you also won invite so you came into this tournament as a major favorite regardless of scrims. Besides that, neither of the teams who had to deal with a day of shit scrims were eliminated by you anyway.

Besides that, I think the more important point is

I'm telling you issues people had with the lan and your response is "My team won"

I really hope you're never involved in planning something like this again.

I ran the idea of doing a 5 minute introduction video by the shadowrun guys, they might try to make one, or atleast a script for a video on stream.

Bren on analyst desk instead of casting chair was a mistake haha

Maybe b4nny ate all the monitors so others couldn't practice????

For the invite teams, my point is that scrims were irrelevant, the round robin essentially served as scrims for the teams and every team had enough time to prepare for the elimination bracket. Funnily enough, in your post not even you seem to acknowledge that we didn't get to practice. For the open teams, if people only played two games in the tournament, then I agree that's not enough and it would have been cool if the tournament offered more gameplay for everyone. Then again, ESEA LANs used to be double elimination and those worked pretty well. Plus I think pugs were happening at the LAN too. Still, I was under the impression it would be a swiss system not a double elimination bracket, which could have given more games, and to be honest I still don't really know what format they ended up using. I didn't have much involvement at all with the open side of things, I was more focused on the invite side of things and they were organized separately. Either way, I'm sure ESA did the absolute best they could given the time restraints, uncertainty of attendance/registration and other technical difficulties.

I'm simply proving that your feedback that you said was "a massive problem" was actually not. Again you're refusing to be practical about how this stuff actually works. It would have been perfect if the monitors were there on time, but they weren't. Instead of joining you in yet another one of your tantrums about it, I'd rather rejoice that there were people who didn't sit around crying, but instead solved the problem and the monitors arrived in time for one of the greatest TF2 tournaments of all time.

Unfortunately this confusion has probably generated most of the negative feedback you've received

He spent time on the analyst desk early to get him involved since TheFragile didn't arrive until later on Saturday and we elected to keep caster pairs

There was one PUG on Friday, but there were no servers so someone had to start a server on his PC while playing. The game/server crashed before the second PUG could start. There was an unlocked Rewind server, but we were told that we couldn't use it. We finally got one PUG on a dedicated server on Sunday among the Open players who'd been eliminated.

I asked an ESA staffperson on Saturday morning what the Open tournament format would be, and they said Swiss. It turned out to be double-elimination.

I enjoyed it.

Good job.

Group matches affected seeding, you couldn't use them in the same way as scrims. While it's great that a lack of scrims didn't affect your team, the match between the 2nd and 3rd place teams ended up going to GC. The team that scrimmed all day on a normal setup won, the team that didn't lost. Are you saying it's really that far-fetched that could have had some impact on the outcome of the match?

I'm not saying the people at ESA didn't do their best or that this LAN was a failure on all counts. I'm saying that if you want invite teams to show up to an event like this again the planning needs to be a lot better.

Format wise if we had a bit more time I'd like to see the following at the neXt ESA or major LAN:

Computers all ready to go Friday-mid day. Open tournament players eXpected to start playing a few matches Friday night, Invite players settle in. Open goes as long as the numbers dictate in order to hit the timing needed to sync them up with Invite. Streaming during this would iron out kinks, help highlight the open teams, and give chances for other people to cast if not everyone is present.

Round Robin starts Saturday Morning for Invite. Open resumes and is scheduled to finish by the time the Round Robin concludes. We then switch into an 8-team double elim bracket with the top 2 open teams coming in as the 7th and 8th seeds. It'd create a few more matches, but a lot of those can be played simultaneously. There's definitely a big skill difference between our 8th seed and our 1st seed right now, but that gives the broadcast a chance to show 4th seed vs 5th seed. In the future I can definitely see the teams that were in the Open Grand Finals challenging the 5th and 6th seeds in the Invite tournament.

It seems like there were definitely plenty of people wanting to get some game on throughout different parts of the tournament, it'd be fun to run some side tournaments like MGE scout, Solly, 2v2 MGE, Bball, and Ultiduo, late Saturday Night or early Sunday.

People always want more TF2, so thats a good thing.

I def have some production thoughts, but I realize all that stuff ties into ESA needing another hand or two around, or myself needing to take better ownership.

maybe they could show invite scrims?

Yeah I agree, like Dreamboat mentioned above Fragile was flying in late so I just opted to go on the analysis desk to get some time on the big screen. Could have been much better from me, for future events if a situation like this ever happens again I'll work much harder to make sure I dont sound like an open shitter.

You can plan endlessly. There will always be things out of your control or needing last second changes. Our team probably "planned" this event for over 500 work hours.

