Sticky: Avatar Arena Rules

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How Avatar Arena Works

Avatar contests are held weekly starting from Monday midnight. Users can submit for the upcoming contest as long as the entry is received before Monday midnight. Past midnight the submissions will be entered for the next upcoming contest.

At the end of the 1 week voting period, the top 10 avatars will be determined and archived. Winners are determined by a computer using an algorithm that uses an average that has been weighted to mitigate downvoting (people who vote maliciously and unfairly). Winners are determined at 7pm, Californian time (PST) every Sunday. A new competition will start, and the cycle repeats. See diagram below:



Note that while the submissions for Contest 1 is in voting phase, a new submission phase for Contest 2 starts concurrently.

While avatars are in submission phase, they are not public for viewing.
When you submit your avatar, Gaia will take a snapshot of your current avatar in a different location. (It's like a photo). Which means you may change your avatar outfits as you like and it will not affect the avatar submitted for competition.

After voting is over and the winners have been decided, the top 10 avatars will be permanently saved (archived), and the rest will be purged from our system.

[Airez]

How Much Does It Cost

Every Avatar submission costs 1000 gold. This is done to encourage users to be serious about their submissions.

Once submitted, you can get a refund if you withdraw before voting starts.

Once voting starts, you can only get a refund if a mod decides it is not your fault (eg. broken image) and refunds gold to you when withdrawing your entry.

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Avatars That Will Be Disqualified

No avatars with major glitches are allowed. No nudies, no invisibles, baldies, eyeless avatars. A major glitch is generally something that would significantly affect the base model, or reveal something that was not meant to be seen. So n***s, balds, invisibles and eyeless (vampire/grombie with superior form) are not allowed, but minor glitches like "this shoe cuts off the pants by 2 pixels" are allowed. If we were to fix the glitch, the minor glitch would probably not be affected too much, whereas a major glitch would be affected greatly.

Though the system will not prevent you from submitting a glitched avatar, you will be disqualified if you are reported. Note that the higher your placing gets because of voting, the higher your chances are of getting reported since your visibility increases. So in short, submitting a glitched avatar not only makes you unable to win, you also waste 1000 gold doing it.

All accounts are allowed. ie. secondary accounts are allowed too.

Avatars imitating copyrighted characters, eg. an avatar that looks like Edward Elric from Full Metal Alchemist, will not be penalized for entering the competition. The reasoning behind this is that we are not enforcers of copyright. If the company/party holding the copyright actually comes forth to request us to remove the avatar from competing, then we will honor their request.

Offering gold, items or services to gain more votes and comments is not allowed. Asking/suggesting that other members to vote for your avatar in the arena is fine, however paying them to vote for you, or promising to do so, is not.

ANY contest that offers a prize, or ANY thread that offers possible financial gain to participants cannot operate in conjunction with an arena advertisement.

This means you cannot host any contest or offer prizes/gold and link to an Arena Advertisement within the same thread or ask for votes or comments on your entry. Any kind of financial gain, promised or actual, made in conjunction with requests for votes or comments is strictly forbidden in the Arena as it is usually a form of bribery, whether the prize is guaranteed or not.

Any users violating this rule will have their entry disqualified.

[Airez]

Misc Issues

We want Avatar Arena to be fun. (indirectly, that means fair)
We want Avatar Arena to have quality avatars.

The goal of avatar arena is to choose the avatars that the most number of people agree on as "that deserves to win". We can't get everyone to agree, but we can get a maximum number of people. We are constantly working to improve the algorithms and system so that the system will get closer to this goal, so be prepared for changes.

We want to give everyone as much opportunity as possible to compete. There are many, many really cool avatars on Gaia and by having a cycling system where there's a new competition every week, we hope to give everyone a better chance to win.

Ranking is only displayed to the owner of the post. Ranking is only done for the top 500 and is updated every hour.

The system grants gold for voting and commenting.

The problem of mule accounts voting for a user is mitigated by the fact that there will be a lot of votes for any post that has a chance of winning. 100 mules voting only count for 100 out of say, 30,000 votes.

To make sure everyone gets the same amount of time to get voted on, we separated Avatar Arena into 'Submission Phase' and 'Voting Phase'. That way, everyone starts out with 7 days of chance to get votes

We took away linear navigation and made the primary mode of navigating to another picture such that the system would bring you to the picture that has not been modified recently. (ie. the post that hasn't been voted on or commented on in a while) This will hopefully lower the chances of people getting left out and not getting any votes/comments at all.

The "Hot" list at the side rotates randomly throughout the hour.

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Prizes

At the end of every competition, the prizes are distributed as follows:

1st place: 50,000 gold
2nd place: 30,000 gold
3rd place: 20,000 gold

4th to 10th place: 10,000 gold each.

Additionally, the 1st place winner will be placed into Avatar Spotlight on the front page by the system. This feature is currently not working at the moment as we want to wait for the feature to stabilize first before hooking it into the front page.