth. Then, if still active in the community, proceed to purge those who disagree.
That’s still behind closed doors. They only invited a few trusted fellows, locked away from the community at large.
Which is why in the viewpoint presented, it included a statement about the BioCup being problematic for other reasons. However, even if they weren’t canon contests, that does not mean rules could not have be implemented to be like them. It would lack of the prize of being “canon,” yes, but perhaps just being able to win anything at all with a lower ceiling would do it.
Mind you, even in official LEGO Group competitions, not even the best looking or constructed builds win. Depending on the contest, they will skew to worse entries…Or in the case of a real gold Skull Spider mask, they even forget their own themeing of the contest.
That aside, you can have contests where characters or items become canon to something else, some other project. Would it keep the same feeling as impacting Bionicle canon? Maybe. Depends on how into this other thing you are. I won’t deny that feeling, or intensity of it, can be difficult to create and it is a unique advantage to these contests (problems aside).
@Atobe_Brick @RiderBD and others above or those whom replied to me but forgot to tag or quote. Considered following up with all of you, but decided to condense it to a few with similar or same points for efficiency.
Hopefully this clears up the potential viewpoints or counters others may have to the ideas/points you presented. As for any of my personal preferences stated, like communication, hopefully that came out fine.
I understand many of you came here or got more involved because of these contests. And that’s great, welcome aboard. Glad you’re having some fun and hopefully the others go well for you.
4 Likes
NEVER give an exact date unless you want people to yell at you when you inevitably miss it. “Until after” would work better.
The commonly accepted appearance of Nidhiki has the wrong colour scheme because many people aren’t aware of two obscure Greg Quotes
3 Likes
Perhaps, yes. In Government, exact dates are required. But that’s why we also look at when we think we could accomplish the goal at the most reasonable date, and then move it out by a couple months or more. That way it either looks like we completed early, if completed on the initial timetable, or “on time” if problems arise.
Though yes, that is true with Nidhiki, but I’m sure most would quote Nick Furry in response to Greg on that. 
smacks lips
I see it has, again, begun.
7 Likes
This is a big part of a lot of people’s issues, I think. We had our “I’ll take it from here” moment in 2010 and we’ve had a whole decade where we were free to do whatever. For a long time, all these blank slates were up to us to fill, and we did. Now, after a decade, we’re getting new, official content which doesn’t necessarily fit with what we’ve built in the interim.
It’s also far from uncommon for Bionicle fans to dislike getting Greg’d, even before the contests returned. One of our longest-standing memes is the arguments about romantic feelings getting Greg’d in 2005, because it came on the heels of three movies, two Templar games, and one season of Templar animations that strongly referenced those elements, and Greg’s own Adventures books. If you can read Adventures without getting the impression that the Toa Metru were some kind of polycule, you probably think Achilles and Patroklos were just friends in the Iliad.
Sure, those elements weren’t in the initial story bible, but… most us will never get the opportunity to actually read the story bible, and given what we can see in almost every story bible ever released to the public vs. the content of the finished product… chances are the rest of the bible won’t be all that accurate either. There’s always a lot of things in those books that end up on the cutting room floor and aren’t considered canon. So it comes down to “A book we can’t read says no” vs. “The actual content of the first half of the franchise says Yes”.
Greg’s world-unbuilding on BZP and the LMBs is legendary (even if it’s not entirely his fault and most of it lies at the feet of fans asking for things to be made canon), and Bionicle fans have been arguing and fighting back against it as long as those posts have existed.
Based on that, it shouldn’t be remotely surprising that contests bringing back “you got Greg’d” in full-force received pushback.
We have a Kanohi that was literally designed to look like Nidhiki’s head but then one of two things happened: Either the guy that wrote Iruini’s bio didn’t check Birth of a Dark Hunter, or Greg, writing BoaDH didn’t check Iruini’s bio, and the mask literally made to be Nidhiki’s got given a different power, or Greg gave Nidhiki a different mask that he just made up on the spot, and so Nidhiki doesn’t have the mask that was made to be his head.
(On the other hand, Vortixx Lariska and Boob Lariska getting Greg’d has been a long time coming so there’s at least that)
5 Likes
LMAO Yes, that’s right. It started again.
It happens every two months.
That’s it. Let’s stop.
1 Like
It wouldn’t just be “pick any Bionicle character you want”; the list would still be restricted to important characters who had a speaking role, and whose lack of an appearance wasn’t a creative decision.
None of the characters you mentioned would be eligible, since they already have an appearance in some form, or they were intentionally left unknown. And I don’t know what TGSK is.
(Although I still wouldn’t mind seeing the unmutated Barraki, or mutated Brutaka)
Because none of those other options are canon. Maybe you feel different about things, but I don’t find it to be very fun just coming up with whatever new stuff I want without restrictions. I prefer knowing as much as I can about the details of a scene.
