i liked the format (eu ruleset)
and i might be alone in thinking this but bo3 for the all bracket matches would've been nice

Chairs

Trying to get players from teams that are knocked out as casters would be cool

Maybe not for the 16 team part of the bracket. A team like mine having to play froyotech for 2 maps would really be a waste of time. Maybe for the lower bracket and all the other UB but the first round.

Also, not having the admin announcements blaring through the same speaker as the casts would be nice. It was very obnoxious and sometimes painful for the ears if you sat up close.

A designated spectator area would be nice, just so all those people crowding the CS teams won't happen again. It inundated the entire gaming part of the hall with all of the people standing behind the teams.

This is mostly just nitpicking, other than a few small things, it was very well run and quite fun to be a part of. Thanks for making GXL'14 happen, and thanks for trying to make GXL'15 even better!

The only two problems I had were with the chairs and the tables, the chairs were a little too short so sitting down at the table was kind of awkward. The tables were kinda shitty and I ended up with one or two splinters, would say adding a table cloth would fix the problem but idk if that would cost a lot.

Other than that great lan

More accurate info about when matches are expected, I'm assuming the long delays between matches were so that both the cs and tf2 matches could have non-laggy streams and I understand you can't always predict when a cs match will be over in 20 minutes or 120 minutes but its pretty annoying to hear "be back soon don't go anywhere" and then be waiting for like 90 minutes. There were a few matches I missed because by the end of the event I realized that it was just random when the next match would start and I just left after watching a match and hoped when I came back in an hour or so I would be in time to catch the next one. I think it'd beneficial to either get a higher Internet connection for the casters so they could runs simultaneously or even just making educated guesses like "it should be about an hour" and then maybe someone comes into the stream to let people know if there are delays or its gonna be a bit longer.

dm server

some kind of ventilation (unless ppl really love the smell of warehouse mixed with sweaty nerd)

I don't know about other people but I would really have loved to get rid of all the shit covering up the windows, I don't see what's wrong with actually having some daylight in there I hated that it was always dark

if there was some sort of functionality for picking your seats ahead of time like for the intel lans that would be really nice

I have an idea, how bout putting the cs nerds that are going to have 50 people standing behind them in a place that will facilitate said people. Maybe put them against the wall or an open area with no gamers behind them. Getting bumped mid-game by csgo fanboys all weekend was a drag.

I could complain about the tables/chairs but I understand the logistics and cost. Also to echo what dashner said, being able to rent pc's would be a HUGE help.

Last but not least, there has to be a better way to communicate with the players. I can't tell you how many times I heard "yo nick" or "yo fragile" followed by "what is happening right now?"

I would say the event was pretty spectacular overall, but dem chairs man

Yeah this was a fucking pain in the ass. But now I know not to sit behind cloud 9

Nope, there was never a point in time in which games were held up for stream reasons, there was simply never a need to. There were a lot of longer breaks, but almost all of them were caused by problems with people's computers, especially the ones that CEVO brought and the pro teams were using. For that reason, it was almost impossible to ever get an accurate estimate of how long it would be until the next games could play. In addition, one game being delayed necessarily delayed all games because we were running all rounds concurrently. The delays sucked and no one was happy about it, but it should be much better next time ^_^

This was a HUGE problem that we had to work out as we went at the lan. The original solution was going to be an IRC channel that people could go to for match assignments etc, but because of the super restrictive net policy, I was told there could be no irc connections. Both Nick and I learned a TON about how to keep communication flowing at a large LAN and I already have a solution in the works that will make this problem much diminished going forward at GXL and even other community LANs. Any suggestions are hugely welcome.

The event was amazing, but here are the things I would like to see for next time:

- Hotels. The Hilton was an absolutely great facility, not too sure about the Hampton but I'm sure it was fine as well. With how many people were staying at both hotels, I'm sure it would be reasonable for the hotels to establish some sort of event discount for people who are attending for GXL.

- Trying to watch the streams of the tournaments (of either the CSGO games or TF2 games) was impossible since Twitch was blocked. I'm assuming that was for bandwidth purposes? But a way to keep track of the events going on around you in the event you couldn't stand behind the players as they went on would be nice. Maybe an exclusive GXL viewing hub through the GXL intranet?

- The chairs were pretty uncomfortable/small.

- I somehow didn't have enough time to meet everyone I wanted. Of course it didn't help that I arrived Friday afternoon, but I know a lot of people felt the same way. I don't know what could be done about that though, as we're trying to pack in so much into ~2 days.

