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> v28 Feedback Thread - Give us impressions/feedback/loved etc
Jen
post Sep 22 2013, 10:37 AM
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On behalf of the core admin team (Votucu, Squid, R4N and Zardoz), please do share your feedback for v28!

What you loved?
What you didnt love?
What we could do better?
What you think we missed?

(dont have to use the above, just helps get the creative juices flowing to help the teams that work with the core admins make it more awesome).


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oodLes
post Sep 22 2013, 07:13 PM
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What you loved?
The dodgy looking throne of Lan, MS paint comp entries

What you didnt love?
No announcement that CS:S GG comp was starting or when
Space in the rows, need more to get in and out of there comfortably but I understand more space = less Lan space
Aircon at 4am, holy shit it was cold

What we could do better?
Loudness of announcements, most of the time we have headphones on so I could barely hear what was happening.

What you think we missed?
Exploiting the theme a bit more somehow? Dunno, hard subject matter.
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Chill_Penguin
post Sep 22 2013, 10:39 PM
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What you loved?
Rock paper scissors comp, and can stacking. Not just because I/we won both, but because the staff knew the rules that had been decided beforehand, and they were run in a way that seemed more fair than in previous years especially the rock paper scissors. Thanks Jeffy for running them this time. Loved dota 2, good to see teams returning from last year.

What didn't you love?
Completely packed this time, a great thing for respawn, but I had friends who didn't prepay have trouble getting inside, so maybe its time for a bigger venue. Also, the power outages sucked but it's bound to happen at some point, I think it was handled well though.

What could we do better?
The theme of the event was kinda lost somewhere, I forgot there was a theme at some point. Themes are a good idea and make the event more memorable, but they have been done way better in the past. For example, I remember my first respawn was the "suit up" one, and the way that event was handled used the theme well and made for a lot of good times.

What do you think we missed?
Respawn 27.5, the smaller LANs are a different kind of great, I have fond memories of hearing zardoz rage at the other end of the room during our game of tribes CTF.


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admin
post Sep 22 2013, 10:47 PM
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Loved: Community as always, all events, generosity of prizes and door prizes, food prices, pings cafe being open and that whole area being available for more casual hangouts/board games/talking.

Didn't Love: Loudness of announcements, no mention of RespawnNotify.. not sure if it's in use anymore but it's an EXCELLENT idea of how to get messages to the masses without having to always shout, a simple "Check notifier" would be enough rather than long message that gets muffled half way. Would be awesome if you could redirect people on first connect to the network to the EMS, and give them the option to run respawnnotify on the first page they see on connect.

What could be better: Just throwing this out here but the sleeping area could be regulated a bit to allow for more spaces for people to sleep? I saw someone take up a single space that would otherwise have fit 4 people.. but again it's not that big of a deal if it can't be done.

EDIT ONE: A friend who came for the first time said that the only thing he'd change would be a stricter schedule for the competitions and more 'official' rule set for competitions to avoid the problem we had with name changes and handle usage. (using nickname different to that of your respawn display name).

Overall this is probably the best respawn I've been too so far (always more to come) and it was definitely awesome and something completely different for all the people I invited this time - many of them first timers smile.gif

Will edit this post as I think about more! See you next time!


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Jen
post Sep 23 2013, 02:41 PM
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Hey Guys,

I'm probably jumping the gun replying a little early, but hopefully it should help for everyone who replies. I was the competitions person for this event. I want to firstly apologise to those who were frustrated by the competition delays and missed announcements. As someone pointed out, I haven't seen power issues in quite a long period of time, so it was a first for me as competitions to have to pull out my "incase we have no power" instruction sheet to keep things in tact.

So I'm really sorry to everyone for the delays we experienced. Normally I'm pretty tight when it comes to pushing people into servers, but I have to be fair especially when power is lost. It sucked, I know I speak for the competitions group when we heard players dropped out mid round that it sucks! Regarding the CS:GG tournament, unfortunately that got knocked to early in the morning due to us needing to catch up on the bigger games. Because some of those gamers wanted to jump into a regular "lets just go crazy" game and have some fun. So there is some scheduling that'll need a big tweaking to get around.