If everyone could accept your solution of “just come up with your own stuff”, there would be no reason to have any kind of canon in the first place.
There’s also the appeal of having a single official appearance to refer to. If I just come up with my own version of a character, I can’t really have any discussion with anyone else about that character since I can’t expect them to accept my personal vision.
You aren’t wrong, but I could just as easily claim that stopping the contests is just for the personal satisfaction of being able to say that your own version could be canon. This entire discussion is based around personal satisfaction; there’s no objectively correct answer.
Which is canonically inaccurate.
Again, you say this as if it’s a bad look for TTV, but it’s more of a bad look for the community, if anything; why do you expect TTV, out of anyone, to be the ones to come up with this? Do you seriously expect that they’re the only ones who claim to have been “keeping Bionicle alive” for the last decade?
The entire community has been dedicated to keeping the series alive, so it seems unfair to specifically criticize TTV for failing to think of the same thing that everyone else has also failed to think of for the last ten years.
Oh no, how dare they manipulate the loophole of… fulfilling the requirements to begin the contests that Greg asked for?
What are you trying to prove here? Greg said he’d do it if the community was okay with it, and TTV left it up to the community to say if they were okay with it. What else were they supposed to do?
The bigger question, I suppose, is how should they have done it? How could TTV have done this differently to prove to you that they aren’t doing this for clout?
How would Greg reading Iruini’s bio help? It says nothing about Nidhiki’s mask power.
I just posted five links proving this wrong.
If you want to challenge that, you’ll need to find a source that’s more credible than “Nuh uh, I don’t believe you”.
And couldn’t the Kualsi have just been kitbashed from a Vahki head, like so many other later parts were?
1 Like
Ironically many of the people claiming that seem to have quite the ego of their own! Off of the boards I’ve wasted plenty of time asking people what their real problem is and they can never give any good coherent answers.
It’s funny how I drew a comparison to a certain story of years past and that sure enough people have started murmuring now that Eljay is absent. Yes it is their (TTV staff’s) bad for leaving without communication but any attacks about why they made the list the way they did etc. are pointless as they are not here to answer that.
“The best way to attack someone is when they cannot defend, verbally this means when they are not present to give a defence.” -Sun Tzu probably
My bad, I read the last paragraph of your comment as saying the contests have got worse or will get worse. The comment like any in a public topic is directed at a broader group though.
3 Likes
Nitpick alert: the reason is neither. The reason is that Greg said Iruini’s mask wasn’t reshaped like Norik’s.
I don’t think Greg’s lying about what happened at the board meeting. Whoever designed that set unquestionably had Nidhiki in mind.
Yeah, I just made an edit to address that.
How about this, then?
What are you talking about, we saw Mutated Brutaka. It got a set and everything!
16 Likes
Is it that bad for Nidhiki to use volitak?
well, I admit that volitak doesn’t suit with green.
volitak’s shape is similar to skull ,so I felt it was similar to the nasty impression of Nidhiki.
(Sorry Nuparu)
2 Likes
Yeah, I suppose it was up in the air until A) Stealth got reused for a mainline set in 2007, and B) Greg said Iruini bucked the trend for reasons
I mean yeah, that’s straight up what I said, right here:
This isn’t even the only case of it either. Once we got the Volitak, community sat down and went “Well, the Volitak is silver, Nidhiki’s mutant form is green and silver, and silver/green is a nice compliment to gold/red” and immediately scores of Toa Nidhiki’s were made, and they were good MOCs that reflected the spirit of the character. And then someone thought it was a good idea to ask Greg and now Nidhiki is canonically mono-green because the fandom couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Same thing happened with Lariska. Blue/green is an fitting colour scheme, easy to work with, and lends itself to making her a combiner from two Metru Nui-era sets like the other main Dark Hunters. But someone asked Greg and now we know that she’s teal, a colour that’s much harder to work with. So now Lariska MOCs are going to have to be Stud.io, predominantly black, or ugly messes of 2001 bait because options are limited. Artakha too, though we at least got a good result from that one.
These were questions nobody needed to ask, but ask they did, and the answers helped… basically nobody.
(Why people thought it was a good idea to ask a guy who fully admitted to having at least some form of aphantasia about the physical appearances of characters, I don’t know, but they did)
Also, Greg’s statements about colours have been undone, by these very contests.
Helryx was dark blue. That is a 100% true Greg Statement. But that didn’t track with the 2001 IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS mentality that decided Helryx’s canon contest results, so now she’s regular blue.
If the art for Nidhiki makes him partially silver (provided TTV doesn’t ban that), Nidhiki will be silver.
It’s less “Nidhiki using the Volitak is bad” and more “Nidhiki’s mask not looking like the Kualsi is bad”.
3 Likes