100% agreed. It'd be easier to have teams pick seats before than to just hope to god you get all your six in one row.

dem chairs
dem splintery tables

The most important thing i think is there needs to be a central place to get information and to talk with other players, and everyone needs to automatically know about it.

Maybe you could have a private official steam group, that you are invited to when you register for the LAN.

i think everything was smooth, my only complaints were the chairs and possibly somewhere to organize pugs officially because the servers hosted from the various people's computers weren't very high quality.

I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but I think having more food options at the venue would be great. I don't know the logistics of getting that done though. Inviting a third party company to sell their shit maybe?

Food trucks!

Damn dude just get up and walk around! Once I met everyone I've seen on facecams, I started just creeping on killcams to see who TF2 folks were. It worked! I know you want to play a bunch but get up and just shake some hands.

An easy sign-in type chair map would be cool for next year though.

It was sort of a small venue but there were still lots of people, you're an adorable little man, and everyone else was SEVEN FEET TALL. We sat ten feet away from the "admin" desk but it was unmanned fairly frequently. If you need to assign shifts to a "station" then whatever, but I think having 1 spot someone can always go for assistance or report scores is better than having to hunt down a person. The mumble setup made it so this might not even be necessary(with the Admin channel), but I went there for assistance twice and the person/people in it weren't at their computers.

I might make a pug group come next gxl as a way to organize these kinds of things. I know there were a few times when I wanted to get pugs going but there was no one in the mumble channel, I didn't really know who'd be interesed, etc.

Water please. And not that $3 a bottle shit, lol

oh yeah i liked how the gxl hustlas right in front of the vending machine were selling drinks higher than what they were in the vending machine

HOW WERE THERE SO MANY PUBES IN THE URINAL

Seriously do people just shed after whipping their dingles out? Or was the urinal not cleaned before the event? The urinal legit had facial hair and it scared me.

EDIT: I guess as far as real complaints go, I second the tables and lights off complaints. The tables were pretty awful. The flat tables were giving people splinters and the one I was set up on had indents all over the edges making mouse movements unresponsive at times. I never game with the lights off since it puts too much stress on my eyes and I can imagine it became uncomfortable to some of the players playing matches with the lights off.

The chair complaint is fair, but it's not really that realistic to supply anything but the chairs we were given with the amount of people there. I brought a pillow to sit on since I figured the chairs would be bad and it worked out fine.

Thanks for clearing that up. It's a pretty first world problem overall, but in that event i'd honestly rather someone come and say "someone disappeared" or "we don't know when the next match will start because x" or whatever. I get that everyone's busy at the lan center trying to get shit underway and I give the volunteers mad props for helping get the event running as smoothly as it was so I'm not trying to shit on that or anything. There was some information and people knew technical problems were an issue but I just think more communication with the stream during the event would've been nice, that's all :)

Thanks for all the work to everyone that put this together, I didn't go but I did enjoy watching.

P.S. It'd also be pretty cool if there was something to watch during the downtimes I think it was one of the esea lans where they had a few frag vids that would play in between matches, it made it more fun to stick around the stream in the downtime

Quake Live tournament! lol but seriously.

Me and Br0nze were waiting for the UT2k4 Tournament to start only to find that we missed an announcement for it over the loud speaker and ended up missing it entirely. I know you guys don't want to go looking for people and I dont expect you to but I think the PA system needs a more centralized position so that everyone can hear the announcements.

Also I know theres not much anyone can do about it but I would like for the lesser but still relevant tournaments to overlap less. Such as have the Dota 2 tournament start after like the first 3 brackets of TF2... IDK would have more players for the other tournaments that way and not many would have to choose between the two.

Oh! and also I was bored the entire time because I couldnt join pub servers and the other players gave up trying to start pugs some of the times so I would like better connectivity to public servers.
(we had a decent connection last year js)

I guess the only real issues I had have already been voiced, but they would definitely be the lack of DM servers and table height.

DM is self explanatory, I just don't like MGE and I would like to warm up a little.

The table height combined with the lack of chair height is an issue for most people, however it becomes a larger issue when you're short and aim like I do. It must have looked like I was using some 60 inch 360 (chingoo?) because I just couldn't move my arm enough to be fluid.

The only things I had issues with were

as others have said, the chairs (more-so than the tables). WAY too short in comparison to the tables... Sitting on pillows and using boxes to get higher was very common... If I could have paid $5-10 for a good chair, I totally would have.

On Saturday night, there was a guy fan-dubing(?) a bunch of movies. Thats cool if its like 1 or 2 am, but people needed to be up that morning to leave and he [i]started[/i] Lord of the rings at 5am... Not cool...

A group or something to send out announcements would be fantastic. Getting word of mouth out to everyone who might be interested in Highlander Pugs was sort of difficult. We got a bunch going, but we could have had more if we had an easier way of organizing them.