Never the less, competitions is only going to get bigger, better and much more strict around times and other things. There is also some other great things in the works for you guys from the competitions team. So stick with us, we know v28 had some rocky starts to games and what not, but you'll agree, Respawn always takes the bad and makes it glowingly awesome!

If you've got thoughts on competitions, something I missed, something I can do better. Feel free to let me know here publicly or PM me. You can even PM/email the core team and share it with them so it gets noticed! I love feedback, I thrive on it, and I can't make things better if nobody says "Hey Jeffy, you noob you cross scheduled DOTA and LEAGUE together" (for example).

Cheers

Jeffy - Competitions Ringmaster


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m0ns00n
post Sep 23 2013, 06:55 PM
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TL/DR at bottom.

admin's suggestion about RespawnNotify is really good. I didn't know you guys had something like that before. Definitely could use something that gives people a chance to check what's currently happening even if an announcement is missed would be good. I like the use of the big projector screen throughout the night but it could possibly be exploited even more.

It would be nice to have the draft for competitions being updated somewhere we can get access to as well. We only entered the Dota 2 comp, but we had to keep coming up to the front to check out our next match, who won, who lost, etc. We were actually pretty close to the front desk too so I can only imagine people seated on the other side of the venue in the middle of aisles just struggling to go back and forth and causing annoyances to the people around them.

It's not just for the competitors either I know some people who just like to have a nosy about the other competitions to see what teams are playing and who is going against who, etc. The whole thing about eSports getting bigger and people loving the spectator action and "Who's who" is really spot on and it would be good to bring that sort of community vibe to life at Respawn LANs.

admin's EDIT ONE about stricter names and making sure all competitors are actually at the LAN is kinda true. I'm sure a few people have had the thought about the lack of security with team games such as Dota 2 and LoL where you just throw up a lobby and everyone joins and we say glhf and play. It would be so easy to simply get someone from outside of the LAN to play and it wouldn't even matter whose account they are on, we just expect people are doing the right thing.

It would be really good for an official way to advertise to people about smaller inhouse games that are being thrown up for everyone to jump in and play. CS:S GG, WC3 maps, UT 2K4 IG, FlatOut and countless more games people I'm sure would love to have a go at throughout the night, especially the mini-tourney games that run during the same time as the big competitions. We tried advertising some games through the DC++ hub and got a few people jumping in but it's not really good enough. Maybe a separate feed on the intranet where people can post "What's Happening" or something along those lines with attention drawn to it via the projector screen.

I feel like I'm typing so much I'm losing the point. I guess the overall theme is bringing the entire LAN together by helping players share in the joys of seeing tournaments played and participating in a variety of smaller inhouse games together. I know a lot of this can be done by individuals going and looking around for themselves and talking and making new friends but by nature people will participate and engage more if it's thrust upon them.

TL/DR:
More channels for staff to communicate to masses and people to gather players for games, increase info access and atmosphere for big tourneys, closer focus on participating teams/players.

EDIT: Oh yeah - we had a blast! Proud of our tourney performances and most of the crew should come to the next one!
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JustinCarew
post Sep 23 2013, 07:57 PM
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What you loved?
The atmosphere of people, the rush of playing in the tournament.
The internet was amazing, but I had no idea of what was banned in terms of usage of internet, a guy two doors down from me to my left was torrenting like no tomorrow which surprised me.

What you didnt love?
The fact that the giveaways were during peoples tournaments, one of our players almost missed out on a motherboard because of this.
The quality of toilets after midnight was awful, having never been to a LAN before I had no idea this would happen.
Lack of space between tables, just a tiny bit more space and I wouldn't have been annoyed at the amount of people going past us.
The time slots of tournaments, and the lack of notifications because of this. Two of the people on our team are big DotA fans and would have loved to play in both.
The announcements in general, we all missed out on the midnight bbq because we were too busy getting our asses kicked in the Grand Final of the League tourney, which would've ended ages ago if the unforeseen issues didn't occur.
The aircon at 4am as well.

What we could do better?
Not force, but try to engage people in the theme more. I myself completely forgot there was even one, and the chair on the stage looked like a standard thing to highlight a winner of whatever.
Bring someone in at some stage of the event to clean the toilets.