Quoted for truth. At every lan I've ran something completely unexpected has always come up that I had no control of. This shouldn't be something an organizer get criticized for, what does matter how how they respond to these unpredictable events and work towards preventing them the next time around.

I understand it wasn't entirely ESA's fault but the open tournament was kinda shit.

There were not enough PCs, so you would have to pack up your stuff and then another team would have to set up theirs after every match until almost the very end of the day when there were almost no teams left. Because of this there was a TON of downtime between matches just waiting for things to happen. It was actually so terrible for some teams that TEZC (the euro team) was waiting legitimately 5 hours from the beginning of the event to set up their PCs and then another like hour and a half to start. Luckily the TEZCs crew didn't really seem like they cared too much since they didn't go to the event to play tf2, they just wanted to hang, but if it was any other team you would not of heard the end of it.

It was kinda lame that the tournament was BO1 double elim, because their were teams that just got a shitty pairing and then got knocked out after losing 2 games in a row to top 3 teams, and then other teams that they were better than seed higher.

Also some of the PCs there were like fucked. B3ar spent at least an hour and a half trying to fix his computer because it would just crash when he joined a game for no reason and had to get another one. A lot of the PCs would just delete TF2 and you would have to reinstall it after the computer was turned on. Some of the computers were just like super fucking slow and I can't confirm this but, my theory is that because they are using regular hard drives and they are constantly throwing their PCs around and re-configuring the arena for different console games and then back to PC games, and in the process some of the drives have been damaged. Like on day 2 after the open tournament was over I jacked b3ar's old PC because I heard pugs were happening and it took like 5-10 minutes to get to the home screen, another 5 minutes to open up the file explorer to get to the tf2 folder, realized tf2 had been deleted so another 10 minutes to open up steam and like 15 minutes to install tf2, then when tf2 finally got to 100% it got stuck their so I had to restart steam which took another 10 minutes and then launch tf2 which took 5 and then I could finally play, but pugs didn't happen anyway :(

Also idk what this guy's problem was, but one of the dudes that was at the front desk on Friday and Saturday gave me like this super shitty logitech headset to borrow when I asked for one because mine broke before the event and it was legitimately falling apart and the mic was terrible nobody could hear me but I saw a container full of kraken headsets behind the counter that he just decided not to let me use?

idk I had lots of fun at this event but very little of it was from the tournament itself and I understand that ESA is not at fault for all of these issues and that their priority was making the best invite tournament possible, but I hope these things can be fixed in the future and I am very much looking forward to another event here.

With all the mishaps, I think we still give ESA credit for caring (as demonstrated in this thread) and trying their best. They only launched in 2015, so It's understandable that they may still be getting used to holding events like this. They're still learning, and I think they overall did not too bad.

Thanks to whoever found La Quinta. It was really great to be able to split Ubers since we were all starting from and heading to the same places, but perhaps we should try a different hotel next time if we can find one for the same price. The "Rewind" promo code price for a room with a bed and pull-out couch was the same as the normal booking.com price. The rooms took until about 3:30 to be ready for check in. The walls were thin enough to be able to hear the people in the next room snoring. I heard that some rooms were flooded by the rain. The air conditioner/heaters were loud.

biggest complaints for me personally were:

chairs on the floor. dumpster tier. made tables feel wayyyy too high

switching stations every. single. match. maybe write the schedule so theres as little moving as possible, at least during groups. every time we moved our setup we had an issue on at least 1 pc delaying stuff by ~20 min

stage setups WAY superior to floor. im an arm rest gamer so when i was on stage i was 10x more comfortable playing and being able to rest my elbow on the chair. maybe just getting more of those dxracers could solve that issue though.

overall pretty good lan, woulda run a lot smoother without the constant station changes i think. i know people mentioned adding a day 3, and i think that'd be pretty dope and then you could extend groups to bo3 or just 2 maps against each team. didnt feel like i played that much for how long i was at the venue.

i think adding the top 2 open teams to R1 of the LB or something would be pretty cool too, or just give top 2 teams in invite a bye

i did not like that i missed about half of the round robin games because they were not put up on the projectors. if they were worried about players peeking at the projectors, they could have literally gone to the esportsarena twitch channel and put that up there. i went and watched a few individual players pov's instead which was really cool, but i still think it could have been fixed in like 30 seconds, and made a huge difference

Also just to note (not to you, Wade, but to anyone asking about sound), there was no dedicated sound person. The mixing board for the headset/mic levels was actually right next to me. So occasionally I'd get told from the booth to adjust a pot up or down slightly, which isn't an ideal setup. A dedicated sound person would make a big difference for future events! But tbh I think we did very well and the desk setup was the most legit one I can remember the game ever having.

