AGDQ 2015 Feedback

RJCWILSON

2015-01-23 01:59:27 pm

Quote from flatluigi:

Quote from RJCWILSON:

Quote from TheMG2:

Uh... paper mario wasn't at this event at alll.

My bad, I meant RPG. Fixed.

SMRPG wasn't a race, it was a run by a single person (also it was a pretty good run too)

Difference of opinion here, no worries. Thanks for the info guys.

AlteisenRiese

2015-01-23 02:09:45 pm

Old Iron Giant

Speaking entirely as a viewer, I felt the event came off as incredibly dull and that in a sense hurt some of the runs as well, in particular during the first couple of days, everything felt so wooden and monotonous, like people where told to not show a personality, even people like Mecha and PJ seem unsually subdued during their runs, it was a strange thing to see.

The majority of the crowd being hidden as well didn't help, like it or not the crowd really helps a GDQ feel alive, that's where your hype is, the crowd, keep the no sign policy but obscuring them the ways you guys did was really dumb.

Lay-out was abysmal, there's gotta be a way to fit in those sponsors better, the room they took up could have been used for either a better game view or runner view, also that commercial you guys plays constantly got really, really obnoxious, if the intended effect was to get me to try their stuff, it failed.

Don't know if this was a scheduling issue, the schedule being to strong, or the delays things fell at incredibly odd hours, lots of really awesome stuff like awful block and the arcade block fell at strange hours instead of primetime which I felt they should have been at, again don't know what caused this, this is more of a personal thing really.

Twitch chat was a gigantic pile of shit like always and I am utterly baffled why isn't sub only, I guarantee you that if it was sub only the money from subs would like quadruple, everytime it went sub only during SGDQ I saw tons of people sub, there are streams that don't get even 1/4 of what you guys get and they went sub only because well, twitch, a 130k viewer stream cannot have an open chat, period, its just not possible, if people want poverty chats to spam their garbage that's what hosting is for.

Beyond these complaints, the rest of the event was solid, really hope the tech issues get ironed out as years go by and you guys get a super smooth GDQ.

Speaking entirely as a viewer, I felt the event came off as incredibly dull and that in a sense hurt some of the runs as well, in particular during the first couple of days, everything felt so wooden and monotonous, like people where told to not show a personality, even people like Mecha and PJ seem unsually subdued during their runs, it was a strange thing to see.

The majority of the crowd being hidden as well didn't help, like it or not the crowd really helps a GDQ feel alive, that's where your hype is, the crowd, keep the no sign policy but obscuring them the ways you guys did was really dumb.

Lay-out was abysmal, there's gotta be a way to fit in those sponsors better, the room they took up could have been used for either a better game view or runner view, also that commercial you guys plays constantly got really, really obnoxious, if the intended effect was to get me to try their stuff, it failed.

Don't know if this was a scheduling issue, the schedule being to strong, or the delays things fell at incredibly odd hours, lots of really awesome stuff like awful block and the arcade block fell at strange hours instead of primetime which I felt they should have been at, again don't know what caused this, this is more of a personal thing really.

Twitch chat was a gigantic pile of shit like always and I am utterly baffled why isn't sub only, I guarantee you that if it was sub only the money from subs would like quadruple, everytime it went sub only during SGDQ I saw tons of people sub, there are streams that don't get even 1/4 of what you guys get and they went sub only because well, twitch, a 130k viewer stream cannot have an open chat, period, its just not possible, if people want poverty chats to spam their garbage that's what hosting is for.

Beyond these complaints, the rest of the event was solid, really hope the tech issues get ironed out as years go by and you guys get a super smooth GDQ.

CosmykTheDolfyn

2015-01-23 02:14:14 pm

NowOwnsAFreaking Plane

Just a small thing: It would help to have 1 or 2 more people in tech at all times. I found myself lifting and moving equipment around because the tech guy needed help. I wasn't scheduled for that; in fact I was sitting on the couch getting ready to commentate the upcoming run. The lack of people for actually working on the equipment meant that the set up was only seconds shy of 30 minutes for a 26 minute run. That setup time would have been much shorter if there had been more than one person who knew the equipment to fix everything instead of one guy knowing what he was doing using the guy on the couch to help lift things. I'm not even sure what it was that broke, but I guess I should be glad that we did have back up stuff laying around. But to sum it all up, a non tech guy (me) was lifting vital pieces of equipment and help fix stuff before a run because of lack of help when I should have just been sitting on the couch. That just wasn't good.

I also agree that there was too many plugs/too few donations comments read. Obviously we need both, but there could have been a better balance. The sponsors were already visible on stream, I'd figure hosts could have talked about them about 20% less just due to that. Of course, I don't know all the details with all the sponsors so that may not have been a possibility.

Just a small thing: It would help to have 1 or 2 more people in tech at all times.  I found myself lifting and moving equipment around because the tech guy needed help.  I wasn't scheduled for that; in fact I was sitting on the couch getting ready to commentate the upcoming run.  The lack of people for actually working on the equipment meant that the set up was only seconds shy of 30 minutes for a 26 minute run.  That setup time would have been much shorter if there had been more than one person who knew the equipment to fix everything instead of one guy knowing what he was doing using the guy on the couch to help lift things.  I'm not even sure what it was that broke, but I guess I should be glad that we did have back up stuff laying around.  But to sum it all up, a non tech guy (me) was lifting vital pieces of equipment and help fix stuff before a run because of lack of help when I should have just been sitting on the couch.  That just wasn't good.

I also agree that there was too many plugs/too few donations comments read.  Obviously we need both, but there could have been a better balance.  The sponsors were already visible on stream, I'd figure hosts could have talked about them about 20% less just due to that.  Of course, I don't know all the details with all the sponsors so that may not have been a possibility.

Claude

2015-01-23 02:15:25 pm

If you know, you can foresee

This was my first time attending / running at a GDQ, and overall I had a fantastic time. Hotel was great, tech staff was very supportive, and I had a lot of fun. I'll just touch on a few minor complaints I had:

1. The TV I played on during my marathon run was huge. I play on a very small CRT at home, and practiced on a wide array of small + medium TVs in the practice room to get comfortable. When it came time for my race, I had to play on a TV that was far larger than anything I had practiced on during the event. I know l wasn't the only one who had some issue with the TV used during their actual run, and it truly does make a big difference as far as influencing performance. romscout did mention that the submission process will change in regards to requesting equipment, so it sounds like staff has already been made aware of this. I would hate to add even more variables to setup time, but having something as simple as a choice between a small / medium / large CRT would go a long way towards helping the runner feel comfortable.

2. Not all of the Super Nintendos in the practice room were modded to play SFC games. Considering what an easy mod this is, I was pretty surprised by this, and made finding a good SNES + TV combo a bit of a hassle. Fortunately I brought my own SNES anyways, so this wasn't a huge deal to me - but in the future, this should definitely be addressed.

3. As esi pointed out, there was a bit of confusion as to what games belonged in the casual / tournament room. In the end I just ended up checking both rooms to see what was going on, but for someone who was interested in playing non-Smash fighting games, I was a bit confused as to where I should be hanging out.

That about sums it up for me without repeating anyone else. Great job guys!

This was my first time attending / running at a GDQ, and overall I had a fantastic time. Hotel was great, tech staff was very supportive, and I had a lot of fun. I'll just touch on a few minor complaints I had:

1. The TV I played on during my marathon run was huge. I play on a very small CRT at home, and practiced on a wide array of small + medium TVs in the practice room to get comfortable. When it came time for my race, I had to play on a TV that was far larger than anything I had practiced on during the event. I know l wasn't the only one who had some issue with the TV used during their actual run, and it truly does make a big difference as far as influencing performance. romscout did mention that the submission process will change in regards to requesting equipment, so it sounds like staff has already been made aware of this. I would hate to add even more variables to setup time, but having something as simple as a choice between a small / medium / large CRT would go a long way towards helping the runner feel comfortable.

2. Not all of the Super Nintendos in the practice room were modded to play SFC games. Considering what an easy mod this is, I was pretty surprised by this, and made finding a good SNES + TV combo a bit of a hassle. Fortunately I brought my own SNES anyways, so this wasn't a huge deal to me - but in the future, this should definitely be addressed.

3. As esi pointed out, there was a bit of confusion as to what games belonged in the casual / tournament room. In the end I just ended up checking both rooms to see what was going on, but for someone who was interested in playing non-Smash fighting games, I was a bit confused as to where I should be hanging out.

That about sums it up for me without repeating anyone else. Great job guys!

Linkinito

Edit history:

Linkinito: 2015-01-23 02:19:03 pm

Linkinito: 2015-01-23 02:18:42 pm

Linkinito: 2015-01-23 02:18:18 pm

Linkinito: 2015-01-23 02:17:37 pm

Linkinito: 2015-01-23 02:17:35 pm

2015-01-23 02:16:40 pm

This is my avatar

My copy-paste from a feedback thread on Reddit. Feel free to check other feedback from here. These are mostly cons because everything that AGDQ made right was said quite a few times already.

The first two days

I think everybody will agree that the first 48 hours of the marathon were clearly not into the usual mood of the previous GDQ marathons. It was basically "NO FUN ALLOWED" and was hugely criticized on Reddit, but at least, they managed to get back on tracks and showing some fun scenes. But anyway, we felt that the audience ambiance was lacking a little bit.

Overly long "setup" times

When you look at the schedule, it was really clear, some games really had a very, very, very long setup time. Sometimes exceeding the actual duration of the run. It was the main cause of delay this year and led to cancel some runs in setup slots to catch up (like MGS Ground Zeroes). Also, if most of the time it was setup, sometimes, it was an addition to the run like an any% glitched run, or a glitch showcase, etc. And even though it was entertaining, it added even more delay to the schedule.

The "PCF controversy"

It started on Reddit, and even though it's impact is not proven, I'm pretty sure it turned off some people to donate. I think this controversy shouldn't have been started in the first place because anyway, it's all about giving for charity. I understand that some questions can be asked, but remember, it's the PREVENT Cancer Foundation. Of course the goal is to fight cancer, but they are specialized in a way to stop it before it starts. From the million of last year, $250,000 were dedicated for a research on cancer. The rest was for prevention. But honestly, people saying "76.5% of your donations go towards fighting cancer, the rest goes straight into the pockets of the executives" (while PCF is actually a non-profit organization!) are kinda harming the marathon. And that's ignoring what PCF has done for AGDQ this past years by providing it some unvaluable help.

