60 sounds like a heap to look into from an admin perspective in my opinion. I guess it depends on what the spirit of these achievements is meant to be. I agree with your interpretation of the medal awards as written, although out of the 30 original forums only a select few “allow” multiples to count. As you’ve stated things like warmachines (which were previously once per machine type) are now collected into one group which suffers under the once per gallery idea. A compromise is likely needed there (granted I have a vested interest here because I chronically work on projects in that category).
To me if you were to just go count every single thing contributed there would be piles of overlap with the medals for army lists by points. Yeah you don’t have to have a valid list but it still feels like enough of an overlap and creates more work for the staff, compared to the army list which is much easier to send to an admin for a quick check with a single army picture.
I don’t have a good answer and am not a staff member. I would however feel bad sending a staff member 60 images w/ hyperlinks to posts located in the galleries for their consideration, even if in groups of 10 spread over time. This also compounds if I have 20 painted characters and want those to count as 2 image gallery entries based on the below.
In my opinion the army list by points medals shows a person has delved deep into the Chaos Dwarfs, likely repeated infantry units to assemble their legions, and showed their stalwart resolve in getting a host of models to the table in a manner of their choosing (with some guidance from legal list making).
The image gallery to me feels more like a celebration of breadth, contributing to the myriad crazy concepts the chaos dwarfs have to offer and sharing that madness with the community. This could just be a headcanon I have myself. I wouldn’t grant myself an image gallery blackshard if I painted 60 units of hobgoblins.
Whatever the solution ends up being I will hope that it is not extra or duplicated effort for admins to something that already exists. Trying to put myself in the shoes of someone entering this fresh. One path (that many of us walk) is to strive toward an army list to play games and they have the Points of Army medals to work toward. There are the contest veteran medals which encourage engagement in that aspect of the community. Perhaps the image gallery medals could enrapture the “gotta catch’m all” folks and encourage people to dabble in Tjublings or man o’War (cough me cough cough pirates cough) or just paint that one unit they’ve neglected.
That makes sense from my perspective, but would actually be a solid reason for for continuing under the existing rules and perhaps NOT counting multiples.
My use of pts was an (probably poor) attempt to quantify what might be reasonable numbers for each of the categories if multiples are allowed in the counts, not an attempt tie the image gallery to point values. I agree that Army medals already fully account for that.
If multiples are counted, then a larger count would be needed to reflect a suitably massive number of units and work worthy to earn a difficult to achieve Blackshard medal.
(FYI, if you put in the effort to fully build and paint 60 different unique units of all hobgoblin warriors, that still celebrates diverse crazy concepts, as an insane interpretation of a chaos dwarf army, and effort worth rewarding).
Following old forum precedent, I expect very few would get to Platinum, Diamond, and Blackshard so minimal stress to the Admins to verify numbers for those who do. Also, given the supportive and great attitude of this community, I suspect few if any would attempt to fudge numbers, and getting away with such a deception would be next to impossible.
All just food for thought, and I would be perfectly happy keeping the image gallery as is, or going in a totally different direction. Cheers!
No duplicates with a suitably mountainous blackshard achievement would be an interesting tactic. Near the original 30 might be pretty on target there.
+1 +1 +1
Agreed on all counts. Although I certainly hope we see more contenders vying for the top tiers of the ziggurat during this bit of CDO renaissance. This is indeed an upstanding corner of the internet, and of course the real importance is encouraging people to immortalize their wonderful creations in these well curated image galleries for all to fosche. I’m all for any fiddly medal semantics that support such a goal
I have read all arguments presented and I agree no duplicates seems very reasonable and it differentiates this achievement from the army list one, as mentioned by @Reaver.
Having 30 unique models (because that is essentially the competition… 1 infernal guard or 100 makes no difference anymore) seems like quite the achievement to strive for!
As to warmachines, it seems like the same rules apply… 1 iron deamon or 10… doesn’t matter. The only caveat I see is what do we do with conversions and scratch builds. If I own a forge world iron deamon and I make one from scratch I feel like both should count.