I went to play TF2...

where we people getting pilows/cushions from? i'm 6'2" but even I felt low.

even iseries chairs were comfier because they cover your back but they're still low tier.

Stole em from the hotel

I will now give feedback as someone who was half in and half out of the planning and running department. But first I would like to preface my feedback.

This event was by far the best and most smoothly ran TF2 LAN event that I have ever attended, especially of this scale. Compared to the absolute clusterfuck that is GXL, this event was a pleasant change of pace into the realm of competence and out of the dark pits of apathetic fuckheadedness. Samiface obviously cares so much about the community, I knew that going in and is the only reason I even helped out with the event, so burned have I been by GXL and the goings on there.

What surprised me is that Wade gets it. He really really does. Humble, down to earth small business owner that cares not just about the big esports but the little guy, the classics and "retro" games all the same. When I arrived, he knew who I was and what I was there to do. When teams arrived, he knew of them and their accomplishments. He may not be a part of this community in the same way that a multiyear player is, but that he cares is beyond questioning.

That was the primary good at the event, the amount all the staff cared about our experience was very clear.

The Good:
Samiface, Wade and company. The people make a business and a LAN.

The organization of the invite tournament. Was smooth and with few interruptions, especially day 2. Invite teams were kept well herded and moved into servers expeditiously. I understand quite well how hard that is.

You took care of your volunteers. I've volunteered a ton and you guys buying us lunch/dinner was phenomenal. I'm not sure I've ever been treated as well as a volunteer than at your venue and I want you to know how much I appreciate that.

You listened. Not everything was in your power at the venue, but sympathetically listening to the incessant bitching of the TF2 community is a saint's task and you guys performed (and are performing) it with extreme grace.

The stream looked really good, I was worried at first because of the concerns surrounding casting from live feed and it seeming like you guys were ignoring the advice and requests of a team of people that have been doing this for years, That was quickly dispatched though and overall I'm impressed.

The Bad:

Nothing here is a deal breaker for me, just things to work on in the future.

Open bracket tournament organization... was awful at times. The flow was poor, I got the feeling you all were overwhelmed with the number of signups and the organizational difficulties that only appear at that scale. I had no good way of disseminating sever info other than going over to the players and manually assigning servers. This is how LAN events used to be ran years ago, but its 2017 and we have better solutions now. This got much better the later the event went on, but we still ended up super far behind and with a lot of teams discontent.

PC numbers. This has been addressed ad nauseum. I know you guys leveraged every single PC yall had. When there is a big TF2 LAN, we show up.

Servers... were desktop computers that had been set aside for this use. This is kind of a waste since the usual bottleneck on running a TF2 server is memory, certainly not gpu (doesn't even care if there is one) or processor (doesn't really utilize super heavily) so a pair of dedicated server rigs, even older ones you could pick up for 5-7 hundred would do just fine and not have to be set up time and time again. People were a little discontent (no more so than myself) that it took from when I got there at around 2pm on friday until almost 8 for the servers to get adequately set up. There were other cool things I wanted to do for samiface that would have made the LAN so much easier if we had chit chatted about things before hand and a little more prep work be put into that area the day before. Once everything was up and running, things went super smooth. Perhaps next time I will just bring my servers with me or something.

The PCs themselves had... weird issues. Someone's font crosshair wouldnt work because of a specific version of directx they were using that was no problem on any other computer. Another had no ability to join any server without deleting all their custom stuff. Several computers had to re-install TF2 on restart and the problems marched on. Some of that is #valve'sgame

EDIT:
In case I wasnt clear. I loved the event and would love to come back and would love to be even more involved with planning and execution so that its even better next time.

Disappointed nobody missed stats wizardry

showing the logs.tf page was certainly a downgrade from the neato stats graphics

No complaints. Perfect LAN, I enjoyed it. Hardly any delays and downtime. Big ups to ESA

Two things:

The weed maps sign on the stage cut-off a big portion of the main screen for spectators.

If there was catered food (beyond just some pizza, which I also bought) I definitely would have bought some rather than going outside to get food. Maybe you could do something with the area with the beanbags and tables - add a couple extra tables, add a screen of the main cast, and you could have a 'relatively quiet' little cafe/eating area.

only complaints i had was chairs, the fact that people had to download tf2 onto computers at a tf2 LAN. in my team alone we had to wait for that to be done 3 times on the computers I was on. towards the end ppl were so tired of it that we just played matches with people directly behind us because we didn't feel like moving and setting up again. Why not position tables so that teams face each other like was done for the invite teams during their scrims, to provide for less movement. or maybe just some cheap covers or something to put on the back of the tables.