The prizes

I think it was a big letdown this year. The only prize that really deserved to be considered as "grand prize" was the PS4, and, without a clear explanation, it was only up to Mega Man X3, because "Romscout wanted it".

(And check on agdq.ma.pe or alligatr.co.uk how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations. Even though some runs were great - look at GTA Vice City, praised by everyone, but very few donations throughout the whole run! And it was in graveyard shift)

Because honestly, I don't think getting a banner or Twitch swag was that interesting to motivate donations solely for that. Remember the Tychus Findlay statue? Donations during the Starcraft 2 run last year went through the roof. Even though the run was considered bad by Twitch Chat (I'll come back to it later), the amount of donations skyrocketed thanks to this goodie. A good prize can be a game changer. And I don't think the Pinball machine was attractive enough for a gamer audience as a grand prize. The best prizes? Consoles, games, artworks. I think the GDQ Staff should ask some help from Loading Ready Run. The Desert Bus marathons are awesome in terms of prizes because they get in touch with devs and publishers. Next GDQ should get more prizes, both official and handmade.

Sponsor promotion

Okay, they helped the marathon. Okay, they deserve a mention. But many people considered they went a bit over the top on this part because this time could have been useful to promote incentives and prizes. Even though nearly all incentives have been met, there wasn't that much exposition to them. I won't call that a sellout, but well, we've seen their logos nearly all the time on stream. I don't think that Something Artistic or Tiny Build needed that much exposition because their addition to the marathon wasn't clear. However, The Yetee and The Humble Bundle deserved all the exposition and they truly delivered ($45k in shirts and $200k from bundles).

Twitch Chat.

Well, it's toxic and hell as usual, but this year it went quite over the limit and I strongly think that for next editions, it should become sub-only (and let the freedom mode during setup times). After all, all the money from subs goes to charity, so I thought it would be a good thing. However, after doing some stats, I underestimated how popular Twitch Chat was this year: over 223,000 unique users. 22% of them (58k people) posted 10 messages or more, 10% (22k people) posted 25 messages or more. This drops at 4.6% (10k people) for 50 messages, 1.8% (3.9k people) for 100 messages, and 0.5% (1.1k people) for 200 messages. For my own part, I've posted 927 messages which puts me in the 0.015% most active users of Twitch Chat (33 people). I'm a sub, by the way.

Twitch Chat is part of the hype, but sometimes, it just gets very nasty.

Nintendoverdose of games

That's a proven fact, there was half the time and half the games dedicated to Nintendo platforms. We can't deny that some games bring a lot of donations, especially Zelda and Mario, but I think there should be some rebalancing on next editions, and give more space to Sega, Sony and Microsoft which were not that present, even though some big games from them were showed (Sonic block, iconic PlayStation licenses, Halo 2). I think that we could trade like a day of obscure games from Nintendo platforms towards heroes from other consoles. ESA does it better than GDQ, in my opinion.

My copy-paste from a [url=http://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/2s20ko/were_talking_about_the_best_of_agdq_but_what/]feedback thread on Reddit.[/url] Feel free to check other feedback from here. These are mostly cons because everything that AGDQ made right was said quite a few times already.

[b]The first two days[/b]

I think everybody will agree that the first 48 hours of the marathon were clearly not into the usual mood of the previous GDQ marathons. It was basically "NO FUN ALLOWED" and was hugely criticized on Reddit, but at least, they managed to get back on tracks and showing some fun scenes. But anyway, we felt that the audience ambiance was lacking a little bit.

[b]Overly long "setup" times[/b]

When you look at the schedule, it was really clear, some games really had a very, very, very long setup time. Sometimes exceeding the actual duration of the run. It was the main cause of delay this year and led to cancel some runs in setup slots to catch up (like MGS Ground Zeroes). Also, if most of the time it was setup, sometimes, it was an addition to the run like an any% glitched run, or a glitch showcase, etc. And even though it was entertaining, it added even more delay to the schedule.

[b]The "PCF controversy"[/b]

It started on Reddit, and even though it's impact is not proven, I'm pretty sure it turned off some people to donate. I think this controversy shouldn't have been started in the first place because anyway, it's all about giving for charity. I understand that some questions can be asked, but remember, it's the PREVENT Cancer Foundation. Of course the goal is to fight cancer, but they are specialized in a way to stop it before it starts. From the million of last year, $250,000 were dedicated for a research on cancer. The rest was for prevention. But honestly, people saying "76.5% of your donations go towards fighting cancer, the rest goes straight into the pockets of the executives" (while PCF is actually a non-profit organization!) are kinda harming the marathon. And that's ignoring what PCF has done for AGDQ this past years by providing it some unvaluable help.

[b]The prizes[/b]

I think it was a big letdown this year. The only prize that really deserved to be considered as "grand prize" was the PS4, and, without a clear explanation, it was only up to Mega Man X3, because "Romscout wanted it".

(And check on [url=http://agdq.ma.pe]agdq.ma.pe[/url] or [url=http://alligatr.co.uk]alligatr.co.uk[/url] how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations. Even though some runs were great - look at GTA Vice City, praised by everyone, but very few donations throughout the whole run! And it was in graveyard shift)

Because honestly, I don't think getting a banner or Twitch swag was that interesting to motivate donations solely for that. Remember the Tychus Findlay statue? Donations during the Starcraft 2 run last year went through the roof. Even though the run was considered bad by Twitch Chat (I'll come back to it later), the amount of donations skyrocketed thanks to this goodie. A good prize can be a game changer. And I don't think the Pinball machine was attractive enough for a gamer audience as a grand prize. The best prizes? Consoles, games, artworks. I think the GDQ Staff should ask some help from Loading Ready Run. The Desert Bus marathons are awesome in terms of prizes because they get in touch with devs and publishers. Next GDQ should get more prizes, both official and handmade.

[b]Sponsor promotion[/b]

Okay, they helped the marathon. Okay, they deserve a mention. But many people considered they went a bit over the top on this part because this time could have been useful to promote incentives and prizes. Even though nearly all incentives have been met, there wasn't that much exposition to them. I won't call that a sellout, but well, we've seen their logos nearly all the time on stream. I don't think that Something Artistic or Tiny Build needed that much exposition because their addition to the marathon wasn't clear. However, The Yetee and The Humble Bundle deserved all the exposition and they truly delivered ($45k in shirts and $200k from bundles).

[b]Twitch Chat.[/b]

Well, it's toxic and hell as usual, but this year it went quite over the limit and I strongly think that for next editions, it should become sub-only (and let the freedom mode during setup times). After all, all the money from subs goes to charity, so I thought it would be a good thing. However, after doing some stats, I underestimated how popular Twitch Chat was this year: over 223,000 unique users. 22% of them (58k people) posted 10 messages or more, 10% (22k people) posted 25 messages or more. This drops at 4.6% (10k people) for 50 messages, 1.8% (3.9k people) for 100 messages, and 0.5% (1.1k people) for 200 messages. For my own part, I've posted 927 messages which puts me in the 0.015% most active users of Twitch Chat (33 people). I'm a sub, by the way.

Twitch Chat is part of the hype, but sometimes, it just gets very nasty.

[b]Nintendoverdose of games[/b]

That's a proven fact, there was half the time and half the games dedicated to Nintendo platforms. We can't deny that some games bring a lot of donations, especially Zelda and Mario, but I think there should be some rebalancing on next editions, and give more space to Sega, Sony and Microsoft which were not that present, even though some big games from them were showed (Sonic block, iconic PlayStation licenses, Halo 2). I think that we could trade like a day of obscure games from Nintendo platforms towards heroes from other consoles. ESA does it better than GDQ, in my opinion.

MrStarbird

2015-01-23 02:16:49 pm

Leader of Starbirdia!

from a watching standpoint...

pros: the stream format (the layout) was much improved over last year. having the frame where it would switch between sponsors and prizes was very well thought out, especially where viewers could see what prizes they were bidding on. game selection was very diverse and interesting throughout almost every day.

cons: really had to think of anything that could be used for improvements. if I think of any I'll let you know.

overall very enjoyable to watch. you guys really out-did yourself this time.

TruthBomber

2015-01-23 02:17:52 pm

Putting the chat into submode would reduce viewership/viewer retention. With ~100,000 viewers average for a week there's no way the chat is going to be a source of valuable discussion, submode or not. Submode runs the risk of chat volume being too low, or being a circlejerk of its own kind which might turn viewers away ala the forced HOIP and 'cringe'worthy moments do. the forced HOIP and cringe moments are weathered by people having an outlet to spam their failfishes and residentsleepers and c r i n g e b o i z. Like it or not, AGDQ is community driven and the twitch chat drives the momentum of the event. I feel like by and large, given the volume of traffic that goes through twitch chat, the people who dislike it are statistical outliers in the grand scheme of things, and the onus should be on those people to close the chat or use twitch's functionality to open up an alternative chat in the sidebar.

Onin

2015-01-23 02:26:14 pm

During Vulajin's Transistor run, I donated in the hopes of surprising him with the new WR I'd gotten just a day prior. It never got read out. This despite there being ample downtime in the run, and the host mentioning not having many good donations to read. Of course, I'd considered it possible that my donation would've been missed, or that it was too late somehow, or that the tracker bug ate it. Disappointing, but can't be helped.

Then UraniumAnchor checked the tracker. My donation got tagged "Ignore". A donation comment related to the run, from a friend of the runner's, got intentionally ignored. And not in favour of "better" donation comments, however you'd define that. UA agreed: Someone fucked up.

ShadowDraft had the same thing happen to him, a donation with comment related to the speedrun at hand (I think it was during Broforce?) not being read out. I'm not sure if it was actively ignored as well, but there's a good chance.

This is still, despite all the work to increase the audience and widen the appeal every year, a speedrunning marathon. I do not understand why things related to speedrunning are being ignored, not just in favour of cancer-related stuff, but just ignored on the off-set.

I don't want to blame whoever ran the tracker during the Transistor run, or whenever else. Because no doubt that person got instructed. And if said instructions even implied, remotely, that cancer is more important than speedrunning, the entire system is fucked up.

During Vulajin's Transistor run, I donated in the hopes of surprising him with the new WR I'd gotten just a day prior. It never got read out. This despite there being ample downtime in the run, and the host mentioning not having many good donations to read. Of course, I'd considered it possible that my donation would've been missed, or that it was too late somehow, or that the tracker bug ate it. Disappointing, but can't be helped.

