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Fascinating stuff. Very generous of Project Soul to allow us to use both cylindrical and camera projections. Still working on (practical) guide to bump mapping.Thanks, Retrotator1!
There are a lot of factors that affect how a sticker is placed.
First, remember that the more you blow up an image, the more pixellated it gets. So, you're right in that scaling a sticker to max on a large piece of clothing is going to start to look fuzzy faster than on these helmets. However, it seems that different stickers are made at different resolutions. Take the dragon crest sticker (motif 78?) and scale it up on the leg on the Rubber Unitard. Compare that to how one of the large number stickers scales (super fuzzy).
One thing you could consider is looking in the location settings and try "Entire Body". This changes how the sticker goes on the part quite a bit. So instead of placing on upper body and scaling up, put on entire body and see if it scales better (scaling down instead of up).
On top of that, there are issues depending on whether you choose 'place by axis' or 'place by view'.
Place by Axis uses something called a Cylindrical Projection. In terms of 3D modeling, before a texture is applied, each polygon must be mapped out on a field called a UV map. These UVs determine which part of an image goes on which polygon.
Here you can see a UV map created with a Cylindrical Projection. See the Cylinder? Now look to right for the UV map. Because the top of the cylinder is flat, the polygons are smushed together. You can see the effect on the texture on the sphere. As the image goes toward the top, it gets stretched and then distorted. This is why on upper body and head equipment, the stickers get distorted the closer they are to the top, or shrinking into a black hole. This is also why the image will start to spread messily on the arms if scaled up too much. Very annoying side effects.
Place By View is different. It used a 'camera projection'. Much like a movie projector, it shoots the image from the in-game camera onto the model. This is why it looks normal when projected top-down onto the model. Of course, what ever isn't in the camera's direct line of sight isn't going to get the image.
For reference, TTT2's decal placement uses 3D planar projection. What ever fits inside the box gets the image. I'm not quite sure what the WWE games use.
tl;dr: yeah you got it. But whether or not it smears depends on the sticker, if the sticker gets close to the smushed UVs at the top, or if you use place on upper body or entire body. Try placing on Entire Body and see if that gets different results.