What is a Gaming Table Quality Paint job - Level 5 on the Vote Rating? Changes are Needed!

[Griffonbait]

What is a Gaming Table Quality Paint job - Level 5 on the Vote Rating? Changes are Needed!

I have seen a number of miniatures with an averaged rating of less than 5, that have been painted all over, with appropriate colour schemes and that would look good on a gaming table.

Most voters here (probably too big a generalisation, but what the heck) seem to want high quality paint jobs on all their minis. This is not feasible, especially if you are like me and actually use your painted minis in wargames.

I have over 100 Bretonnian Bowmen (let alone the 35 Knights Errant, 40 Knights of the Realm, 12 Questing Knights, ++++ - you\'ve got the picture, and this is only one army of the four I have!) for WHFB and it would be unreasonable for anyone to expect the currently perceived (my perception based on the averages I see) level of Vote Rating 5 on all of them.

What looks good on a gaming table is different to what looks good as a picture for voting purposes. Why? Well, as you know, when you are actually gaming you rarely get down and have a detailed look at the miniatures - you are usually 3\' to 4\'+ (1m to 1·3m) from the minis. This is too far to make out the fine details of a miniature. Quite often detailed looking at miniatures is done before or after a game - where you show off to your friends!

_All_ the minis with an average vote rating of 4 & below, that I have seen, are of gaming table quality (level 5), especially if they are part of a unit that had the same quality paint job throughout.

My thoughts on vote rating 5 are that the mini needs to be painted at any reasonable level that makes it look good from a distance, not close up like we are viewing the majority of miniatures here.

What does \"any reasonable level\" mean? It means that the colour scheme is appropriate for the type of miniature and that it is completely painted (this probably should include the base being done as well).

Either we drop the expected standard for vote rating level 5 or the rating levels change. For example, make gaming table quality level 3, say, with higher levels of detail being the higher ratings.

Rating levels 2 and 1 are then left for incomplete miniatures and miniatures that are not fully disclosed for our viewing. It is obvious that some people are only allowing us to see the parts of the miniatures that are fully complete, or they think are worthy to be presented to the general public.

On the subject of poor image quality, I will only rate these miniatures level 5. What can you expect if you can\'t see them because the image is too dark or washed out?! So long as they look fully painted I have no problem giving them a 5.

I believe the vote rating levels need greater clarification through a more detailed description of each.

Comment on the above please.

 

[SintriCat]

Re: What is a gaming table quality paint job...

I\'ve noticed this same trend - even high quality paint jobs are scoring incredibly low. I just looked at one of SlappingPaint\'s wolfen that was sitting at a 6.7... this mini is nice enough that for a minute I thought it was the manufacturer\'s image (not to imply that he would post someone else\'s work) and while there is some room for improvement... it is a really fine piece and I can\'t see how it could get less than the \"8 = great job\" rating.

Overall, scores seem to be getting lower and lower on most of the minis posted. I don\'t know if this is simple pettiness on the part of people who have posted pics in the past and not scored well, or if people just expect every mini to be totally converted, meticulously painted and based on something that resembles a big production movie set, but the standards seem kind of harsh to say the least.

In the scheme of things, it isn\'t the end of the world, but why go out of your way to discourage people with unrealistic scoring?

 

[expressivemonkey]

Well I would personally tend to mark a well painted figure with a good photo at a 6 or a 7. To receive an 8 or above from me there\'s got to be something about the figure that leaps out at me.

The problem of course is that it is very much a personal thing, but due to the diversity of people voting, the average score does tend to even it out as everyone votes a little differently.

While a 5 still qualifies a good tabletop piece (for me anyway), the caveat is a good quality picture.

if the photo is too small to appreciate the figure, or it\'s blurred, then I find it hard to vote higher than a 4. It\'s not being petty, it\'s basically a reflection that someone isn\'t giving me enough detail to make an informed opinion. For reference, I believe I\'ve only ever given a 3 on for one figure (the number escapes me) and that\'s the lowest I\'ve ever gone.

I would like to think that while I probably wouldn\'t get higher than a 5 (at best!), that I wouldn\'t be marked down on photo quality. When looking at it in this format, the presentation is just as important as the paintjob, without the former it\'s hard to gauge the latter.

That\'s my tuppence anyway

 

[Griffonbait]

In reply to expressivemonkey

What you have written strongly indicates the need for voting rank clarification. That is, greater detail on the ranks themselves.