Then UraniumAnchor checked the tracker. My donation got tagged "Ignore". A donation comment related to the run, from a friend of the runner's, got intentionally ignored. And not in favour of "better" donation comments, however you'd define that. UA agreed: Someone fucked up.

ShadowDraft had the same thing happen to him, a donation with comment related to the speedrun at hand (I think it was during Broforce?) not being read out. I'm not sure if it was actively ignored as well, but there's a good chance.

This is still, despite all the work to increase the audience and widen the appeal every year, a [b]speedrunning [/b]marathon. I do not understand why things [b]related to speedrunning[/b] are being ignored, not just in favour of cancer-related stuff, [b]but just ignored on the off-set.[/b]

I don't want to blame whoever ran the tracker during the Transistor run, or whenever else. Because no doubt that person got instructed. And if said instructions even [b]implied, remotely,[/b] that cancer is more important than speedrunning, [b]the entire system is fucked up.[/b]

Overfiendvip

2015-01-23 02:33:41 pm

never a frown

I'll try to take up as little space as possible for this (perhaps wildly unpopular and mildly off-topic) opinion - as an attendee that enjoys speedrunning to the point where I probably spend the most time out of the vast majority of people there practicing games and actually speedrunning, I sincerely hope you have more events like SGDQ 2014 in terms of the event's physical layout, if that's at all possible. Thank you.

Silverbawxer

Edit history:

Silverbawxer: 2015-01-23 02:36:40 pm

2015-01-23 02:35:55 pm

round the outside, round the outside

I guess I'll be the guy that has to say it... please do a better job with the donation messages. After the first few runs I watched at the event, I was sick and tired of hearing a sob story with every other donation. I know this event is to raise money for charity to help prevent cancer, but nobody wants to hear about dead relatives. I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but every single cancer comment was a buzzkill for the entire stream room. It puts a damper on the hype and the excitement of the run, and the event as a whole. Please focus on speedrunning related donation comments more, since this is a speedrunning event after all.

That being said, this was my first time attending the event in person and the entire thing was fantastic. There are no other major problems I had with how the event was handled, you all did a great job running this thing.

Forstride

Edit history:

Forstride: 2015-01-23 02:42:41 pm

Forstride: 2015-01-23 02:41:57 pm

2015-01-23 02:40:16 pm

As a first time attendee, there wasn't really a whole lot to complain about honestly. The hotel itself was great, with nice rooms and comfy beds, awesome showers, and friendly staff. I'd say the biggest problem was not having any food places or other stores in walking distance to the hotel. I was with people that had cars most of the time, and we'd all go out to dinner together, but there were a few times where I ended up having to order food to the hotel because they went to eat lunch before I woke up or whatever, and I'd much rather spend, say, a few dollars on a burger at a place within walking distance than $20+ on a pizza delivered to the hotel.

Also, there seemed to be a lack of TVs in the casual/practice rooms. Or at least, TVs that worked...There were a lot of TVs that only had RF support, and some that just flat out didn't work (Not being able to switch to the A/V input, input delay, etc.).

With the streaming room, I wish there could've been more chairs behind the couch. I was supposed to sit in for a run on the first day (I'm friends with the runner and he said it was fine obviously), but a bunch of other people wanted to sit in as well, and it was like a mad dash to see who could get a seat first. It also happened during my own run to my knowledge, with some people not being able to get a seat, and I imagine it happened with a lot of other runs as well. Plus, with more chairs available to people, it'd help to make the stream feel less empty, which a lot of people were complaining about.

As far as running a game goes, the only problem I experienced was that when I went back to watch the VOD of my run, my voice was really, really quiet. I didn't think I was talking too quietly during my run, so I'm not sure if it was just the mic's sensitivity, or something with the audio levels on the stream.

As a first time attendee, there wasn't really a whole lot to complain about honestly.  The hotel itself was great, with nice rooms and comfy beds, awesome showers, and friendly staff.  I'd say the biggest problem was not having any food places or other stores in walking distance to the hotel.  I was with people that had cars most of the time, and we'd all go out to dinner together, but there were a few times where I ended up having to order food to the hotel because they went to eat lunch before I woke up or whatever, and I'd much rather spend, say, a few dollars on a burger at a place within walking distance than $20+ on a pizza delivered to the hotel.

Also, there seemed to be a lack of TVs in the casual/practice rooms.  Or at least, TVs that worked...There were a lot of TVs that only had RF support, and some that just flat out didn't work (Not being able to switch to the A/V input, input delay, etc.).

With the streaming room, I wish there could've been more chairs behind the couch.  I was supposed to sit in for a run on the first day (I'm friends with the runner and he said it was fine obviously), but a bunch of other people wanted to sit in as well, and it was like a mad dash to see who could get a seat first.  It also happened during my own run to my knowledge, with some people not being able to get a seat, and I imagine it happened with a lot of other runs as well.  Plus, with more chairs available to people, it'd help to make the stream feel less empty, which a lot of people were complaining about.

As far as running a game goes, the only problem I experienced was that when I went back to watch the VOD of my run, my voice was really, really quiet.  I didn't think I was talking too quietly during my run, so I'm not sure if it was just the mic's sensitivity, or something with the audio levels on the stream.

Miles

Edit history:

Miles: 2015-01-23 02:46:16 pm

2015-01-23 02:42:50 pm

A few things that immediately come to mind:

Wario Land 4: I was really not a fan of the stream room layout, with the audience not visible during the run. At the very least if you're going to keep the audience to the side like that in the future, then put more rows of chairs behind the couch.

Wario Land 4: The overfocus on sponsors. Aside from the stream layout/mentions on stream, I feel they took up too much space on the site itself; I shouldn't have to scroll down on my 1920x1080 monitor in order to view the entire stream, i.e. the entire reason I'm viewing the website. At the very least put them under the stream instead.

Wario Land 4: The NO SMASH IN THE CASUAL ROOM rule was too heavy-handed, forcing people to stop their casual 8-player Smash and move the 60 inch TV they were playing it on to the tournament room was... Who exactly thought that was a good idea?

Wario Land 4: The bathroom doors what the hell.

Quote from Linkinito:

(And check on agdq.ma.pe or alligatr.co.uk how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations.

That probably has more to do with the bug that managed to leave out 400K in donations, which AFAIK was introduced in the latter half of the marathon. I do agree that the prize situation was weird though ("Twitch Swag" as the grand prize, what?).

A few things that immediately come to mind:

[b]Wario Land 4:[/b] I was really not a fan of the stream room layout, with the audience not visible during the run. At the very least if you're going to keep the audience to the side like that in the future, then put more rows of chairs behind the couch.

[b]Wario Land 4:[/b] The overfocus on sponsors. Aside from the stream layout/mentions on stream, I feel they took up [url=https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7GnhBDCYAAAffn.png:large]too much space on the site itself[/url]; I shouldn't have to scroll down on my 1920x1080 monitor in order to view the entire stream, i.e. the entire reason I'm viewing the website. At the very least put them under the stream instead.

[b]Wario Land 4:[/b] The NO SMASH IN THE CASUAL ROOM rule was too heavy-handed, forcing people to stop their casual 8-player Smash and move the 60 inch TV they were playing it on to the tournament room was... Who exactly thought that was a good idea?

[b]Wario Land 4:[/b] The bathroom doors what the hell.

[quote="Linkinito"](And check on [url=http://agdq.ma.pe]agdq.ma.pe[/url] or [url=http://alligatr.co.uk]alligatr.co.uk[/url] how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations.[/quote]
That probably has more to do with the bug that managed to leave out 400K in donations, which AFAIK was introduced in the latter half of the marathon. I do agree that the prize situation was weird though ("Twitch Swag" as the grand prize, what?).

Cool Matty

Edit history:

Cool Matty: 2015-01-23 03:49:54 pm

2015-01-23 02:43:54 pm

Crawlathon WR, get down on my level.

I am cherry-picking things that I can answer now, directly, as tech staff. Others will reply in due time, this thread is moving really fast.

Quote from BubblesDelFuego:

2. After submissions and during the scheduling process there should be a thread on here asking runners what they would like to have as their music which will be played during the setup for their game. It would probably be video game music related to the game. For example: TMR may suggest having Clock Tower play before he does a run of Castlevania IV.

4. Videos of the runs should be uploaded to the YouTube page much, much faster. I understand completely that this is being worked on as much as it can, but maybe if during the volunteer forum there can be a spot for people to offer their services as dedicated uploaders. During the marathons there are multiple rouge YouTube accounts that upload and monetize the GDQ's content, and kicking their video off the internet is a hassle. There are also online news cites that contact the runners and ask when the videos will be uploaded, and for the purposes of "fresh news" the runs should be uploaded within a few days of happening. Also, the sooner the videos are uploaded to the SDA channel means more views on the SDA channel, and then the SDA channel can monetize the videos and raise even more money for charity.

But that's all that I can think of besides some obvious stuff that will probably get posted anyway. Thanks again for the great event.

#2: It will always be video game music, particularly chiptune because it's less likely (although I acknowledge it still happens) to get flagged for VODs. For the same reason, I will not give people the option to choose their own music. Finally, managing song plays for each runner would be a tremendous amount of effort required for our tech staff and that's not fair to them. It's best to have something that is automatic and requires extremely little fiddling, so tech can focus on getting the next game up.

#4: Agreed, but we don't want to simply just push Twitch VODs over to YouTube. We want to maintain a level of quality that is high, so we want to use local recordings. I want to make this happen for SGDQ. That said, we have a LOT of planning, research and preparation to figure out the best way to do this with the least amount of volunteer effort.

Quote from flatluigi:

Apologies if this is off-base, but I feel there should be at least one more competent tech person there so UA can actually sleep at some point - or at least a dedicated person or two who can be super focused on monitoring how things are coming across on stream. Those issues were fairly few and far between, but stuff like the Transistor run being muted for the first 10 minutes just shouldn't have happened and the Risk of Rain run should've had some allowances made for how unreadable the gameplay was on stream. I was also really surprised to see that the computer setups were still on Windows 8, as I thought that was the cause of a lot of issues in previous marathons.

Finally something super subjective: not having a crowd mic was a mistake and (for the first day at least) the marathon just didn't have the feel of being a big thing despite it being the biggest GDQ yet! Music interludes were a good (if late) addition, as was messing around with the crowd cam. There was also super harsh gating on the mics, leaving the setup times in dead silence (instead of hearing minor crowd noise).

I believe there should have been an experienced tech person on station at all times in addition to newbie tech. Honestly, sometimes mistakes happen (no one was actually listening when they should have been during Transistor), but I do know newbie techs felt they weren't being allowed enough control. I do want to work on that so that it's not effectively one person running the show up there.

