The thing that I love about this thread is that it is a mix of people who obviously have skill and take a lot of time and effort and those that don't or just don't put the effort into it but felt like what they are showing was important enough to them to come here and post.
I think that is a good summary, with the side line comment that it feels the group who put a lot of time in their shots is becoming smaller and smaller in this thread.
Also, there are threads for consoles where anyone can post any shot regardless of "effort" and that's what I expected here. I actually expected more. Getting into PC gaming is intimidating enough. People acting high and mighty telling others that they don't pass the bar to be able to post here is counter productive to growing a thriving "more skilled" PC community and screenshot thread. We should be helping each other as much as possible and create an environment where the less skilled and experienced don't feel intimidated and are confident enough to say, "Wow, how did you do that?" This is how they learn. If you see something wrong with a shot try to come up with a way to convey it constructively if it bothers you so much that you just have to say something and see if you can help.
You make some good points and if this was a community, it should work like that. However I have never felt it to be like that, at least not the last 2 years. Sure there is the occasional 'hey is there a freecam for game ABC' question and someone helps out with that, but it actually stops there. People ask less and less, and simply post their shots, and move on.
All of this should be done with the intention of wanting to elevate the person you are criticizing. But from what I have seen it seems that some just want others to leave. Or just want to complain and not be helpful.
I can only speak for myself, but I don't want anyone to leave, on the contrary, I want people who have left to come back. The thing I want is to have some sort of quality bar (I know that's subjective) so the shots here are
worth looking at. If it has a HUD, c'est la vie, but at least, it has to be worth looking at, not be an eyesore.
As you can't remove people from a thread here like in a Flickr group, you only can drive a discussion about the matter in a direction which brings an overall consensus about that quality bar, i.e. what is acceptable and what isn't. As it is now, there are two lame things:
- a beautiful composed shot but compressed at 89% jpg quality is BAD
- a lame shot from an ugly 90-ies game but no compression is GOOD
That's the core issue for me: there are endless debates about compression and how terrible it is because it ruins shots (i.e. it makes them ugly. I can see that). So the motivation is: it makes shots ugly. Understandable. However an ugly shot to begin with is _fine_. Anything goes. Literally a Larry Suit Larry CGA shot is fine. I don't understand that: why is there endless debate about compression because apparently (rightfully btw) people don't want to look at shots made ugly due to compression artifacts, but OTOH one is
obnoxious when you bring up the second point, namely an ugly shot to begin with. If preventing ugliness (due to compression) is the driving motivation behind the compression argument, why is preventing ugliness not the driving motivation to tell people to at least make a little bit of effort. That's not telling them to fuck off, it's telling them to put in a little effort: they'll get better shots, get better at taking shots and the shots posted here are easier to look at. Win win, IMHO.
What's so bloody wrong about that?
Regardless though. If your work is as good as you think it is, it should be able to stand out and above these posts that you think are so "low quality" if they actually are.
Not necessarily. It can also feel you simply posted in the wrong community. If the majority here simply wants to see gameplay shots obtained by pressing F12 at random intervals, a carefully crafted shot won't be appreciated that much.
It can very well be this thread isn't for arty shots which took a lot of effort, time, sweat and tears. For me it more and more looks that way and I find that a sad development. Others might think this is a good development and can't wait till all arty shots are gone. It would be great if we had that clear so we all know what to expect, for now and for the near future.
I remember the days where we had this thread and the super high-res art shot thread as separate threads.
Stallion's screenshot thread has always been (or at least it originally was) more about actual gameplay shots rather than no-HUD, 8K, cheat engine camera hack shots.
But for some reason this thread became almost exclusively the high res art shot thread by default as the other thread fell away and I kinda like it less for it.
I can understand your point, and thanks for sharing it as it's good to learn other people's PoV without the usual hurling of mud that is common around here
Serious question: nowadays with many hours of actual gameplay video available on twitch and youtube about any game in existence, isn't a thread about simple gameplay shots irrelevant? I mean: years ago, this thread was a great way to see how the game actually looked like. Nowadays, this thread isn't really needed for that, other sites have way better content for seeing how a game looks like. Do you still see this thread as an extension for all the other sources of game footage?
(For me, years ago this thread started to be the thread where you could see shots from games which you couldn't find anywhere else: shots which made the game look amazing. Like "How on earth did they do that!?". I still hope people come here and ask themselves that same question, but I understand for others that's actually not what they want to see (no offense meant in any way))
And here, a shot (watch_dogs 2, own camera tools yadda yadda. )