So how can the ranks be clarified? How can the image quality effect the ranking? Since hardly anyone is voting 1, 2 or 3, should these be used for the poor image quality pics, say:

1 - for poor/incomplete image, low quality paint job/hard to distinguish quality.
2 - for poor/incomplete image, average quality paint job
3 - for poor/incomplete image, high quality paint job (from what can be seen)?

Even the words \"poor\", \"incomplete\", \"low\", \"average\" and \"high\" need to be stipulated.

 

[Commander Y]

There are many stages of quality above \"tabletop quality\" presented in the repertoire here, yet only 6 through 10 to grade them.

If \"tabletop quality\" means coloring in the lines with a simple basecoat, and a painted base with some gravel on it, then \"tabletop quality\" needs to be less than a 5. The type of work that your basic gamer, that uses their figures on the table, usually produces (what you see at the store and at cons, etc) is generally sub-par, and would rate about a 3 from me.

For me, no matter how well-painted the entry, or how well-converted, or how good a sculpt it is... If the base is not finished (some sort of texture/flock, etc and painted), it will never get that 5 -- for it to be \"tabletop quality,\" the figure MUST have a finished base.

In addition to the base, to score a 5, there must be at least some attempt at highlighting and shading. And I\'m not talking about the quick-paint mega-drybrush that we see a lot of. To some, those models may be \"tabletop quality,\" but not to me...

So my scale uses a lower system...the basecoated, painted base figs generally receive a 3. The really offensive ones to the eye will score lower. A decent-looking mini, with some work put into it (and a finished base!) will score the 5.

6 through 10 I reserve for the really nice looking minis...Most getting a 7, quite a few getting 8\'s, and 9 or 10 is reserved for the type of work put up by Jennifer Haley, et al. For a 9 or 10, it has to be perfect, or near-perfect...I mean, really mind-blowing. So that leaves all the other well-painted models to fit into 6, 7, or 8.

I think by stating 5 is \"tabletop quality,\" it really discourages the use of numbers 1 through 4 -- So why not just have a 5 point scale?

Some more clarification needs to be made, I agree -- we all have our opinions of what the scale means, but: Thanks to averages, after 50 or 100 votes, the true public opinion can be seen, regardless of everyone\'s individual opinion of what the scale means.

But it is disturbing to see a lumpy, drybrushed horror of a paint job scoring only half a point under a well-highlighted, very appealing model, and I think the problem is the limit of choices between \"tabletop quality\" and a God-like 10.

Y

 

[theorkcollector]

check out that wraithlord!

well, i\'ve seen enough. you know that beautifully painted wraithlord by devuana, with the friendship bead things? i reckon thats worth atleast an \"8 = great job\", but the dickheads are saying how gay the beads look. wel i think they\'re unique and suit the eldar. we\'re all getting too high expectations (especially poor old me).:innocent:

 

[Craftergoddess]

Tabletop quality

What is tabletop quality? Hmm. That\'s a very good question -- for me, it tends to imply \'something that will stay in one piece once my players are through with the game\'.

See, my own collection of miniatures isn\'t for the purpose of wargaming -- pushing little men, women and monsters around now and then -- my miniatures were painted for the purpose of tabletop roleplaying games.

You know, incidents like when the concept \'dice pool\' gets a completely new meaning when the player spills his or her drink on the table. It\'s not just books, dice and character sheet on the hazard zone, but those little figurines that portray who we are!

Or when the DM doesn\'t notice a miniature behind his screen and plants his hand right on top of one.

Or when a player picks up a miniature and accidentally squeezes it in his or her hand.

Or when the two cats of my household sneak upstairs and notice something interesting on the table.

Or when one drops on the floor. Or into a glass of Coke. (Sometimes even in the middle of being painted, too -- once I dropped a miniature straight into the jar of blue paint. Oh the frustration.)

I have experienced ALL these during a year -- my poor pretties! -- and this ramble should go to the point soon. One of my pet peeves is the chitter about the base. THE BASE! ALL YOUR BASES ARE TO BELONG US! (Ahem) Only recently I\'ve decorated the base with flock, sand, whatnot -- one of the reasons being that most of the bases would not last the rough gaming (see above) and sometimes going for the simple solution works better than truly artistic. I mean, who wants to drink Coke that has been littered with loose sand and some suspicious-looking cut grass?

All this, with a tongue firmly in cheek.

(Or, is it that all pictures of miniatures are taken at the point while they are still... \'virgin\', so to speak, and no one has gamed with them before? Mine tends to see couple of months of gaming before I can be bothered to bug a friend of mine who has photographer experience and a lot more expensive digital camera than I have...)