But yeah, this year was great, hopefully we have a similar turnout for 2015.

yeah for anyone that is above average height the chairs were really annoying i felt like i was gonna break the damn thing, which led to people basically taking the chairs with the cushions on them. i think folding tables with a cloth would be much better as well

also more servers, at least a few for pugs/dm there was a mge one but it had crits turned on for some reason. some people were running things like gunslinger cause there wasn't really a whitelist in place either. i think the EU ruleset is good but no one is used to it...when some people saw 5 on the board it let to people disconnecting when the game isn't over yet

and basically what conductor said, the weather wasn't great over the weekend but im curious as to what lead to the garbage bags over the windows...basically zero sunlight getting in

last thing is they need more people at the door for when you register to get your pass....at one point they had 1 person for everyone in line maybe 2 people tops. at ETS there was multiple staff and tables to keep the lines shorter and everyone getting their gear in plus nametags much faster

my name isnt pewn

other than that, everything was great :)

Decided to compile a list of ideas people had so far. Probably missed some people's suggestions. So bear with me if I left some out.

Compilation of ideas:
[*] Official setup time (no events planned during that time)
[*] Computer/gear rental options. Especially for people who have to take planes to get to the lan.
[*] Chairs (more comfortable)
[*] Tables - smoother surfaces + more overall + table cloth?
[*] Designated spectator area with chairs already setup
[*] Designated shuttle times that would go in between hotels and event.
[*] Pre-released schedule of events.

My personal suggestions:
[*] Volunteer signup (discounted lan ticket price if you volunteer to help out for something) - I saw times where fragile was running around frantically. Maybe people can offer assistance for areas unanticipated. Even something as simple as rounding up team captains for competition. Things of that sort.
[*] Online list of where people attended and their "seat" so others can find them. This way you can still choose a seat but others can find you. :)

Yeah, the tables and chairs were pretty bad, but we'll look into ways to improve that aspect.

Actually, some of the feedback I've heard is that some of the guys played too much TF2, lol (which I guess would be a more relevant issue from a team who finished top 8 or so).

It wouldn't have been possible to finish that tournament in one day with bo3, though. Maybe unless it was top 16 bo3 single elimination.

That definitely won't happen next time. We will have that stuff roped off and in a way where it won't totally obstruct everyone from walking by / sitting in the area.

I deleted the rest of your post in the quote because dr.shdwpuppet and Lange already dismissed that part of it, but I felt like I was pretty right for the most part on when people expected to play their matches. Yeah, there were some delays on Saturday due to making groups / brackets and getting servers ready. However, I think I made it pretty clear to everyone when they would play, and I told anyone what we were waiting on if there was any kind of delay (usually waiting for a few other matches to finish up).

is the next gxl going to host cevo lan again or was that a one time deal?

Building off of Cheeriss # 9, I actually preferred the picking a seat when purchasing a ticket (could change to other vacant seats whenever) that FITES uses compared to the 2 GXL lans I've been to with first come first served seating. Also made it really easy to know where everybody was.

get in mumble with me tonight ill help you make a list while its still fresh in my mind :3

Would it be possible to have the group stages happen on friday and do elimination stage matches all on saturday with bo3s? This would be assuming that if there were to be cevo lan on friday that those teams would have a bye through groups like there was this time around.

I had a blast at this event, even though I was on the inside looking out, and spent literally the whole time looking at my command line x.x My suggestions are as follows:

More setup time: this is largely my own fault as I couldn't get in before Thursday evening, but a lot of elements of the LAN seemed to be haphazardly put together at the very last second. The CEVO computers arrived around 9pm Thursday night, less than 12 hours before they were to be played on, and this caused a TON of problems where they weren't updated, tested, and two or three didn't have TF2. CEVO did the best they could with the time they had, but if those computers had been arranged to arrive the day before, and the whole event itself were to be set up and ready to go by noon on Thursday (to give everyone the 12 hour time window until early access gamers come in to work out the kinks, relax a bit and put together a more solid event).

A physically larger building: As others have said, there was a huge problem with people wanting to watch the CS players at work (even a lot of the pro tf2 players were standing there... while they were supposed to be playing a match). I think its great to watch those players and show your support, but we need to show respect to the other people who paid for a seat or who have to play matches and would rather not be elbowed in the face by the, quite frankly, rude and unwashed masses thronging around the CSGO teams. This could be much mitigated by a larger space with room set aside for the CEVO computers.