The crowd mic always existed, but the issue was it was turned extremely low at the beginning of the marathon due to fear of feedback. I personally worked on this mid-marathon, but we were running out of time to fix less important things like that before the event. It'll definitely come back next GDQ.

SETUP ISSUES:

Many of the issues with setup were trying to accommodate special-case setups for games. And worse still, is these setups would be made and then left for future staff to discover and undo during graveyard. Overall, surprisingly, communication was the biggest downfall this GDQ.

For SGDQ, we are going to have a schematic for ALL hardware and cabling, and we will stick to that as closely as possible. Any revisions will be noted so staff later in the day can catch up on anything that went wrong.

Finally, some of the setup time was due to runners not communicating, or not taking care of their particular setups. In the future, we will be less willing to accommodate special setup changes that we are not informed of prior to the event. If you know you need a particular type of TV for instance, and you're waiting until your run is being set up, that is unacceptable. That creates delays in the marathon, and impacts other runners.

To help curb some of that, the game submission form for SGDQ will include a field to describe anything special you need to perform your run. We can't guarantee we can provide everything, but at least we can let you know if it will be a problem.

To be clear, for unforeseen issues, bugs and things that the runners aren't aware of, we'll always do what we can. I just want runners to take charge in other situations, such as needing specific TVs, or a PAL game. It hurts the marathon and other runners when a runner arrives unprepared.

Quote from final fight cd:

why can't there be TWO dedicated "couches?" as one is running a game, the other is getting setup for the next. that way, there actually might be a seamless transition between runs. it seemed the viewer count dropped by 20-30K when a run finished, which i'm sure can be mainly attributed to the expected LLOONNGG setup for the next run.

This isn't a logistical possibility. It would require significantly more equipment, more staff, and there is only one streaming computer. We couldn't check if they were set up beforehand, so time saved would be minimal.

Quote from boredeathly:

For hosting, a mute button or a push to talk key would have been nice. The noise gate was very harsh and would cut out the host's voice mid sentence.
Also this sounds silly but could the host get some sort of colored sign to wave to get the audio tech's attention? Like wave red side at them to get muted and green side to be unmuted. It was sometimes hard to get their attention with just a waving hand.

There was supposed to be a nice mute button and setup for host, but I ran out of time to prepare that due to the extra workload with Mike being out of commission. That's on me, will be there for SGDQ. The host controller will probably have a way to flag down tech staff too.

Quote from KennyMan666:

Also, that Tinybuild commerical. Who the hell makes a commercial showcasing a bunch of different games without including the game names? That made that commercial completely pointless for a viewer.

Tinybuild made the ad. I'd ask them. Tongue

Quote from StingerPA:

Submission Process

This was definitely an improvement over last year. I felt that SDA thread was well handled, especially with all the salt that came through (FFT), and I appreciated the forums not being completely obliterated this time around. The Salt-o-meter was good to see how far along the staff was in processing the submissions.

However, it wasn't perfect. Submitting 2 categories for a game was a pain in the ass, especially since you were expected to cram pitches for both categories into the already very limited space for a single category. This also cluttered the submissions after being processed as both categories would look to be accepted, and it wasn't clear which one until well after the fact when Mike was able to put comments in.

Suggestion: Make it so that we can have 10 submissions, like the rules imply (5 games, 2 categories each means up to 10), or change the policy regarding that. You can simply have the system auto-reject a person's submissions if more than 5 distinct games are entered. People might try to get around that, but it shouldn't be so many that they can't be manually handled. This would also clear up the other issue of which categories are/are not accepted through the first round. For example, Escape Goat 2 had any% and 100% submitted together, but 100% was never really considered. Making them separate submissions would eliminate any confusion.

The category issue was entirely an oversight on Mike and myself. During development we didn't really realize the need for this. This system will be dramatically improved, particularly with how it is presented. Categories will be selected when approved immediately as well. We won't be using your suggestions here, because I am overhauling it entirely to work better with categories in mind.

Quote from Naegleria:

audio issues (AGDQ 2015 Contra TMR was audible, everyone else was quiet. everytime someone scratched their ear/moved their hair/removed the mic, there was a loud screech)
(AGDQ 2013 Contra blue yeti didnt have these issues, I know I'm in the minority here, but I really prefer having one mic that picks up everything over a bunch of mics that pick up some things. Also, the field of view of the cameras is great in the AGDQ 2013 Contra video)

I don't know what was with that contra run. The reason the two guys weren't audible is because they're "sharing" a mic by holding it between them. There is no reason for this to be happening. There was 4 mics and that's all the commentators there should be. We have that rule for exactly this reason.

Also, AGDQ2013 did not have a Yeti, we were using my MXL mics (now the crowd mic), which would be completely unusable with the size of the event these days. Keep in mind the event is completely different scale now. It would pick up every footstep in a 10 meter area if we used that same setup this year.

Quote from TruthBomber:

With the amount of money that goes into this event, and the viewership and profile it has, I think it is high time there are some A/V and event management professionals to keep things running smoothly, and get the details right. Ignoring setup times, Details like:
-Mic levels being atrociously varied. Given that GDQ events have the luxury of still being an event with a somewhat casual air, I think it would be worth having people do a quick mic level test (if they're running clipons) or getting a boom mic to mic up the couch. Especially given that the couch was seperated from the main viewing area by big screens that help to inhibit noise, I think it is worth having someone vetting mic volume actively (label the EQ) or to have the boom mic running to avoid having to mic up every commentator.
-Colour temperature on different screens/capture sources being varied. This is probably not as pressing an issue for many people as it is to me, but its a production & polish issue that would only take a small amount of time to resolve.
-Donation reader needs to be able to mute themselves, as you touched on.

We can't afford professionals for the length of our event, and unfortunately the few volunteer people with any audio/video experience are generally from theater backgrounds.

I have been told by various talented A/V people that a shotgun mic (such as a boom) would not work at all. Keep in mind the runners are having game audio blasted in their face, which is a problem no traditional broadcast station has.

UraniumAnchor says that the color temperature issue varies by source type and capture card. I know personally that these issues can break themselves on their own, even after they've been fixed. We have to simplify our setup for volunteers, and adjusting this for every run where it is necessary would increase the probability of something going wrong. Particularly since the area where those settings exist involves other dangerous options that can break the stream layout or crash a capture card entirely.

Quote from Claude:

2. Not all of the Super Nintendos in the practice room were modded to play SFC games. Considering what an easy mod this is, I was pretty surprised by this, and made finding a good SNES + TV combo a bit of a hassle. Fortunately I brought my own SNES anyways, so this wasn't a huge deal to me - but in the future, this should definitely be addressed.

We don't provide the equipment for any other rooms other than TVs. World9 Gaming provided the vast majority of consoles (and TVs) in the practice room. Runners should expect to bring their own equipment for cases such as these, because we can't realistically manage that much equipment on top of what we already have. We'll make this more obvious on the submission form.

Quote from Linkinito:

Overly long "setup" times

When you look at the schedule, it was really clear, some games really had a very, very, very long setup time. Sometimes exceeding the actual duration of the run. It was the main cause of delay this year and led to cancel some runs in setup slots to catch up (like MGS Ground Zeroes). Also, if most of the time it was setup, sometimes, it was an addition to the run like an any% glitched run, or a glitch showcase, etc. And even though it was entertaining, it added even more delay to the schedule.

Just want to point out that setup times on the schedule included bonus incentives, so not all runs were as bad as the setup may imply.

Quote:

(And check on agdq.ma.pe or alligatr.co.uk how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations. Even though some runs were great - look at GTA Vice City, praised by everyone, but very few donations throughout the whole run! And it was in graveyard shift)

The data you were looking at was not updated with the revised tracker donations. Those days were a significant chunk of the $400k that was missing in the tracker.

Quote:

With the streaming room, I wish there could've been more chairs behind the couch. I was supposed to sit in for a run on the first day (I'm friends with the runner and he said it was fine obviously), but a bunch of other people wanted to sit in as well, and it was like a mad dash to see who could get a seat first. It also happened during my own run to my knowledge, with some people not being able to get a seat, and I imagine it happened with a lot of other runs as well. Plus, with more chairs available to people, it'd help to make the stream feel less empty, which a lot of people were complaining about.

The number of chairs were intentional. It's not intended to be a second crowd, just a group that is supporting the runner directly. You may notice later in the event, more chairs found their way over (much to my chagrin), and setup time increased because of the number of people loitering around. In addition, it increases the likelihood of people talking, interfering with the runner, and trying to commentate when they shouldn't be.

Wario Land 4: Yeah, that was fixed. Except during bonus stream, because it was bonus stream.

[b]I am cherry-picking things that I can answer now, directly, as tech staff.[/b] Others will reply in due time, this thread is moving really fast.

[quote="BubblesDelFuego"]
2. After submissions and during the scheduling process there should be a thread on here asking runners what they would like to have as their music which will be played during the setup for their game. It would probably be video game music related to the game. For example: TMR may suggest having Clock Tower play before he does a run of Castlevania IV.

4. Videos of the runs should be uploaded to the YouTube page much, much faster. I understand completely that this is being worked on as much as it can, but maybe if during the volunteer forum there can be a spot for people to offer their services as dedicated uploaders. During the marathons there are multiple rouge YouTube accounts that upload and monetize the GDQ's content, and kicking their video off the internet is a hassle. There are also online news cites that contact the runners and ask when the videos will be uploaded, and for the purposes of "fresh news" the runs should be uploaded within a few days of happening. Also, the sooner the videos are uploaded to the SDA channel means more views on the SDA channel, and then the SDA channel can monetize the videos and raise [b]even more money [/b]for charity.

But that's all that I can think of besides some obvious stuff that will probably get posted anyway. Thanks again for the great event.[/quote]

#2: It will always be video game music, particularly chiptune because it's less likely (although I acknowledge it still happens) to get flagged for VODs. For the same reason, I will not give people the option to choose their own music. Finally, managing song plays for each runner would be a tremendous amount of effort required for our tech staff and that's not fair to them. It's best to have something that is automatic and requires extremely little fiddling, so tech can focus on getting the next game up.

#4: Agreed, but we don't want to simply just push Twitch VODs over to YouTube. We want to maintain a level of quality that is high, so we want to use local recordings. I want to make this happen for SGDQ. That said, we have a LOT of planning, research and preparation to figure out the best way to do this with the least amount of volunteer effort.

