A year and a half later...

 Oops, yeah, not so much of a newbie any more. I've been playing this game for two years today, so it occurred to me to actually post here.

Here's a Top Look I got last week, very unexpectedly:

(Actually they're always unexpected. Even at level 69, where I never ever expected to be. Also, I am not a huge animal-print fan - but that's what it specified, so I just ran with it!)

Low scores

I think I mentioned that I first started playing Covet on my tablet, at Christmas, but then I almost immediately switched over to the phone, and I just started a different character, at the time, because it was easier and I hadn't gotten far anyway. I don't think I would necessarily have come back to playing on the tablet if I didn't have a phone with a small screen - I bought it deliberately because it was cheaper (it's an iPhone SE, and I bought it right when they were first released) and at the time I thought I wanted the smaller screen, but I guess I'm settling into middle-age, and although my eyesight isn't deteriorating as fast as it did in my forties, it's still getting harder and harder to read small print. The next phone I get, I definitely want a bigger screen. But meanwhile, I went back to the tablet largely so I could see things that were hard to pick out on the tiny phone screen, like the details of clothing. So that's basically why I have two accounts, because my eyesight is not too great.

(Maybe I just need new glasses!)

So this is going to be a bit confusing if you're not following closely, but the name of the character on the phone is Melli, and the one on the tablet is Mel. I've been doing things like this in games for years, but I've never had a whole blog devoted to talking about a game before, either. (In many games I have had one character with a Mel name - Mellicious or Mellificent or some other play on "Mel," usually - and then after that I make different names where Mel doesn't figure into it. But back in the day in World of Warcraft I remember going nuts with the Mel puns and naming my troll something like Melodorous.) Anyway, I'm sure I mostly will be talking about Melli and only secondarily about Mel, but I thought I'd mention that. Melli is really my "main" - another old gaming term - and Mel is secondary. At the moment Mel just got to level 11 and Melli is 13 going on 14. Most of the time I do Melli's questschallenges first and only do Mel's afterwards. Sometimes that's a benefit to Mel. More and more lately I do something, turn it in, and then end up doing both of them over again. (You can do that right up to the time that a challenge goes into voting.)

I was intending to talk about things that don't get high scores. I had some plan for leading from the above to that topic, but I've lost the thread of it now. I definitely do think doing two characters makes for a faster learning experience, though. I still get plenty of lower scores on both characters - but I don't have pictures from Mel ready to go, so the examples are going to be all Melli.

OK, here's one where both characters got low scores, and I knew they were going to get dinged for this and I did it anyway:

The prompt for this was something about going to sleep in a garden. Everybody else was doing eveningwear, and I knew that, but I just couldn't conceive of going to sleep in a garden in an evening gown. Sometimes my practical streak gets the better of me in this game. You will see if you stick with me here that practicality is just not a big factor in Covet, most of the time.

This is another one where I deliberately flaunted the norm:

This was something about surfing, and it was pretty clear you were supposed to wear a wetsuit. I either did Mel first or I did this one "right" first and then came back and changed it - I think the latter, actually. Mel did the wetsuit and got a higher score, but I found this sarong and I liked it and I decided to use that instead. And I like this outfit, but I suspected that I would get graded down, I was just hoping against hope that I was wrong.

I would like to know what the actual average score is in this game. I'm not sure that Covet gives out that information, or if they do I've never seen anybody say it. I know that I've rarely gotten scores below three. 3.46 is not actually a terrible score - if you have better bonuses than I had here, you will get a score above 4, which is where you get a prize. (Perfect score is a 5.0 on the voting, and then the max bonuses are .50 for unworn and .30 for in-season, so a true perfect score is 5.8. The second "total" gets mostly ignored. "Style Score" is some cumulative thing that I don't really understand how they calculate. I know it goes up and down somewhat along with better or worse scores, but it seems to drift upward gradually so I'm not sure if it has level figured into it at all, or not.)

One more - this is another one where I fell in love with a piece I found and used it even though I knew it wasn't the thing:

I'm pretty sure that this is a Camilla skirt. Camilla is an Australian brand that is famous for wild patterns, mostly florals - something that's right up my alley. As you might guess from the challenge name, this was an Ides of March theme. My fashion-history knowledge doesn't really extend so far back in time - all I really know about what they wore in Rome is based on that HBO series from several years ago - lots of draping, and elaborately curled hair for women. But I used the laurel-leaf hair accessory, and that meant I had to use this hairdo. (Besides, Melli is only level 13, and was even lower a few weeks ago when this happened, so she doesn't have any hairstyles that are Roman levels of elaborateness yet.)

Spider-woman

Here's a rare (so far, at least) picture from my second account - this challenge is called Bite of the Black Widow:

I was poking around looking to see if anybody had a certain spidery-looking Covet Collection vest that I could borrow, and I didn't find that, but I found this one instead, which is just about as good. I put it over the red dress because it didn't show up well over black. (I tried it over various other colors and this was the one I liked the best.) This piece is from Bao Tranchi.

Oh, and this hair accessory is called the Zodiack Crown. I bought it when they were having a hair accessory sale a week or so ago. I wasn't sure if I would like it but I do - it works for things like dark sorceresses (which is what this one is supposed to be) but it also looks kind of like horns. So it's more versatile than I thought it would be.