Better organization of volunteer/staff members: TheFragile deserves the world's largest bottle of whatever alcohol is his poison of choice, but it didn't have to be that way. There was pretty poor communication between the stream area, the player area and the admins. We had walkie-talkies that were basically incomprehensible. I think a large part of this would be to digitize the communication between the player and administration staff, a solution for next time I am already working on.

Perhaps a published list of the various resources in and around the venue. I know that finding alcohol and coffee was kind of an exercise in exploration, hard to do as it was pretty foggy a couple nights there.

Better public access servers: This is feedback for me personally, because I was the only one responsible for the servers, but it would have been awesome if I had set up MGE and DM servers ahead of time. It honestly hadn't occurred to me that people might want to play tf2 outside of their matches >.>. The problems with the MGE servers were caused by me literally just launching a tf2 instance and throwing MGE mod up on it with no other configuration because I was really pushed for time. No excuse, I was inadequately prepared and it will not happen next time.

Also. my username is not Shadow Puppet, ShadowPuppet, Dr.ShadowPuppet or Dr. Shadow Puppet. There are no vowels in the shadow. It's shdwpuppet, dr.shdwpuppet or, if you're name is nonis, shdwpuppy

i don't really see the point of bo3 single elim for elimination stages

A system to reserve seats or a dedicated tf2 section. I wanted to meet the scattered hl players.

I don't know why it was like this and I have no idea how to fix it but if you guys could fix the connection to servers outside of the venue that would be amazing.

Also having servers set up at the beginning for public use (Pug servers, MGE servers, DM Servers etc.)

I'd also like to second the table cloth idea cause the tables were kinda evil.

This was already addressed but yeah, no whitelist for the entire event and no config on the mge server. That and I'm sure a bunch of people didn't even know about the dm/pug/mge servers - I know I learned of it pretty late.

Also while it's kind of cool that the lights go out at 8pm or whatever time and there's pretty disco ball lights on the ceiling it's a lot harder to see and find people and just overall the screen glares extra into your eyeballs when it's dark. I definitely preferred when the lights were on.

I think the chairs were the only real thing that bothered me. Other than that maybe a DM server would be nice and maybe some sort of pug setup system? I'm not really sure about that but it seemed like pugs were sort of obscure? Maybe I'm wrong about that

Yeah, the MGE and Pug servers weren't really broadcasted as well as they could have been, but I dont really know how to disseminate that information. I posted about them in the forums and got them up on the gxl.lan domain. Next time I will really push to tell people about an information portal or something similar. Like I said, communication seems to have been the single biggest problem overall, next time it will be better.

the hotel was amazing (i've stayed at a ton of small hilton's/hampton's and the rooms were really nice at the hampton compared to other locations i've been to), so i liked the location of the venue

i think we need a center board or something at the control hub to see exactly what is going on at what time or something, like when someone has to be around for a match

it was really shitty to have to stay around the venue for over 12 hrs for the tf2 tournament, and get like an hour or two of break when we had a lot of downtime waiting for matches anyways

i think there needed to be at least 2 mge servers set up or a dm server set up, since there wasn't enough room in the initial mge server, as people already mentioned, the crits were awful as well

it would be cool to actually see reserved seating since it was really hard finding people at the venue rather than just looking at a map to see where people are

i personally liked the tournament format of bo1, although it was really confusing since i kept forgetting we were using the euro format. i don't think there were whitelists enabled because i remember i couldn't go sniper because the item server broke and i was stuck with my machina from playing highlander pugs and didn't want to use banned weapons

having some dedicated servers for pugging with everyone having rcon would have been neat (or at least having a lot of people with access around) since people had to host their own servers and sometimes things went very wrong or people were forced to pick others because they were hosting the servers, i think a lot more pugs would have went down if we had more access to servers or something idk about bandwidth things or not restricting that though

i also think there should have been more notice about the gxl.lan site since i only found out about that site within the last 3 matches i played in lol, i think over 70% of the people participating in the lan didn't know it was a thing and we were just waiting to be given info from someone else that did have access to it

chairs were pretty bad, but i was kind of used to that set up since my table is raised at home as well

i was terrified of getting splinters from the tables as well, but it ended up not happening so i guess it was okay for me @_@

Within 10 minutes of playing, I got a splinter. I then covered the table edge with electrical tape.

@TheFragile:3, i have a laundry list of ideas and complaints. i'll talk your ear off about it later