MMO Fashion – Visual Databases

Someone on Reddit really angered me this morning, so I decided to write this blog post to give people a little more insight into how the visual databases work on the MMO Fashion sites.

When we first start a site, Dulfy helps me by doing a great deal of the initial screen captures and advertising of the site. We spend a lot of time in a new game, because if we didn’t have something to start with, no one would ever look at the site. But, Dulfy.net keeps her very busy and she is unable to spend much time working on the Fashion sites in the long term. That leaves the majority of updating all eight visual databases to me. That’s seven separate games that I am expected to play, collect or craft items, take screenshots, and post to the site. Obviously, it’s impossible for one person to do that. There just isn’t enough time in the day.

When Dulfy first started TOR Fashion, she built it so that the community members could help update the site by sending in screenshots. In fact, I got involved with TOR Fashion in the first place because I was constantly sending in sets, but she didn’t have time to upload them. She also designed it so that no one had to create an account or had to do the work of posting the items themselves. This made it a lot easier on the community than a Wiki where each individual person has to do the updating. EDIT: We have to rely on the community because the sites don’t make enough to hire someone. No one is going to work on these full time and not get paid, so we have to rely on the people who use the sites to help out with items they already have.

This works great for as long as the community is willing to continue sending in pics. Unfortunately, many people believe that since it’s my site, its solely my responsibility to collect every item in every game and post it. They start complaining on the sites or in social media that something hasn’t been updated yet or that I “dgaf.” Others complain that something needs to be fixed, but don’t try to help out by sending in a pic.

These kinds of comments and the attitude in general are really wearing me down. I didn’t get into this to make money or get recognition (good thing because in three years I’ve never made a dime and everyone gives Dulfy credit for the work I do). I did it because I played SWTOR and really wanted a place where I could see the armor sets. We kept adding games because people liked having a site like TOR Fashion for the games they played. I’ve had to give up playing games except when I’m working to obtain items to put on the sites. That’s ok, because I enjoy working on the sites, even more so than playing the games I am covering. But the negativity and backlash are really making me reconsider whether this is worth my time.

What I want anyone who takes the time to read this to get out of it is: If you want a good resource, you need to help out by submitting items to the database. If you don’t want to help, then quit complaining.

Exile

P.S. I would like to sincerely apologize to those people who have sent in items to TOR Fashion, especially D. Rose. I am way behind in getting them updated. They are on my list, it just takes a lot longer to update TOR Fashion than the other sites because it is a much more complicated site. I really hope to have enough time this weekend to knock them all out. EDIT: I was able to complete them today (10 Mar 16).