Now that I've figured out how to get pictures off of my tablet, that gives me more looks to pick from to show here. Most of the time I do different looks on the two different accounts, partly to see which scores the best. I'm getting better at predicting that but it still surprises me once in a while. I need to pick out some low-scoring things to talk about soon!

New "Josephine" historical clothing set

There's a new set of Covet Collection clothing pieces this week - this one is called "Josephine" and it's vaguely Renaissance-flavored. Last season there was a green one (called Giovanna) and I've seen at least one more that was pink.I'd say the pink one looked more Georgian, maybe - a bit later in time, that is - and the green Giovanna set was probably also Renaissance, I guess, but the style is not the same. (I'm interested in historical clothing styles but I'm no expert. Maybe I'll do some homework at some point and try to figure out what the differences mean a bit more exactly. At a guess, I'd say the green set is the style of a somewhat earlier time period. But I could be entirely wrong.)

The day this set was released the "daily" challenge was called The Girl From the Painting. I had already styled a look before I realized this new set had been released, but I went back and did it over as soon as I figured it out. I did check and Vermeer (the artist of "Girl with the Pearl Earring") was active in sort of the mid-17th century - I think Wikipedia said he died in the 1670s. That's my best guess right now about what era they were shooting for with this clothing set, but again, that may or may not be correct.

There are five pieces to the set (sold separately, you don't have to buy all of them):

1. robe - that's most of what you're seeing in the picture above
2. skirt - you can see it over on the right - red over the gold-trimmed white front
3. bodice - as you might imagine, fills in the section over the chest
4. overskirt - gold
5. ruff

(Note that the game requires that you wear either a dress or a top and a bottom piece, and it's sometimes very annoying about this requirement. The skirt counts as a bottom, but none of these pieces counts as a  top or a dress. So that's why that pink bikini top is there, because it tucks underneath, out of sight, and fulfills that requirement.)

The bodice in the picture above is not the one that goes with this set - again, you can see over on the right that it's actually the JosephineGiovanna one. The green on the sides doesn't show under the robe. The one that goes with the set is the same fabric as the skirt here, and I think it's slightly more boring to look at. I like the Josephine one better because the pattern is not exactly the same.

Also, note that this hairstyle is almost certainly all wrong for the period (it's called "Retro Red Carpet" so I think it's meant to be vaguely 1950s). But hair accessories are tied to certain hairstyles, and this particular crown is tied to this hairstyle - think Snow White. There is another version of this with an updo that I can use, but it's silver, and I felt like this bronze-y one matched much better. I swing back and forth between wanting to be historically correct and wanting a good score. I'm sure I'll end up talking more about that! Basically I don't think the average Covet player knows anything at all about what's historically correct, and they determine your vote, so insisting too much on the "correct" styles has a tendency to hurt your scores.

Here's another challenge a couple of days later where many of us used this same set - I did my look almost exactly the same as above, except the hair is blonder (and the shoes don't show at all so I don't worry much about what I use there)!

Later I bought this Renaissance-style hair accessory, and I also used the ruff and the overskirt for this one.

I notice that I used a different "undershirt" in each one of these. I think I just grabbed whatever I saw first that looked like it wouldn't show.

Soccer Club - 5.0 in voting

This challenge was a month or more ago, I think. I'm showing it because this look got a 5 in the voting - a perfect score. (Unfortunately I didn't have the bonuses to go with it to make it a true perfect score.) I think it's really interesting that this look of all of them got such a high score. I think maybe it's that it's very simple and clean-looking - just jeans, the white top, sneakers and a necklace that's not very noticeable. She may have on earrings but you can't see those at all. It's attractive but not at all flashy.

Best Look In Level

Hi, I'm Mel, and I'm a Covet newbie. - Well, relatively speaking, anyway. I'm level 10 and I've been playing for a couple of months. I thought I would set up a blog because I like writing about what I'm doing and there don't seem to be a lot of people outside of Facebook who are doing that regarding Covet. (Maybe I just haven't stumbled on the right places yet.)

Covet Fashion (to explain briefly for anybody who's baffled) is a mobile game which I have been describing as playing with dolls - like Barbies, or paper dolls, if you're old enough to have played with those. They give you a theme and a choice of clothing items, and you dress up your "doll" according to the theme. Then you vote on other people's choices - which is a topic I'm sure I'll come back to later.

 My sister got me interested in playing at Christmas, and I've been playing hard - and mostly with two characters - since about mid-January. I'm not clear on how many people play with two characters, because the game doesn't give you a way to. You have to have more than one account. I started out playing on my Kindle Fire first, and then made another character on my phone. The Fire is a couple of years old and super-slow. (My phone is almost two years old, for that matter, and doesn't have a lot of memory, but it's still way faster than the Fire.) I haven't taken the time yet to figure out how to get pictures off of the Fire so for now the pictures are all off of my phone.

I have had one Best Look In Level - very unexpectedly - so I thought I'd start with talking a bit about that. This was a challenge that was something about traveling with your parents to the Lantern Festival in China. Everything in Covet goes by seasons, and this was at the time when the game was changing over from Winter 2018 to Spring 2019, so you could use clothes from either season. I can't remember whether I had any spring clothes yet at the time, but I remembered these Yumi Kim floral pieces that I had from Winter and I thought they looked very appropriate. (This looks like the real-life dress.)

For the record, here's the message I got:

Added: I forgot to say that I did not get a perfect score on this. I got a 4.82 on the voting (5 is perfect) and I got all the bonuses, so it was a good score, but not terribly near being perfect.