What you think we missed?
Maybe a system where someone (not suspicious looking, maybe someone certified with the staff to give people a lift) can volunteer and be approved to give a lift to people without car access to mcdonalds, or any food place for that matter. I learnt the hard way that its really hard to live on confectionary and ice tea for 29 hours, and didn't eat any "real" food until morning.
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Harlski
post Sep 23 2013, 10:02 PM
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QUOTE (JustinCarew @ Sep 23 2013, 07:57 PM) *
What you think we missed?
Maybe a system where someone (not suspicious looking, maybe someone certified with the staff to give people a lift) can volunteer and be approved to give a lift to people without car access to mcdonalds, or any food place for that matter. I learnt the hard way that its really hard to live on confectionary and ice tea for 29 hours, and didn't eat any "real" food until morning.


Hey, I will be at the next Respawn. I'm more than happy to take <15 yo kids to get some food. I have plenty of room in my van and we can even go somewhere nice to chat. smile.gifsmile.gifsmile.gifsmile.gif
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Jen
post Sep 23 2013, 10:26 PM
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QUOTE (JustinCarew @ Sep 23 2013, 07:57 PM) *
What you think we missed?
Maybe a system where someone (not suspicious looking, maybe someone certified with the staff to give people a lift) can volunteer and be approved to give a lift to people without car access to mcdonalds, or any food place for that matter. I learnt the hard way that its really hard to live on confectionary and ice tea for 29 hours, and didn't eat any "real" food until morning.


There is a couple of food vendors on site in the "Agora", like Subway and the like which is only a 10~ min walk at the most. I'm thinking next event doing a Subway run for those who are interested and arranging it with Subway if people are actually keen.


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Zardoz
post Sep 24 2013, 01:04 AM
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QUOTE (JustinCarew @ Sep 23 2013, 07:57 PM) *
What you didnt love?
The fact that the giveaways were during peoples tournaments, one of our players almost missed out on a motherboard because of this.
The quality of toilets after midnight was awful, having never been to a LAN before I had no idea this would happen.
Lack of space between tables, just a tiny bit more space and I wouldn't have been annoyed at the amount of people going past us.
The time slots of tournaments, and the lack of notifications because of this. Two of the people on our team are big DotA fans and would have loved to play in both.
The announcements in general, we all missed out on the midnight bbq because we were too busy getting our asses kicked in the Grand Final of the League tourney, which would've ended ages ago if the unforeseen issues didn't occur.
The aircon at 4am as well.


Hey, there are some great suggestions here - however:

* Tournaments are running pretty much solid until the early hours of the morning and then people go home. Whenever we give away prizes, we're ALWAYS going to clash with tournaments. Tournaments also clash with each other - we can't realistically run DOTA 2 and LoL back to back as there's just not enough hours in the LAN to do so.
* Toilet quality - we're lucky those things were refurbished. We'll see if we can get a cleaner in there but cleaners are VERY expensive at that hour (so we could probably remove/reduce the cash prizes in order to do so but I am willing to bet that people won't like this either).
* We're working on improving our notifications. How do you suggest we do so? We've got an audio-visual communication survey that'll be going out with our wrap-up to get some feedback. This includes announcements. One idea we had was to stream the mic to a server so people can listen in.
* The aircon was just fan operated (i.e. no cooling was used). The challenge here is that the venue doesn't have climate control so we manually have to turn it on, then realise it's cold, then turn it off, then realise it's hot. The temperature varies - it's hotter in the middle of the venue than it is along the sides as well.
* Seating - yes, it's a bit squishy. We can solve this problem by slashing about 40 people from our player count - so 40 people would miss out on seats. Would you prefer to miss out on a Respawn every year in lieu of this?
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oodLes
post Sep 24 2013, 08:36 AM
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@Jeffy: We understand about the comps getting messed up because of the power outage that's fine, we just didn't get a notification that CSS:GG was going to start in 5 or anything like that and to hop in a server. We played for like 15 minutes in one server and then hopped out to go play something else while we waited for the comp. Then We saw the winner announced lol.

