This has gone off on a tangent on what is and what isn't realistic, and we've wandered away from a core point, the alleged "standards" of Build It. Yellow even found its way into this post, which rarely happens, so it means something obvious is being overlooked.
The standards that an entry must meet to be entered in Build It are as follows:
Justin Wrote:Starting with Round 221, entries must be themed. A base track with absolutely no theming or scenery will no longer be considered a satisfactory entry.
That's it. Everything else is subjective to the audience, and is therefore out of management's control. Build It as a whole has no standards; each individual user does, and while many of us have developed similar sets of objective criteria that we look for in an entry, a user has a right to vote for whichever entry he or she desires based on whatever reason they want. Many of us will recommend that certain basic criteria are met (i.e. scenery, foliage, terraforming, etc) so that your coaster appears "complete", but failing to meet this criteria will not disqualify you from future rounds; you'll just be much less likely to win those rounds, and there's a very good reason for that. As much of a role as the voters play in this competition, they should not be your main focus when designing an entry. As far as Build It "standards" go, there's an even more important demographic to pay attention to.
If you want to win rounds, you must understand the most basic and most important principle of Build It, or any other competition, because it's always the same.
Your entry must be better than all the other entries. It's that simple. The expectations of entries are not determined by the voters, but by the builders, who continue to raise them each time they improve. You're competing against them first and satisfying the voters' expectations second.Â
If you complain that Build It standards are too high, all you're saying is that the other builders are too good. And this complaint is useless, because it would imply that players should put in less effort just to make the competition easier for newcomers to win. They're instead going to continue to improve their building skills in order to increase their chances of winning against other builders doing the same thing. This is how every competition works.
The criteria set by some voters is only a basic guideline for how to improve your chances of winning, and it's encouraged that builders follow it because there are already builders who follow it. You won't win by doing less. "Completeness" or "realism" won't guarantee you a win each time, because there will always be rounds where another coaster is deemed equally good or better, but it will greatly improve your chances in a round with fewer "complete" entries, and over time, you'll develop your own skills further and eventually become a roller coaster powerhouse. If you're determined enough, that is. This doesn't happen overnight for any builder.
If you look at a winning entry with the mentality of "this is the requirement I must satisfy", you're only halfway there. In order to maximize your chances of winning, you must look at a great winning entry and say,Â
"This is the coaster I have to beat."