Overall, that was my first LAN experience, and I was very pleased with how it went, and with all of the people that I met.

Run a little web server locally on the network perhaps, assuming the Lan network policy allows it. I realise this is another headache to manage but keep it simple (maybe even just an html page) and you wouldn't need a dedicated machine for it.

Alternatively would you say mobile internet use is high enough amongst individuals to be reliably used for the purpose? Players could potentially access an outside information channel that way.

If there is any way to turn off the single light above the projector screen to watch current streams, that'd be great. The light above the screen made it difficult to watch from the projector.

I ended up just grabbing my pillow and lay down on the floor in front of the 42 inch TV to watch some casts.

A stream that wasn't a weird Blue-Green hue would've been nice. Also that and their was a weird crescent shapped gray water mark in the lower left hand side of the stream toward the center.

1. It would have been cool to have a "stage area" where games from the UB/LB/Grand Final could be played. I'm not sure if it was possible but perhaps something like it could be setup for next year. This way you don't have people being knocked into while they're playing for actual money.

2. The bathrooms were in an appalling condition throughout the LAN - and that's compared to what they usually are at a LAN. I think that half of the problem is that there are too few plumbing fixtures in the room in proportion to the number of gamers there. It's a miracle that a bunch of people didn't get really sick at this LAN.

That was due to an issue in the extv-lowerthird animation that didn't disappear, which I assume will get fixed.

Yeah, it would be cool to have a webapp that mass texts the 2 teams involved in a match to try and reduce delays, but it would have to be automated and not buggy to reduce workload for organizers, not add to it.

Also, I'll volunteer to clean the bathrooms once in a while next lan if they'll let me. That shit was a human rights violation.

Mass texts is probably not in the cards, but there is a web based solution in the works for '15

I feel like if the CEVO finals were in the morning following the rest of the games, the loser-bracket team would play a lot better. Also there is potential for using a stage of sorts.

So the finalist cevo teams would be guaranteed a spot in the byoc bracket, and the group stages could be during that or something. Mix^ played bad in the cevo finals because they had been TF2ing for 15 hours at that point. This is a problem that doesn't exist in esea because they have a night of rest/ demo reviews before grand finals.

I agree with lots of feedback here, and I'm glad everyone is giving much input. However, I think I had only one legitimate issue, so I'm gonna keep it very real right now.

If you get incredibly drunk / high as fuck at your hotel, I don't give a shit. That has nothing to do with GXL or me at that point, and we don't care. However, a few of you got absurdly drunk/high while at the venue (regardless if you're inside the venue or outside in the parking lot). You were a disturbance to a handful of people and, to be blunt, outright creeped out some of the people.

I'm not saying that anyone who consumed any kind of alcohol or smoked were totally unacceptable. I had a few beers myself, and I know that most people who did any kind of drinking were responsible and handled themselves well. However, we don't want to start kicking people out from the event because you are a total wreck.

might not be the right thread for this but what happened in ro4 elevate vs. 20b on granary?
there were a ton of pauses.

I think there were minor things (better tables and chairs) but overall, I thought you guys did a great job organizing this. Thank you to everyone who came to the venue early to set up, stayed late to clean, and just ripped their hair out trying to keep this event going smoothly (especially you nick :3). Also the outro frag video was well done and touching. It was wonderful to see everyone and I hope we can do it again.

cozen and I had problems with the computers supplied for cevo and crashed 2 or 3 times each but we were then allowed to switch to our own computers.

On Friday, some of the players (namely cozen, ninjanick, and I think deadbolt) were crashing a lot on the iBuyPower PCs. It go to the point where instead of figuring out the issues after the second/third time, players swapped out the iBP PCs for their own.

edit: oh, nick said this like 40 minutes ago. my b, bae.

It was me not deadbolt, but also the beginning was delayed because cyzer had to switch computers right as he got set up, then the new computer got stuck updatinh for over an hour and then had to install tf2

Just wanted to piggyback the attendee feedback.

As professional hotel roamer this weekend, I think something that annoyed me to no end was people assuming other people would take care of their irresponsibility.

Next year book your hotels early, explicitly tell people if you're planning on staying with them BEFORE you arrive at the event, and for the love of god pay the people for the beds you're occupying.

I mean myself and others booked rooms and still wound up on the floor some nights, and some nights people couldnt stay in their own rooms due to 'unforeseen consequences' LOL.

Either way, next year don't be a mooch. Nothing's more disgusting to me than nerds taking advantage of nerds. If you wanted to stay at the Hampton, book early, not 2 weeks before at another hotel assuming you can just use your invite level nerd virgin status to steal other people's sleeping arrangements. #yolo.