RE: Toilets: can't do much about that, they were fine as far as I could see for a 24+ hour event of people constantly using them.

Streaming notifications service: this sounds fucking brilliant, no really, brilliant. It stops people missing out on notifications because they have headphones on. I forgot to get RespawnNotify when I was there, maybe have that as a constant message on the Notepad screen.

Squishyness: surprisingly yes. I would like it 400 players and more room.

RE: Announcement at 2-3am to please stop shouting because people were sleeping - could you also have turned off the music? Seemed rather hypocritical.

Biggest complaint: comic sans in notepad wtf. tongue.gif

Lan rating: 8/10 - attending again! smile.gif
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TechL
post Sep 24 2013, 11:51 AM
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Great LAN as usual!

What caused the power issues though? It happened twice I think?

Also how many players checked in? Keen to find out as it seemed fairly packed and with the pre paid seats actually booked out this time and all...
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Agnostos
post Sep 24 2013, 04:05 PM
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Power issues I can answer.
The one that knocked out a table and a half was a bad, power cable and power board the first time. Then an uneven load across the 3 phase box we had which tripped the halls safety switch for that distro rather then just the individual ones in the distro box.

TL;DR: There is far too much power draw from people with power hungry computers.

respawn notifier may be in for a re-write soon. as for streaming audio notifications, we'll look into it.
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admin
post Sep 25 2013, 01:06 PM
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QUOTE (Agnostos @ Sep 24 2013, 04:05 PM) *
respawn notifier may be in for a re-write soon. as for streaming audio notifications, we'll look into it.


RespawnNotify + Streaming Mic Updates (maybe combined into a reworked notify tool?) + The projectors being utilized a LOT more would be the perfect solution for the notifications problem. smile.gif


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Vot
post Sep 25 2013, 01:37 PM
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Lots of great points so far. I don't have time to reply to a lot of them, but know they are all being taken on-board and discussed behind the scenes.

One thing to note, though, is that we have (unoficially) retired the RespawnNotify program, due to several reasons that led to it generally being unreliable. HOWEVER, we only chose to do that as we started designing and trialing different ideas to replace it. More news will come as it's ready smile.gif

(This applies to issues relating to PA volume being inconsistent around the hall, as well as the use of projectors, and peoples' issues with being distracted when announcements are being made, all of which are issues we're aware of and have been mentioned here).
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Stoogie
post Sep 27 2013, 11:15 PM
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First i want to apoligze to Jeffy and Zardoz for going overboard on the whole CSSGG issue because i had nfi what was happening and because of that the winner and prize didnt go to me. And i wish to offer myself to help pack up till the end on the next lan as an apology.

But anyway everything oodLes has said so far is what i agree on,

e.g.
1. No information about tournament rules before the tournaments start
2. Lack of knowing when it was going to start due to the delays
3. Hard to hear announcements most of the time because they get called while people are playing other tournaments or mostly everyone has their headphones on and cant hear it anyway.
4. So cold at 4am my hands were shaking quite fast like 5cm+ size of shakes, like i had that shaking disease lol..
5. rows had barely enough space between them, i had hundreds of people ass the back of my face while playing and pushing me forward.
6. It would probably be a good idea to use the main screen for more than just small notepad information, as i saw that you had one on the side with the same thing, like livestream comps from spectator perspective or provide more information on tournaments on the main screen.
7. Streaming what oodLes said if its possible to do that then sure why not but i cant really think of anything unless theres some group based thing u can join with popups, does raptr do that at all? or anything similar.
8. the power went out on that row because the person across from me his power supply for his monitor blew and he didnt unplug it.

also would like to make a suggestion, u could set up a spectator comp for each tournament and make them use FFsplit which is free and records like fraps(its like xsplit, the lazy way to fraps+webcam) but directly to a low sized mkv format like 1 minute per 5-10mb or less im not sure on size, to make sure no ones cheating and if anyone asks anything about the match then u have these videos, also if u wanted to upload them to youtube later for others to watch.

other than that it was really good, the food was reasonably priced at the cafeteria, everyone treated me with respect. try to keep the temp around 22-24 degrees though as i hate the cold due to bad hand circulation(my mum has reynaud's)


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