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.)