[quote="flatluigi"]
Apologies if this is off-base, but I feel there should be at least one more competent tech person there so UA can actually sleep at some point - or at least a dedicated person or two who can be super focused on monitoring how things are coming across on stream. Those issues were fairly few and far between, but stuff like the Transistor run being muted for the first 10 minutes just shouldn't have happened and the Risk of Rain run should've had some allowances made for how unreadable the gameplay was on stream. I was also really surprised to see that the computer setups were still on Windows 8, as I thought that was the cause of a lot of issues in previous marathons.

Finally something super subjective: not having a crowd mic was a mistake and (for the first day at least) the marathon just didn't have the feel of being a big thing despite it being the biggest GDQ yet! Music interludes were a good (if late) addition, as was messing around with the crowd cam. There was also super harsh gating on the mics, leaving the setup times in dead silence (instead of hearing minor crowd noise). 
[/quote]

I believe there should have been an experienced tech person on station at all times in addition to newbie tech. Honestly, sometimes mistakes happen (no one was actually listening when they should have been during Transistor), but I do know newbie techs felt they weren't being allowed enough control. I do want to work on that so that it's not effectively one person running the show up there.

The crowd mic always existed, but the issue was it was turned extremely low at the beginning of the marathon due to fear of feedback. I personally worked on this mid-marathon, but we were running out of time to fix less important things like that before the event. It'll definitely come back next GDQ.

[b]SETUP ISSUES:[/b]

Many of the issues with setup were trying to accommodate special-case setups for games. And worse still, is these setups would be made and then left for future staff to discover and undo during graveyard. Overall, surprisingly, communication was the biggest downfall this GDQ.

For SGDQ, we are going to have a schematic for ALL hardware and cabling, and we will stick to that as closely as possible. Any revisions will be noted so staff later in the day can catch up on anything that went wrong.

Finally, some of the setup time was due to runners not communicating, or not taking care of their particular setups. In the future, we will be less willing to accommodate special setup changes that we are not informed of prior to the event. If you know you need a particular type of TV for instance, and you're waiting until your run is being set up, that is unacceptable. That creates delays in the marathon, and impacts other runners.

To help curb some of that, the game submission form for SGDQ will include a field to describe anything special you need to perform your run. We can't guarantee we can provide everything, but at least we can let you know if it will be a problem.

[b]To be clear, for unforeseen issues, bugs and things that the runners aren't aware of, we'll always do what we can.[/b] I just want runners to take charge in other situations, such as needing specific TVs, or a PAL game. It hurts the marathon and other runners when a runner arrives unprepared.

[quote="final fight cd"]why can't there be TWO dedicated "couches?"  as one is running a game, the other is getting setup for the next.  that way, there actually might be a seamless transition between runs.  it seemed the viewer count dropped by 20-30K when a run finished, which i'm sure can be mainly attributed to the expected LLOONNGG setup for the next run.

[/quote]

This isn't a logistical possibility. It would require significantly more equipment, more staff, and there is only one streaming computer. We couldn't check if they were set up beforehand, so time saved would be minimal.

[quote="boredeathly"]For hosting, a mute button or a push to talk key would have been nice. The noise gate was very harsh and would cut out the host's voice mid sentence.
Also this sounds silly but could the host get some sort of colored sign to wave to get the audio tech's attention? Like wave red side at them to get muted and green side to be unmuted. It was sometimes hard to get their attention with just a waving hand.
[/quote]

There was supposed to be a nice mute button and setup for host, but I ran out of time to prepare that due to the extra workload with Mike being out of commission. That's on me, will be there for SGDQ. The host controller will probably have a way to flag down tech staff too.

[quote="KennyMan666"]
Also, that Tinybuild commerical. Who the hell makes a commercial showcasing a bunch of different games [i]without including the game names[/i]? That made that commercial completely pointless for a viewer.
[/quote]

Tinybuild made the ad. I'd ask them. :P

[quote="StingerPA"]Submission Process

This was definitely an improvement over last year. I felt that SDA thread was well handled, especially with all the salt that came through (FFT), and I appreciated the forums not being completely obliterated this time around.  The Salt-o-meter was good to see how far along the staff was in processing the submissions.

However, it wasn't perfect.  Submitting 2 categories for a game was a pain in the ass, especially since you were expected to cram pitches for both categories into the already very limited space for a single category. This also cluttered the submissions after being processed as both categories would look to be accepted, and it wasn't clear which one until well after the fact when Mike was able to put comments in.

Suggestion: Make it so that we can have 10 submissions, like the rules imply (5 games, 2 categories each means up to 10), or change the policy regarding that.  You can simply have the system auto-reject a person's submissions if more than 5 distinct games are entered.  People might try to get around that, but it shouldn't be so many that they can't be manually handled.  This would also clear up the other issue of which categories are/are not accepted through the first round.  For example, Escape Goat 2 had any% and 100% submitted together, but 100% was never really considered.  Making them separate submissions would eliminate any confusion.
[/quote]

The category issue was entirely an oversight on Mike and myself. During development we didn't really realize the need for this. This system will be dramatically improved, particularly with how it is presented. Categories will be selected when approved immediately as well. We won't be using your suggestions here, because I am overhauling it entirely to work better with categories in mind.

[quote="Naegleria"]

audio issues (AGDQ 2015 Contra http://youtu.be/_k74rJ-wtrE?t=8m44s TMR was audible, everyone else was quiet. everytime someone scratched their ear/moved their hair/removed the mic, there was a loud screech)
(AGDQ 2013 Contra http://youtu.be/n_pJJOfHh18?t=4m35s blue yeti didnt have these issues, I know I'm in the minority here, but I really prefer having one mic that picks up everything over a bunch of mics that pick up some things. Also, the field of view of the cameras is great in the AGDQ 2013 Contra video)
[/quote]

I don't know what was with that contra run. The reason the two guys weren't audible is because they're "sharing" a mic by holding it between them. There is no reason for this to be happening. There was 4 mics and that's all the commentators there should be. We have that rule for exactly this reason.

Also, AGDQ2013 did not have a Yeti, we were using my MXL mics (now the crowd mic), which would be completely unusable with the size of the event these days. Keep in mind the event is completely different scale now. It would pick up every footstep in a 10 meter area if we used that same setup this year.

[quote="TruthBomber"]

With the amount of money that goes into this event, and the viewership and profile it has, I think it is high time there are some A/V and event management professionals to keep things running smoothly, and get the details right.  Ignoring setup times, Details like:
-Mic levels being atrociously varied. Given that GDQ events have the luxury of still being an event with a somewhat casual air, I think it would be worth having people do a quick mic level test (if they're running clipons) or getting a boom mic to mic up the couch.  Especially given that the couch was seperated from the main viewing area by big screens that help to inhibit noise, I think it is worth having someone vetting mic volume actively (label the EQ) or to have the boom mic running to avoid having to mic up every commentator.
-Colour temperature on different screens/capture sources being varied.  This is probably not as pressing an issue for many people as it is to me, but its a production & polish issue that would only take a small amount of time to resolve.  
-Donation reader needs to be able to mute themselves, as you touched on.
[/quote]

We can't afford professionals for the length of our event, and unfortunately the few volunteer people with any audio/video experience are generally from theater backgrounds.

I have been told by various talented A/V people that a shotgun mic (such as a boom) would not work at all. Keep in mind the runners are having game audio blasted in their face, which is a problem no traditional broadcast station has.

UraniumAnchor says that the color temperature issue varies by source type and capture card. I know personally that these issues can break themselves on their own, even after they've been fixed. We have to simplify our setup for volunteers, and adjusting this for every run where it is necessary would increase the probability of something going wrong. Particularly since the area where those settings exist involves other dangerous options that can break the stream layout or crash a capture card entirely.

[quote="Claude"]
2. Not all of the Super Nintendos in the practice room were modded to play SFC games. Considering what an easy mod this is, I was pretty surprised by this, and made finding a good SNES + TV combo a bit of a hassle. Fortunately I brought my own SNES anyways, so this wasn't a huge deal to me - but in the future, this should definitely be addressed.

[/quote]

We don't provide the equipment for any other rooms other than TVs. World9 Gaming provided the vast majority of consoles (and TVs) in the practice room. Runners should expect to bring their own equipment for cases such as these, because we can't realistically manage that much equipment on top of what we already have. We'll make this more obvious on the submission form.

[quote="Linkinito"]

[b]Overly long "setup" times[/b]

When you look at the schedule, it was really clear, some games really had a very, very, very long setup time. Sometimes exceeding the actual duration of the run. It was the main cause of delay this year and led to cancel some runs in setup slots to catch up (like MGS Ground Zeroes). Also, if most of the time it was setup, sometimes, it was an addition to the run like an any% glitched run, or a glitch showcase, etc. And even though it was entertaining, it added even more delay to the schedule.

[/quote]

Just want to point out that setup times on the schedule included bonus incentives, so not all runs were as bad as the setup may imply.

[quote]
(And check on [url=http://agdq.ma.pe]agdq.ma.pe[/url] or [url=http://alligatr.co.uk]alligatr.co.uk[/url] how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations. Even though some runs were great - look at GTA Vice City, praised by everyone, but very few donations throughout the whole run! And it was in graveyard shift)
[/quote]

The data you were looking at was not updated with the revised tracker donations. Those days were a significant chunk of the $400k that was missing in the tracker.

[quote]
With the streaming room, I wish there could've been more chairs behind the couch.  I was supposed to sit in for a run on the first day (I'm friends with the runner and he said it was fine obviously), but a bunch of other people wanted to sit in as well, and it was like a mad dash to see who could get a seat first.  It also happened during my own run to my knowledge, with some people not being able to get a seat, and I imagine it happened with a lot of other runs as well.  Plus, with more chairs available to people, it'd help to make the stream feel less empty, which a lot of people were complaining about.
[/quote]

The number of chairs were intentional. It's not intended to be a second crowd, just a group that is supporting the runner directly. You may notice later in the event, more chairs found their way over (much to my chagrin), and setup time increased because of the number of people loitering around. In addition, it increases the likelihood of people talking, interfering with the runner, and trying to commentate when they shouldn't be.

[b]Wario Land 4:[/b] Yeah, that was fixed. Except during bonus stream, because it was bonus stream.

