At long last, the wait is over!

Welcome to the conclusion of the Herald Graphics Tournament, Shroud War!

Vyr, Mako and myself are extremely pleased at the level of excitement and participation this tournament, the first of its kind, brought. Our expectations were pleasantly exceeded, as you will be able to see further below. When this idea was first coined, we were not exactly sure if the concept would work. However, after many days of deliberation, we came up with a method and our wondrous Seneschal, James, whipped up a new Brackets competition archetype for us to use! We feel that the archetype worked very well for what we needed, and we hope to see it used in future competitions of the same nature, though not just for graphics. So, thank you very much James! We could not have done this without you!

Victors

Congratulations! Everyone is a winner! Thank you all for your dedication and taking the time to make this tournament such a great success! However, we have to announce our top three placements, so without further delay...

We are pleased to announce the winner of the first ever official Herald Graphics Tournament...

Jasper Arlow, of Clan Odan-Urr!

Congratulations, Jasper! You surely earned your spot at the top. Coming up in second place, we have Atyiru Caesura Entar Arconae and taking third is Zujenia! Congratulations to the both of you as well for representing Arcona and making it to the end!

Statistics

Thanks to Mako wading through numbers upon numbers, I was able to create a couple graphs to represent a few of the important stats that you all may find interesting.

In the image above, we see the breakdown of the rounds. “Byes” are those that had a free pass to the next round and as such, were not required to submit an image. Subscribers are those who were paired up to participate in the round. Finally, the submissions stat are those that submitted a valid image for the round. As you can see, we had nearly 100% of the subscribers submit in the final few rounds. A fantastic feat!

In the image above, we find total unique participants broken down by unit across the whole tournament. The exact numbers are listed here:

• Arcona - 2
• Naga Sadow - 4
• Odan Urr - 13
• Plagueis - 2
• Scholae Palatinae - 5
• Taldryan - 1
• Tarentum - 1
• DC/Rouge - 3

The tournament started with 50 members signing up and showing interest in the event. Throughout the entirety of the tournament, there was an unfortunate 19 disqualifications due to lack of submissions in their first round of the event. A total of 31 unique participants submitted a combined 68 images across all 6 rounds. With 31 of the original 50 having fully participated, that gave us a 62% participation rate, great job everyone! The entire tournament ran for 6 weeks, each round lasting a total of 6 days which provided a 1 day grading period between rounds, with the exception of round 3, which had 2 days for grading.

Feedback

I have created a tournament feedback form for the participants to use. We hope to further improve the tournament experience for future use, so anything and everything you provide to us will be of great use!

You can find the form here.

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Before we completely close this out, we would like to offer the opportunity to get feedback from us on an entry or two that you have submitted. Due to the time in between rounds and the sheer number of entries, we would not have been able to give feedback to each one. So pick your favorite and shoot us an email! We will gladly offer some clean critique on your work so you can better your craft!

So, thank you all once again for making this tournament such a great success! Without the members of our art community, we would not have seen such a fantastic result. We are very proud of you all. Keep those pencils and styluses scribbling, and we will see you in Art Club!