 

[Warboss Gord]

Level 5? what the heck?

hmm yes i dont beleive that there is actually a rating underneath table top quality. Any model, no matter how good or how bad, is welcome on the tabletop. a model with a rating of 1.0 on this site is still good enough for a battle. its not the way its painted, its how much u value it and how it plays on the tabletop. sure, you\'d rather have a perfect model than a scrubby, flat-coloured, un-finished freakazoid model, but still, in my opinion, NOTHING is below tabletop quality. and well we\'re here, lets discuss this \"6 = not bad\", just above tabletop quality. what is, not bad? does it mean that one area is decent while another area sucks? does it mean its a decent paint job all round? its rather confusing, really.

Laters!

 

[Thri-Keen Priest]

Ratings vs Quality

Let\'s face it: This is a community of hardcore enthusiasts with very high expectations. Personally, for a 5, I expect a mini to be neatly painted, with some degree of shading to it. A six requires something extra, like a really effective color scheme and some good basing. Models without a face impress me less; faces are the best part!
If a model lacks any shading, and/or has a sloppily painted face, I\'ll likely give it a 4 or even a three. My idea of a 1 is a model that is just painted all one color, with maybe a couple black dots for eyes or something.
I have no idea why people don\'t seem to like my barbarian, #2201. (Is it because he\'s not wearing power armor? ) By my standards it\'s at least a 5 if not a 6. Ah well. One thing I can say is that the intense competition on this board has definitely inspired me to reach for a new level in my painting. Just you guys WAIT for my next entry! HARR!!!

 

[Lowrianne]

you too, CrafterGoddess?

We have a reoccuring monster in our games...the Giant Black Demon Cat From the Deepest Pits of Hell.

Just as our little minis are about to hack and slash the little bugbears (pictures not up yet) this huge demon cats jumps onto the middle of the mat, grabs one of our heros by the head and runs off with it.

They have later been recovered burried in the litter box or hidden behind the toilet. Tends to do a number on the mini.

 

[Temperance]

Could this be used for the lower level votes? In most cases, the lower levels are never used because people don\'t post pictures of those miniatures...

4 - some light shading or highlighting, 100% covered in paint.
3 - base coat, some primer showing.
2 - primed miniature, flash cleaned off.
1 - better than a nickel

Better than a nickel? You know what I mean -- you need to fill a spot in the army and you use a proxy coin for the base trooper? Or a couple to represent the orcs attacking the party... etc.

 

[Grimtoof]

See my comments in other threads (not trying to spam the board, there just seem to be a lot of threads about this). Whatever the guidelines say, the votes on the site appear to give around 4 for a basic troop-standard paintjob, up to about 6 for a typical character-standard paintjob. As far as I\'m concerned that whole range is tabletop quality, and I find it far easier to vote on \'average\' minis using those guidelines.

As for the number of minis affecting your painting technique, well, that depends on the person. I started painting before I started wargaming, and I find that I just can\'t use the \'squad at a time\' approach - I have to paint every mini as an individual.

Lowrianne - very disappointed that you pulled a couple of yours (even if I did think one of them was worth more than it was getting). That is one thing that a lot of people seem to be doing and it really does skew the range of votes on the site. Something has to be at the bottom!

 

[Dedwrekka]

I beleive that this is very true. Not to mention that any paint scheme is tabletop quality. I think that most people take off points for pictures/ baseing/ NMM/ is it the normal paint scheme.


P.S. this is a venerable post i.e. it was at the bottom of the list when I found it. I think it goes well with the current discussions though.

 

[farseerlum]

gunna be the baddie here.

i don\'t want to see your gaming quality peices.

sorry but there are just too many of you who want to show of your every squad member. i swear someone posted their entire brettonian army here a while ago.
INDIVIDUALLY

sure you have some well rememeberd peices or just aren\'t that good yet. thats fine, post em!

but at the end of the day i want to see really good stuff. no, not just golden deamon winners. but original cool minis!
8 around here can be really sweat.

i don\'t really want to see your grunt! i want to see your best guys!

don\'t take it out on everyone else if they didn\'t take much time to rate it squarely. if it is under 6 then it\'s all the same to me.

yes i have minis under 6. and i thought they were better. but at the end of the day i can see room for improvement. so i have no cause to complain.

 

[kittykat23uk]

IMHO, it is getting more difficult to get the higher scores these days. I for one know that both my mini painting and my photography has improved over the past year or two but my most recent minis have not scored as well as I would have expected. My ranking has also gone down from 142 to 199. We are also seeing UK golden demon finalists scoring in the 7- 8s and winners scoring 8+ when last year they might have got a 9+.

Last year I entered a dragon battle scene, it didn\'t place or even make it through to first cut. This year, my temple guard got me a finalist place but has scored less on here than my dragon battle. Everyone who has seen both my entries in person say that the temple guard is superior to the dragon battle.

I think people are expecting such high quality work because this site has taken off so well. Remember folks, that this site showcases the best miniatures in the world. It is not surprising that standards are getting higher, and thus it is getting more difficult to impress the viewers.

I don\'t agree that a plain black base should automatically score a 5, because you only have to look at the Rackham miniatures on the Confrontation site to see that the quality of the paint job alone is way superior to that. I would score most of the Rackham minis on that site in the 9+ range.

As for what is tabletop, I generally use my own miniatures as a guide. I would consider my lizardmen army to be for the most part table top quality (or just above). This being that they have been painted in a rank and file way, quite neatly, using basecoat, some highlights and ink washes, details painted but not to the extent that I\'m spending days on a single figure.

More effort is put into characters and these I\'d expect to get high 6\'s to mid 7\'s for. I would also consider some of my earlier paint jobs to be table top quality because I was learning how to paint and wasn\'t that good back then, compared to the amount of effort I put into my miniatures now.

Regards

Kat

 

[Stripwalker]

You\'ve touched apon something there- I have a friend who has done some amazing work but yet it doesnt rate well on here at all. Yet in person you can not understand how it would get less than a 8. The sad fact is that this site is really coolmini_and_camera_ornot.com Face it, if you dont have a top end camera WITH a decent photo editing capability then even the best work will show like crap.

But back to the main point- I too think that there is some variation in scores- Solid paint jobs are getting 4.5 or there abouts and they are far above bare table top works. By the same token even the shoddiest painted Rackham figure seems to get a 7 as a base score as people vote more and more on the sculpt of the day. Sad fact is that there is nothing to be done about it- it is human nature at work here and no ranking system can work against that really.

 

[dauber22]

Originally posted by farseerlum
gunna be the baddie here.

i don\'t want to see your gaming quality peices.

but at the end of the day i want to see really good stuff. no, not just golden deamon winners. but original cool minis!
8 around here can be really sweat.

don\'t take it out on everyone else if they didn\'t take much time to rate it squarely. if it is under 6 then it\'s all the same to me.

Might I suggest seetting your preferences to not show you anything under, say, a 7. That way your sensibilities wouldn\'t have to be offended?
Amd, BTW, if you find average pieces to not be worth viewing, why don\'t you remove any of yours that are 6 or under?

No, I don\'t mean that you really should, because I don\'t have any problem viewing them. I just thought it would be more consistant with your rant about anything under an 8 apparently being a waste of your precious time.

 

[finn17]

God! Who dug this one up....

This thread is so old it\'s got bristles (And a strange smell of wee....)

I think one of the probs is CMON is a mini site and a painting site...it\'s not really a gaming site IMO and, as I have said before, a gamer\'s view of tabletop is different from a painter\'s view of tabletop.

(Dedwrekka, for someone who advised, \"don\'t poke the bear\" you seem to have arranged a perfect bear-poking venue in resurrecting this thread)

 

[kittykat23uk]

Yep, never mind, theres always a thread going on about this. Most people I know who game hardly have anything painted and very few put a lot of effort into it. At that siege game I played last weekend, most of the opponents were either bare metal or undercoated black. I think I was the only one who had a fully painted army.

ah well...

Regards

Kat

 

[Lurch]

Originally posted by Stripwalker
... By the same token even the shoddiest painted Rackham figure seems to get a 7 as a base score as people vote more and more on the sculpt of the day.

??? Excuse me?
If this were true then please explain these:
http://www.coolminiornot.com/?id=39043
http://www.coolminiornot.com/?id=38951
http://www.coolminiornot.com/?id=37861
http://www.coolminiornot.com/?id=38606

There are literally THOUSANDS of examples to go through here debunking your point.

Just because a mini is a Rackham model does not block it from being judged harshly. That point is ludacris, innappropriate and just flat out wrong!

While the mini may be judged differently by fan boys (of ANY miniature producer) it will have no true effect on the averaged ranking of the mini.

Seriously though this topic is soo old and it seems to get drummed up at least every other week.
I\'d drop my cut and paste here but I dont even have the motivation anymore to carry on this conversation.
NEXT TOPIC PLEASE!