TruthBomber

2015-01-23 02:44:17 pm

I would say for most people watching AGDQ, they wouldn't have an intimate experience with cancer within the family. Reading out donation comments that are running commentary on the game at hand not only creates more hype than shouting the word, it also incentivises donation because people want their comments read on stream. Someone without a cancer experience might not feel like writing a comment or donating some significant sum of money if they feel like its a prerequisite to being read. It's all well and good to assume people donate purely altruistically, but I would say most people who donate and leave a comment hope their comment is going to be read.

Supreme

2015-01-23 02:45:06 pm

Dixie Kong Fan Club

From the viewer perspective, I just want to kind of echo the points of a few previous posts.

Layout: Greatly improved! But I do agree there can definitely be improvements, particularly with the 2 person race....I'm glad it was a step in the right direction though, everything looked a lot more professional Smiley

Camera: I know this has been brought up a lot, but I was really surprised by what seemed like resignation that all the runners during a 3+ person race would not be on screen. As cute as 0x is, I wanted to see the other runners as well Tongue

Donation Comments: I know of the issues with readers/couch not necessarily being able to hear one another, but at some points during set up in between runs it felt like it was primarily sponsor plugging when that was the perfect chance to get in a lot of donations that weren't read when there was a commentary-heavy run. Also, I definitely agree with the overdoing of sob stories. I think they're important, but it felt like that was 90% of what was being read. At certain points, it felt like a cookie-cutter almost. Include these buzzwords and emotions and my comment will be read! Hopefully there can be a little more mix next time.

Overall though, I thought the marathon was great Smiley

The runs were pretty awesome, and great runners picked!

From the viewer perspective, I just want to kind of echo the points of a few previous posts.

Layout: Greatly improved! But I do agree there can definitely be improvements, particularly with the 2 person race....I'm glad it was a step in the right direction though, everything looked a lot more professional :) 
Camera: I know this has been brought up a lot, but I was really surprised by what seemed like resignation that all the runners during a 3+ person race would not be on screen.  As cute as 0x is, I wanted to see the other runners as well :P 
Donation Comments: I know of the issues with readers/couch not necessarily being able to hear one another, but at some points during set up in between runs it felt like it was primarily sponsor plugging when that was the perfect chance to get in a lot of donations that weren't read when there was a commentary-heavy run.  Also, I definitely agree with the overdoing of sob stories.  I think they're important, but it felt like that was 90% of what was being read.  At certain points, it felt like a cookie-cutter almost. Include these buzzwords and emotions and my comment will be read! Hopefully there can be a little more mix next time.

Overall though, I thought the marathon was great :) The runs were pretty awesome, and great runners picked!

kirbymastah

Edit history:

kirbymastah: 2015-01-23 03:00:38 pm

kirbymastah: 2015-01-23 02:56:47 pm

kirbymastah: 2015-01-23 02:56:01 pm

kirbymastah: 2015-01-23 02:55:45 pm

2015-01-23 02:52:37 pm

<(^_^)>

~~RIP bonus stream meaning AGDQ and SGDQ will always suck now screw you stupid organizers!~~

I only have one primary complaint about something.

Someone needs to be constantly watching the live stream

Internet hiccups happen. Twitch goes down. There isn't much you can do about that. However, what happened during samthedigital's zero mission run, was about 30 minutes in, twitch went completely down. The stream was just replaying the same 10 seconds of footage repeatedly. Nobody from the tech station told sam to stop, so he kept playing and ended up finishing the run. By the time twitch got itself fixed, we saw the exact moment sam just ended the run, so we missed basically the last fourth of the run. Afterwards, I assume sam and the commentators got up, chilled a bit, and hung around a while talking about the run. The thing is, they didn't even know the stream went down. Nobody knew. The marathon started minish cap as if nothing happened at all.

Sam and the commentators found out that everyone missed the last 1/4 of the run through our zero mission community SKYPE GROUP. Not the tech station. The SKYPE GROUP of viewers (including me). This raises a lot of red flags, as it means that literally nobody at the AGDQ site knew that twitch went down. I talked to testrunner while he streamed a week after AGDQ and he didn't even know the stream went down during the zero mission run (he wasn't on the job at the moment IIRC).

The point is, someone needs to be constantly watching the stream so something like this doesn't happen again. So the runner can be told to pause, instead of letting the runs go on and have everyone miss them. Which, this has happened in several past runs, and it has been dealt with appropriately. But letting the marathon go on for at least 15-20 minutes when twitch goes down without anyone knowing (heck, I honestly don't know if anyone on the site even knew until some of us told people) is inexcusable.

Other Minor Things

-I agree it would've been nice to have the general audience in the background, but I heard the room layout didn't quite allow for that.
-I only have two minor things about the stream layout. There shouldn't be anything in between the two screens for 2-player races since it makes it hard to watch between the two. Furthermore, while sponsors are important, I do think they're taking up a lot more space than they should, but I'm not sure what else exactly you'd put in there.
-Why have we not turned on sub-only mode for twitch chat at this point?
-The noise gate seemed to make the audio rather abrupt and "choppy" between runs. As in, we'd hear the stream alternate between general audience noise and complete silence. It's rather awkward IMO, I think it'd be best just to not have that filter at all.

[s]RIP bonus stream meaning AGDQ and SGDQ will always suck now screw you stupid organizers![/s]

I only have one primary complaint about something.

[i][b]Someone needs to be constantly watching the live stream[/b][/i]

Internet hiccups happen. Twitch goes down. There isn't much you can do about that. However, what happened during samthedigital's zero mission run, was about 30 minutes in, twitch went completely down. The stream was just replaying the same 10 seconds of footage repeatedly. Nobody from the tech station told sam to stop, so he kept playing and ended up finishing the run. By the time twitch got itself fixed, we saw the exact moment sam just ended the run, so we missed basically the last fourth of the run. Afterwards, I assume sam and the commentators got up, chilled a bit, and hung around a while talking about the run. The thing is, they didn't even know the stream went down. Nobody knew. The marathon started minish cap as if nothing happened at all.

Sam and the commentators found out that everyone missed the last 1/4 of the run through our zero mission community SKYPE GROUP. Not the tech station. The SKYPE GROUP of viewers (including me). This raises a lot of red flags, as it means that literally nobody at the AGDQ site knew that twitch went down. I talked to testrunner while he streamed a week after AGDQ and he didn't even know the stream went down during the zero mission run (he wasn't on the job at the moment IIRC).

The point is, someone needs to be constantly watching the stream so something like this doesn't happen again. So the runner can be told to pause, instead of letting the runs go on and have everyone miss them. Which, this has happened in several past runs, and it has been dealt with appropriately. But letting the marathon go on for at least 15-20 minutes when twitch goes down without anyone knowing (heck, I honestly don't know if anyone on the site even knew until some of us told people) is inexcusable.

[b]Other Minor Things[/b]

-I agree it would've been nice to have the general audience in the background, but I heard the room layout didn't quite allow for that.
-I only have two minor things about the stream layout. There shouldn't be anything in between the two screens for 2-player races since it makes it hard to watch between the two. Furthermore, while sponsors are important, I do think they're taking up a lot more space than they should, but I'm not sure what else exactly you'd put in there.
-Why have we not turned on sub-only mode for twitch chat at this point?
-The noise gate seemed to make the audio rather abrupt and "choppy" between runs. As in, we'd hear the stream alternate between general audience noise and complete silence. It's rather awkward IMO, I think it'd be best just to not have that filter at all.

sumichu

2015-01-23 02:56:22 pm

ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

I'm here to answer inquiries not related to tech, and will answer questions that I can as time allows.

Quote from AlbinoAlbatross:

Donation Screening: How tight is the moderation on donation screening, out of curiosity? There were some pretty bad donation comments that got read aloud that definitely should not have made it past any screening, one of which put one of my friends in a really bad spot.

First of all, we sincerely apologize for offensive comments that made it on-stream.

We give the donation station people some guidelines about what comments are okay and what comments aren't, but because we are unable to detail what should be done for each comment (people can get really, really creative with what they choose to write sometimes), we leave final judgment to them. Since AGDQ is a long event that takes people out of their normal day-to-day, they can end up unaware of current events, which was one of the issues we had with vague comments.

In the future, we will reinforce the idea that it is better to be safe than sorry at future GDQs and consider additional training prior to the event.

Quote from presjpolk:

When I got to the venue to do commentary it was really hard to find someone to get me a badge.

Not a huge thing since it's a one shot, but a posted sign of where to go if someone's not manning the station, would be nice.

Noted. We will consider having a "for registration inquiries, please head over to ______" during the hours where registration isn't open, and possibly consider having registration table hours available.

Quote from Kirua:

+/- I can't believe i'm saying that but you should probably read more donations. I noticed that there was a great deal of effort to let the players & couch talk a lot, which was great. But at the same time, when the hosts were talking, I felt that the balance between the things that were being read wasn't necessarily the best. Like reading so many times about sponsors, and way less donations than before. The sponsors were already in the layout to begin with, reading so much about them felt overkill.

- Food. That was by far the main problem as an attendee: getting some food at night was nearly impossible. Not so many cars/drivers around (and even if there are, you're forced to bother them). Basically, having nothing available at a reasonable walking distance was a huge downside of this location. And the on-site restaurant had some really poor service.

Sponsor mentions are different than having their logo displayed on the stream because of the way they are delivered (visually vs audibly), and also give different information. That being said, we got a lot of feedback about the sponsor mentions, and our biggest issue is finding a good balance between the requests of our sponsors and our viewers. We will take the feedback into consideration when we speak with our sponsors.

We understand that the hotel was a bit isolated (I myself had the luxury of someone offering to drive us every day lol). As stated in the OP, we're going to look into additional shuttle services and put a little more focus on the location/food when choosing the venue.

Quote from BubblesDelFuego:

1. Have the event organizers spend more time on camera reminding the audience to donate, announcing donation goals being met, and to really raise the level of excitement. I like how Brossentia says things like, "If everyone donated 1 dollar(and so on)...", and there should be more of that.

Thanks for the example. We'll look into doing more donation mentions.

Quote from BubblesDelFuego:

3. During game submissions there should be something like an upvote and downvote system available for those in the public. This way the ones in charge of choosing which games make the cut can get a good sense of what the community wants to see. Like, maybe you would need an account on the GamesDoneQuick website to vote. It sounds like it can easily be a broken system, but the point is that there should be a public rating system on submissions. The public rating doesn't ultimately decide if the run makes it or not, it just helps the staff out.

This is something that has been brought up and discussed a couple of times. A lot of things are considered when game selection is done. It needs to fit into the schedule, it needs to reach a broad audience (including people both inside and outside of the speedrun community; AGDQ 2015 had 9.4 million unique viewers), among other things that go into consideration such as donation incentives, blocks, prizes, and logistics. Voting would only cover what a fraction of the viewers would like to see. Furthermore, a voting system like that runs the risk of becoming a popularity contest and/or being abused.

While the increased interaction would be something really cool, this isn't something that can consider at this time.

Quote from BubblesDelFuego:

4. Videos of the runs should be uploaded to the YouTube page much, much faster. I understand completely that this is being worked on as much as it can, but maybe if during the volunteer forum there can be a spot for people to offer their services as dedicated uploaders. During the marathons there are multiple rouge YouTube accounts that upload and monetize the GDQ's content, and kicking their video off the internet is a hassle. There are also online news cites that contact the runners and ask when the videos will be uploaded, and for the purposes of "fresh news" the runs should be uploaded within a few days of happening. Also, the sooner the videos are uploaded to the SDA channel means more views on the SDA channel, and then the SDA channel can monetize the videos and raise even more moneyfor charity.

We will most likely be uploading videos during the event starting with the next GDQ.

[size="16"][b]I'm here to answer inquiries not related to tech, and will answer questions that I can as time allows.[/b][/size]

[quote="AlbinoAlbatross"]Donation Screening: How tight is the moderation on donation screening, out of curiosity? There were some pretty bad donation comments that got read aloud that definitely should not have made it past any screening, one of which put one of my friends in a really bad spot.[/quote]

First of all, we sincerely apologize for offensive comments that made it on-stream.

We give the donation station people some guidelines about what comments are okay and what comments aren't, but because we are unable to detail what should be done for each comment (people can get really, really creative with what they choose to write sometimes), we leave final judgment to them.  Since AGDQ is a long event that takes people out of their normal day-to-day, they can end up unaware of current events, which was one of the issues we had with vague comments.

In the future, we will reinforce the idea that it is better to be safe than sorry at future GDQs and consider additional training prior to the event.

[quote="presjpolk"]When I got to the venue to do commentary it was really hard to find someone to get me a badge.

Not a huge thing since it's a one shot, but a posted sign of where to go if someone's not manning the station, would be nice.[/quote]

Noted.  We will consider having a "for registration inquiries, please head over to ______" during the hours where registration isn't open, and possibly consider having registration table hours available.

[quote="Kirua"]+/- I can't believe i'm saying that but you should probably read more donations. I noticed that there was a great deal of effort to let the players & couch talk a lot, which was great. But at the same time, when the hosts were talking, I felt that the balance between the things that were being read wasn't necessarily the best. Like reading so many times about sponsors, and way less donations than before. The sponsors were already in the layout to begin with, reading so much about them felt overkill.

- Food. That was by far the main problem as an attendee: getting some food at night was nearly impossible. Not so many cars/drivers around (and even if there are, you're forced to bother them). Basically, having nothing available at a reasonable walking distance was a huge downside of this location. And the on-site restaurant had some really poor service.
[/quote]

Sponsor mentions are different than having their logo displayed on the stream because of the way they are delivered (visually vs audibly), and also give different information.  That being said, we got a lot of feedback about the sponsor mentions, and our biggest issue is finding a good balance between the requests of our sponsors and our viewers.  We will take the feedback into consideration when we speak with our sponsors.

We understand that the hotel was a bit isolated (I myself had the luxury of someone offering to drive us every day lol).  As stated in the OP, we're going to look into additional shuttle services and put a little more focus on the location/food when choosing the venue.

[quote="BubblesDelFuego"]
1. Have the event organizers spend more time on camera reminding the audience to donate, announcing donation goals being met, and to really raise the level of excitement. I like how Brossentia says things like, "If everyone donated 1 dollar(and so on)...", and there should be more of that.
[/quote]

Thanks for the example.  We'll look into doing more donation mentions.

[quote="BubblesDelFuego"]
3. During game submissions there should be something like an upvote and downvote system available for those in the public. This way the ones in charge of choosing which games make the cut can get a good sense of what the community wants to see. Like, maybe you would need an account on the GamesDoneQuick website to vote. It sounds like it can easily be a broken system, but the point is that there should be a public rating system on submissions. The public rating doesn't ultimately decide if the run makes it or not, it just helps the staff out.
[/quote]

This is something that has been brought up and discussed a couple of times.  A lot of things are considered when game selection is done. It needs to fit into the schedule, it needs to reach a broad audience (including people both inside and outside of the speedrun community; AGDQ 2015 had 9.4 million unique viewers), among other things that go into consideration such as donation incentives, blocks, prizes, and logistics.  Voting would only cover what a fraction of the viewers would like to see. Furthermore, a voting system like that runs the risk of becoming a popularity contest and/or being abused.

While the increased interaction would be something really cool, this isn't something that can consider at this time.

[quote="BubblesDelFuego"]
4. Videos of the runs should be uploaded to the YouTube page much, much faster. I understand completely that this is being worked on as much as it can, but maybe if during the volunteer forum there can be a spot for people to offer their services as dedicated uploaders. During the marathons there are multiple rouge YouTube accounts that upload and monetize the GDQ's content, and kicking their video off the internet is a hassle. There are also online news cites that contact the runners and ask when the videos will be uploaded, and for the purposes of "fresh news" the runs should be uploaded within a few days of happening. Also, the sooner the videos are uploaded to the SDA channel means more views on the SDA channel, and then the SDA channel can monetize the videos and raise [b]even more money[/b]for charity.
[/quote]

We will most likely be uploading videos during the event starting with the next GDQ.

Cool Matty

2015-01-23 03:00:12 pm

Crawlathon WR, get down on my level.

Quote from kirbymastah:

Someone needs to be constantly watching the live stream

Internet hiccups happen. Twitch goes down. There isn't much you can do about that. However, what happened during samthedigital's zero mission run, was about 30 minutes in, twitch went completely down. The stream was just replaying the same 10 seconds of footage repeatedly. Nobody from the tech station told sam to stop, so he kept playing and ended up finishing the run. By the time twitch got itself fixed, we saw the exact moment sam just ended the run, so we missed basically the last fourth of the run. Afterwards, I assume sam and the commentators got up, chilled a bit, and hung around a while talking about the run. The thing is, they didn't even know the stream went down. Nobody knew. The marathon started minish cap as if nothing happened at all.

Sam and the commentators found out that everyone missed the last 1/4 of the run through our zero mission community SKYPE GROUP. Not the tech station. The SKYPE GROUP of viewers (including me). This raises a lot of red flags, as it means that literally nobody at the AGDQ site knew that twitch went down. I talked to testrunner while he streamed a week after AGDQ and he didn't even know the stream went down during the zero mission run (he wasn't on the job at the moment IIRC).

The point is, someone needs to be constantly watching the stream so something like this doesn't happen again. So the runner can be told to pause, instead of letting the runs go on and have everyone miss them. Which, this has happened in several past runs, and it has been dealt with appropriately. But letting the marathon go on for at least 15-20 minutes when twitch goes down without anyone knowing (heck, I honestly don't know if anyone on the site even knew until some of us told people) is inexcusable.

If this is the situation I am recalling, this is what happened:

Tech did know about the downtime, but we were informed that it was not a global outage. Because it was not a global outage, we had to make a call on whether to continue or not. Faced with either waiting (potentially hours? we had no idea) for when part of Twitch would come back, or continuing the event for those who could watch, we chose the latter.

[quote="kirbymastah"]
[i][b]Someone needs to be constantly watching the live stream[/b][/i]

Internet hiccups happen. Twitch goes down. There isn't much you can do about that. However, what happened during samthedigital's zero mission run, was about 30 minutes in, twitch went completely down. The stream was just replaying the same 10 seconds of footage repeatedly. Nobody from the tech station told sam to stop, so he kept playing and ended up finishing the run. By the time twitch got itself fixed, we saw the exact moment sam just ended the run, so we missed basically the last fourth of the run. Afterwards, I assume sam and the commentators got up, chilled a bit, and hung around a while talking about the run. The thing is, they didn't even know the stream went down. Nobody knew. The marathon started minish cap as if nothing happened at all.

Sam and the commentators found out that everyone missed the last 1/4 of the run through our zero mission community SKYPE GROUP. Not the tech station. The SKYPE GROUP of viewers (including me). This raises a lot of red flags, as it means that literally nobody at the AGDQ site knew that twitch went down. I talked to testrunner while he streamed a week after AGDQ and he didn't even know the stream went down during the zero mission run (he wasn't on the job at the moment IIRC).

The point is, someone needs to be constantly watching the stream so something like this doesn't happen again. So the runner can be told to pause, instead of letting the runs go on and have everyone miss them. Which, this has happened in several past runs, and it has been dealt with appropriately. But letting the marathon go on for at least 15-20 minutes when twitch goes down without anyone knowing (heck, I honestly don't know if anyone on the site even knew until some of us told people) is inexcusable.
[/quote]

If this is the situation I am recalling, this is what happened:

Tech did know about the downtime, but we were informed that it was not a global outage. Because it was not a global outage, we had to make a call on whether to continue or not. Faced with either waiting (potentially hours? we had no idea) for when part of Twitch would come back, or continuing the event for those who could watch, we chose the latter.

NachoYacopu

Edit history:

NachoYacopu: 2015-01-23 03:01:54 pm

2015-01-23 03:01:09 pm

T r i P T e a M

So a few of the issues I had as a viewers have been adressed already so I'll bring up some minor audio issues.

Audio between games: sometimes during setup times you guys played some good old video game music, and it was great (personally I specially loved the SMRPG tunes every now and then) but some other times there was nothing but dead silence. You never should have that sort of deafening silence during a live event. I'm confused too because sometimes you played songs, sometimes you had nothing, then you had songs again...also echoing what my friend boredeathly said, the noise gate was too abrupt and many times it would cut in a split second from the host talking (and the mic catching some audience noise) to this dead silence, and then back to lively noises and the host talking. It sounded really unnatural and ut made the event feel sterile at times, like it wasn't a live marathon, just a random camera pointing at people in a big room. Its not a major thing but either keeping background noises or just videogame tunes would be better, IMO.

Audio balancing issues: now, I don't know what kind of setup you guys had (so I can't tell what caused the issues) but during some games the audio levels were all over the place (when comparing mics and game audio, or just different commentators). I remember distinctly, during the Contra race, I think it was zallard? (I don't remember, I hope I'm right) was handed a mic and he was barely audible, like his mic was off or had no gain or something. I don't mean to be rude but it makes me wonder if there was anyone periodically monitoring (in whatever mixer you guys had, with a pair of headphones) the audio levels that you were ultimately sending out to the stream. All you really need to do is to hook up a pair of headphones, and listen. Also now I remember, stuff like Transistor having no game audio for 15 mins or so. You really need someone monitoring the audio that's being pushed out so mistakes like this can be corrected asap.

