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There are cases where it's obvious that it's official alternate costume but what about cases like Azki? She has 4 "default" costumes. The current default (post #8196884) is tagged official alternate costume. Is the hard and fast rule that literally any official costume beside the very first one is alternate? What about old designs? There are also cases where the very first costume is only used very briefly and the second one is used as "standard" so which is the alternate costume here?
I've taken to only adding the tag to posts as a placeholder if there isn't an individual costume chartag for it yet. Back in ye olden days characters from anime and games would usually have One primary distinct outfit which made identifying alt costumes and official alt costumes eazypeazy. In the modern era of gacha games and vtubers trying to decide which outfit is a "default" and which is an "official alt" is time that's better spent by just making costume tags.
The difficulties with official alternate costume really stems from the case of it being born to handle alternate costume mistags on official costumes, and even then, what Ylime said was said back then, forum #173977.
I don't think there's any hard and fast rule that says that old defaults no longer count for the tag, but you have to think about it from the perspective of traditional media - using Ylime's One Piece example, Luffy currently looks like post #8600276, but he used to look like post #388506. Does that make the latter retroactively official alternate costume in all art posted since the timeskip? No, that'd be stupid, right? So old defaults wouldn't apply to the tag. But what about later defaults? This is an important question to deal with given that we have VTubers like Yukishiro Mahiro, whose later defaults are in fact just costumes she got in the meantime and made her default after some time. I'd personally say that official alternate costume doesn't apply once they become defaults. I say this knowing that there's taggers who absolutely despise time-based solutions for tagging like that. So AZKi's current default shouldn't be official alternate.
Generally, yes, though there are some cases where we've created a separate tag for the default costume and evazion accepted those through. Those tend to be special cases though when there's a decent value in separating the costumes out (e.g. see Dan Heng (Honkai: Star Rail) as a character who has a tag for his default costume in Dan Heng (Hunt) (Honkai: Star Rail)) versus Jinhsi (Wuthering Waves) who does not). The in-game naming usually helps direct with this - most newer games are easy to reason about the first/main playable version/outfit being the default, while older games are sometimes a little weird, like Honkai Impact 3rd.
gzb said:
That makes sense for VTubers then. What about gacha characters? Is the first released playable costume count as default? Gacha characters can have NPC costume before their playable costume too.
I'd personally say so, because that's the version of the character that everyone will always get first, and will likely always be most represented in fanart. The NPC alt-costume would probably be official alternate costume valid and, if represented in enough posts, probably be even valid for its own chartag. This is assuming that we're talking about a gacha game where you only have one version of the character (I say this as I play one like Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle, where you can get multiples of the same character - that's probably more common for licensed gacha, but it's worth keeping in mind).
You also generally don't see older designs being retired in gacha games too, though it's not like it hasn't happened before (whether pre-release or even post-release). I can't think of any examples though right now, though I have a MOBA one in DOTA 2's Wraith King, who got redesigned from Skeleton King (Dota), which differs from the Arcana/skin they made for him after becoming Wraith King called The One True King. Skeleton King wouldn't be official alternate costume, but the skin based on him would be, because The One True King was never a default.
WRS said:
Generally, yes, though there are some cases where we've created a separate tag for the default costume and evazion accepted those through. Those tend to be special cases though when there's a decent value in separating the costumes out (e.g. see Dan Heng (Honkai: Star Rail) as a character who has a tag for his default costume in Dan Heng (Hunt) (Honkai: Star Rail)) versus Jinhsi (Wuthering Waves) who does not). The in-game naming usually helps direct with this - most newer games are easy to reason about the first/main playable version/outfit being the default, while older games are sometimes a little weird, like Honkai Impact 3rd.
Having names associated with the defaults also helps to some extent in non-VTuber cases. For VTubers, the only reason why they have default tags is because there's so much nude and alternate costume art of them that, for example, doing hoshimachi_suisei -hoshimachi_suisei_(* would not guarantee art of their defaults. Meanwhile, you have F/GO, where tagging the Ascensions necessarily requires that you have the First (the most base default) to reasonably tag the Second and Third, and they also have a similar issue to the VTubers with non-default art flooding the search if you tried to eliminate the other costumes (and we had something F/GO-like happen with Tingyun (Harmony) (Honkai: Star Rail) recently). Though, given the recent approval of Splatoon defaults in topic #31002 using purely descriptives, who knows whether that might change.
Updated by Damian0358
Damian0358 said:
This is assuming that we're talking about a gacha game where you only have one version of the character
By that do you mean something like Granblue Fantasy having different versions of one character or is it like Fate where alternate characters is a thing? Talking about GBF, there are characters that first get the R/SR version and then the first SSR version later. Both are significant in their own ways which could be hard to determine which is the default. Thankfully, in GBF case, the SR and the first SSR are usually the same costume. I don't remember any case where they are different for now or if there are characters with R -> SR -> SSR versions released.
On a tangentially related note - I'm reminded of a conflict I ran into a while back about tagging post #7738800 as official alternate costume, where one user removed the tag because it wasn't one of Ironmouse's "official" costumes as a vtuber, when I actually tagged it as such more because it's an official alternate costume from the one she usually wears in QSMP, an outfit she wore for a single event (Mexico's Independence Day).
It's a different issue but runs into where there seems to be strange unspoken rules about the use of official alternate costume - and in this case I was particularly confused because I feel like that post should absolutely show up if you were to search qsmp official_alternate_costume?
gzb said:
By that do you mean something like Granblue Fantasy having different versions of one character or is it like Fate where alternate characters is a thing? Talking about GBF, there are characters that first get the R/SR version and then the first SSR version later. Both are significant in their own ways which could be hard to determine which is the default. Thankfully, in GBF case, the SR and the first SSR are usually the same costume. I don't remember any case where they are different for now or if there are characters with R -> SR -> SSR versions released.
Yeah, I meant like Granblue Fantasy.
Trouble_Windows said:
On a tangentially related note - I'm reminded of a conflict I ran into a while back about tagging post #7738800 as official alternate costume, where one user removed the tag because it wasn't one of Ironmouse's "official" costumes as a vtuber, when I actually tagged it as such more because it's an official alternate costume from the one she usually wears in QSMP, an outfit she wore for a single event (Mexico's Independence Day).
It's a different issue but runs into where there seems to be strange unspoken rules about the use of official alternate costume - and in this case I was particularly confused because I feel like that post should absolutely show up if you were to search qsmp official_alternate_costume?
For some additional context on this, have forum #286316, forum #286357 and forum #286359.
I've used official alternate costume for official casual like these, hope this is also the correct way to use it, or can we make official casual a tag?
