Plagiarized Artwork Makes Top 5 in pRO Art Contest

There was some concern brought up in the Philippine Ragnarok Online during the past weekend since a Loading Screen contest for Xmas came about. The mechanics were quite simple:

Eligibility: All Ragnarok Players

Mechanics:

• Draw, paint, or make a fan art on how you celebrate your Christmas in Ragnarok Online.
• Image should be in JPEG format with 640 x 480 dimension.
• Attached your entry and email it to: ragnarok@levelupgames.ph with the following format:
• Email Subject: Christmas Loading Screen Event – (SERVER)
• Username
• Character Name
• Brief description of your entry
• The GM team will vote for the best art work and post the winner’s character name and server in this link
• Submission of entry is on December 9 to 12, 2011 11:59PM
• Only one art work per account is allowed.
• There will be 3 winners for all servers and entries will be posted as loading screens on December 14, 2011 Maintenance

It clearly states “draw, paint or make a fan art” so you could imagine my shock when I saw this entry:

It seemed quite familiar, right down to the artwork style and then suddenly I was reminded of “Kodama” (aka Yuichiro - a part of MyoungJin Lee’s esteemed art studio) who is jRO’s official artist (being a big fan) I tried to find out if these were plagiarized works or simply a VERY well copied style.

To no surprise I found the original sources of the artworks and spread it all over the pRO forums. The GM’s were acting quite silly over my post and kept deleting my thread over and over again. Shouldn’t they be happy I was helping them enforce their own rules and protect them from someone claiming the official artwork as their own?

pRO needs to be more careful next time when selecting entries for a Loading Screen Contest. I also urge the team to explicitly state “original” everytime there’s an artwork contest. For those of you curious of how “fake” the submission was. Please see the below. I’ve emailed GM Anael with my complaints. Hopefully they disqualify the entry.

Original Images: