The most popular dimension in Rift with 4650 recommendations is New Eyecandy Spaceship Slide 4.0 by Cariina on Greybriar. It beats all other dimensions by more than a thousand votes and it’s popularity keeps growing.
Four years after the release of dimensions, the positions on top don’t change much. Once a dimension reaches the top three in the shard listings, they earn a few votes each week without the need for promotion by their owners, keeping their position on top safe.
The early years were different, the struggle to reach first position was fierce and filled with less savoury practices. When the suggestion to wipe votes appears on the forums these days, I wonder if the people doing so think it an opportunity to to put their own dimensions on top of the listing. If so, Eyecandy is an excellent example of the effort required to reach the top and stay there.
The original Eye Candy was a Stone Flask Tavern build during Storm Legion beta. It’s one of the earliest examples of dimensions and Cariina and JuicyB were two of the best builders in the game.
When Storm Legion went live four years ago, Eye Candy appeared on Faeblight as a beautifully built house. Their work was colourful, creative and full of wonderful morphs. The first pool table, complete with pool queue, aquariums, sushi buffets and, eventually, the slide were all inspiring morphs by Cariina and JuicyB. For hours, almost every day, JuicyB would advertise the dimension, drawing in visitors and votes and their position in the listing would steadily rise.
Then, one day, they closed the dimension, tore down their work and rebuilt. With the opening of their new dimension, came a flurry of promotion, visitors and votes. Each time, Cariina and JuicyB advertised a new build, they enticed not only new players but long-term players on alts that had yet to vote. This gave them a huge advantage over other dimensions that retained the same build.
Before July 2013, players were free to move their dimensions from shard to shard as dimension recommendations were not wiped on shard transfer. Quite a few dimensions went touring to collect votes. Eyecandy transfered to Greybriar early in 2013, around the time Eyecandy Circus Slide 5.0 was built.
When Trion ran the competition to win keys for their newest dimension release, Key to Dimension: Three Springs (July 2013), trolling for votes really hotted up. Everyone advertised their dimension non-stop. Some players, richer than others, payed for votes. The best going rate at competition close was 10 platinum and many alts were born and raised to level 10 during that time. Just before the competition ended, several dimensions jumped shard to take the top three weekly vote positions on shards with less population, ensuring they won a key. Winning a key took well over one hundred votes and some dimensions gathered close to three hundred votes in the space of that week.
I’m sure it surprises no-one when I say the forums were filled with complaints. Non-dimensioneers complained about the constant advertising cluttering up channels, dimensioneers complained about everything. They complained about the buying of votes, saying it was unfair. They complained about the dimensions that moved onto their shard, ousting them from winning positions. My favourite were the complaints about the people who advertised; the advertisers were too aggressive thus gathering more votes than those that didn’t want to advertise.
Trion listened to these complaints and changed the recommendations system to wipe votes on transfer. A lot of dimensions were caught by this and stuck on the shards they had moved to during the competition. Trion learned about the lengths people would go to win a competition and, thankfully, have never run a competition like this again.
At the end of Trion’s Three Springs competition, Eyecandy Spaceship was second place on the shard listings. Since that time, the Eyecandy dimension has remained a spaceship though with several revamps and updates each with their round of advertising. It soon took first place on Greybriar and then extended it’s lead on other dimensions till it reached the unassailable position it holds today.
The Eyecandy builds have always been quality, well planned and beautifully executed, colourful and creative. They gained a reputation and that helped draw voters to it. The slides have certainly contributed to it’s success, something dynamic and fun to do in the dimension gave voters a reason to return on alts and new mains. Yet it is the constant promotion throughout the years that have been the biggest contributor to Eyecandy’s 4650 votes.
Today, there’s hardly any promotion of dimensions outside the dimensionaddicts channels. The effort to challenge the hundreds of votes accumulated by the current leaders on the all-time listings, along with the ennui the general game population seems to have developed towards dimensions, discourages constant advertising. Set the vote tally back to zero and that would all change. We’d see a return to old behaviours as competitive dimensioneers strove to reach and maintain first place. Those players supporting the notion that all-time votes be wiped, in hopes of becoming the next Eyecandy, had best gird their loins in preparation for war and make sure they have enough platinum and persistence to reach the top of the listings.
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Eyecandy dimensions still in existence:
New Eyecandy Spaceship Slide 4.0 by Cariina is available on Greybriar. The current version of this famous dimension.
Eyecandy Circus Slide 5.0 by JucyB is available on Faeblight. A duplicate of the original Eyecandy Circus Slide.
Eyecandy Spaceship Slide 4.0 by Cariina is available on the Public Test Shard. This is one of the earlier Spaceship builds.
Eyecandy History:
The original Eyecandy on the Storm Legion Beta.
Eyecandy Slide 3.0 on Faeblight, the December, 2012 build of Eyecandy.
Eyecandy Circus Slide 5.0,the March 2013 circus build originally on Greybriar.
Eyecandy Paradise, from April, 2013. A few pictures from the forums showing a return to housing for Eyecandy.
List of winners of the Key to Dimension: Three Springs in July 2013. The first Eyecandy Spaceship was one of the winners for Greybriar.