There were many great things about the marathon (loved the layouts this time around, just to name one thing) but I really think you guys need to look up at the audio issues. They're really easy fixes and would improve the feel and enjoyment of the marathon a lot.

p.s. sorry for any grammar mistakes my english isn't the best

So a few of the issues I had as a viewers have been adressed already so I'll bring up some minor audio issues.

Audio between games: sometimes during setup times you guys played some good old video game music, and it was great (personally I specially loved the SMRPG tunes every now and then) but some other times there was nothing but dead silence. You never should have that sort of deafening silence during a live event. I'm confused too because sometimes you played songs, sometimes you had nothing, then you had songs again...also echoing what my friend boredeathly said, the noise gate was too abrupt and many times it would cut in a split second from the host talking (and the mic catching some audience noise) to this dead silence, and then back to lively noises and the host talking. It sounded really unnatural and ut made the event feel sterile at times, like it wasn't a live marathon, just a random camera pointing at people in a big room. Its not a major thing but either keeping background noises or just videogame tunes would be better, IMO.

Audio balancing issues: now, I don't know what kind of setup you guys had (so I can't tell what caused the issues) but during some games the audio levels were all over the place (when comparing mics and game audio, or just different commentators). I remember distinctly, during the Contra race, I think it was zallard? (I don't remember, I hope I'm right) was handed a mic and he was barely audible, like his mic was off or had no gain or something. I don't mean to be rude but it makes me wonder if there was anyone periodically monitoring (in whatever mixer you guys had, with a pair of headphones) the audio levels that you were ultimately sending out to the stream. All you really need to do is to hook up a pair of headphones, and listen. Also now I remember, stuff like Transistor having no game audio for 15 mins or so. You really need someone monitoring the audio that's being pushed out so mistakes like this can be corrected asap.

There were many great things about the marathon (loved the layouts this time around, just to name one thing) but I really think you guys need to look up at the audio issues. They're really easy fixes and would improve the feel and enjoyment of the marathon a lot.

p.s. sorry for any grammar mistakes my english isn't the best

Linkinito

2015-01-23 03:02:58 pm

This is my avatar

Quote from Cool Matty:

Quote from Linkinito:

(And check on agdq.ma.pe or alligatr.co.uk how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations. Even though some runs were great - look at GTA Vice City, praised by everyone, but very few donations throughout the whole run! And it was in graveyard shift)

The data you were looking at was not updated with the revised tracker donations. Those days were a significant chunk of the $400k that was missing in the tracker.

Alligatr features the revised tracker donations. The missing $400k were spread out all over the marathon, and if we except the bump on prime time Thursday (from Punch-Out to Yoshi's Island), the donations were pretty low between Mega Man X3 and Zelda The Minish Cap. Friday is without a doubt the weakest day, even when counting the missing $400k.

kirbymastah

2015-01-23 03:03:39 pm

<(^_^)>

Quote from Cool Matty:

If this is the situation I am recalling, this is what happened:

Tech did know about the downtime, but we were informed that it was not a global outage. Because it was not a global outage, we had to make a call on whether to continue or not. Faced with either waiting (potentially hours? we had no idea) for when part of Twitch would come back, or continuing the event for those who could watch, we chose the latter.

Fair enough. I still disagree with the decision but at least I got to hear more specifically what happened, since the people I did ask about that were on site didn't know about it. This would be worth discussing more in detail but I dont know how much you guys discussed it on the fly during the run.

NotSoNewby

2015-01-23 03:05:27 pm

We were playing 8-player smash on Palutena's Temple and were told to leave the Casual Room. Nuff Said

Onin

Edit history:

Onin: 2015-01-23 03:08:53 pm

Onin: 2015-01-23 03:07:59 pm

2015-01-23 03:06:28 pm

Quote from Linkinito:

Quote from Cool Matty:

Quote from Linkinito:

(And check on agdq.ma.pe or alligatr.co.uk how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations. Even though some runs were great - look at GTA Vice City, praised by everyone, but very few donations throughout the whole run! And it was in graveyard shift)

I believe the fall of donations happened as soon as the Awful Games Done Quick block happened, which has always been more of an event darling than a, well, good idea. I think AwGDQ has always caused a dip in donations.
The data you were looking at was not updated with the revised tracker donations. Those days were a significant chunk of the $400k that was missing in the tracker.

Alligatr features the revised tracker donations. The missing $400k were spread out all over the marathon, and if we except the bump on prime time Thursday (from Punch-Out to Yoshi's Island), the donations were pretty low between Mega Man X3 and Zelda The Minish Cap. Friday is without a doubt the weakest day, even when counting the missing $400k.

I believe the fall of donations happened as soon as the Awful Games Done Quick block happened, which has always been more of an event darling than a, well, good idea. I think AwGDQ has always caused a dip in donations.

[quote="Linkinito"][quote="Cool Matty"][quote="Linkinito"]
(And check on [url=http://agdq.ma.pe]agdq.ma.pe[/url] or [url=http://alligatr.co.uk]alligatr.co.uk[/url] how the donations slowed down hard after Mega Man X3... Thursday and Friday were abysmal days in terms of donations. Even though some runs were great - look at GTA Vice City, praised by everyone, but very few donations throughout the whole run! And it was in graveyard shift)
[/quote]
I believe the fall of donations happened as soon as the Awful Games Done Quick block happened, which has always been more of an event darling than a, well, good idea. I think AwGDQ has always caused a dip in donations.
The data you were looking at was not updated with the revised tracker donations. Those days were a significant chunk of the $400k that was missing in the tracker.
[/quote]

[url=http://irc.alligatr.co.uk/agdq15/]Alligatr[/url] features the revised tracker donations. The missing $400k were spread out all over the marathon, and if we except the bump on prime time Thursday (from Punch-Out to Yoshi's Island), the donations were pretty low between Mega Man X3 and Zelda The Minish Cap. Friday is without a doubt the weakest day, even when counting the missing $400k.[/quote]

I believe the fall of donations happened as soon as the Awful Games Done Quick block happened, which has always been more of an event darling than a, well, good idea. I think AwGDQ has always caused a dip in donations.

Cool Matty

2015-01-23 03:06:33 pm

Crawlathon WR, get down on my level.

Quote from NachoYacopu:

Audio balancing issues: now, I don't know what kind of setup you guys had (so I can't tell what caused the issues) but during some games the audio levels were all over the place (when comparing mics and game audio, or just different commentators). I remember distinctly, during the Contra race, I think it was zallard? (I don't remember, I hope I'm right) was handed a mic and he was barely audible, like his mic was off or had no gain or something. I don't mean to be rude but it makes me wonder if there was anyone periodically monitoring (in whatever mixer you guys had, with a pair of headphones) the audio levels that you were ultimately sending out to the stream. All you really need to do is to hook up a pair of headphones, and listen. Also now I remember, stuff like Transistor having no game audio for 15 mins or so. You really need someone monitoring the audio that's being pushed out so mistakes like this can be corrected asap.

I've touched on most of this in my mega-post earlier, but I do want to point out that much of the time, the people monitoring audio are just volunteers with minimal audio experience. The more people who volunteer with audio backgrounds, the better prepared we can be. There was someone on desk who SHOULD have been listening the whole time, but many people who are inexperienced are too afraid to adjust anything, or don't know what to listen for.

[quote="NachoYacopu"]
Audio balancing issues: now, I don't know what kind of setup you guys had (so I can't tell what caused the issues) but during some games the audio levels were all over the place (when comparing mics and game audio, or just different commentators). I remember distinctly, during the Contra race, I think it was zallard? (I don't remember, I hope I'm right) was handed a mic and he was barely audible, like his mic was off or had no gain or something. I don't mean to be rude but it makes me wonder if there was anyone periodically monitoring (in whatever mixer you guys had, with a pair of headphones) the audio levels that you were ultimately sending out to the stream. All you really need to do is to hook up a pair of headphones, and listen. Also now I remember, stuff like Transistor having no game audio for 15 mins or so. You really need someone monitoring the audio that's being pushed out so mistakes like this can be corrected asap.
[/quote]

I've touched on most of this in my mega-post earlier, but I do want to point out that much of the time, the people monitoring audio are just volunteers with minimal audio experience. The more people who volunteer with audio backgrounds, the better prepared we can be. There was someone on desk who SHOULD have been listening the whole time, but many people who are inexperienced are too afraid to adjust anything, or don't know what to listen for.

PJ

2015-01-23 03:06:38 pm

Is PJ

So, there's a lot of feedback in here so I don't want to clutter things up any more. I'll try to be brief.

First off, great job to everybody who made this happen! Obviously the planning stages were more chaotic than anticipated because Mike was ill, but you guys really stepped up and did a great job! I also loved this hotel. We had a lot of space and I feel like we made good use of it. The free breakfast was a lifesaver. The stream room was really comfortable for viewing the runs. I never had an issue finding a see or seeing the projectors. The food situation wasn't great, but there was a large variety of really good food just a short drive away. If you don't have a car though, you're really limited. Some of those places delivered, but that is tough to live off of for a week. All the practice rooms had available TVs and consoles at almost any given point, and none of my stuff was stolen. Really nice change from the other GDQs!

The main issue I had, besides my schedule getting absolutely fucked because of late schedule changes, were the PCs we used. I don't know where we bought those, what parts we used, or who built them, but it absolutely needs to change for SGDQ. There is no reason that it should take 4 hours to get a PC to run a game as simple as Battleblock Theater. It took me 2 solid hours to even get past the Steam Guard on the PC I was supposed to use, and then we struggled for 2 additional hours with internet issues, screen tearing, some random vsync issues, and basically any other PC-related problem you can think of. After I finally got that PC set up, I was told the following day that it "was fried" and I needed to get Battleblock running on another PC. The PC in the practice room couldn't download the game because the internet was too slow (it estimated a completion time of like 3 days), so I was frantically trying to get it installed on random laptops to use that instead. Eventually the PC that "fried" was fixed so Mecha and I hurried into the stream room to test it out. Apparently the two PCs that were in there previously were swapped but nobody told us, so we had to set up the computers a second time with the custom files, control schemes, preferred settings, etc. Also, literally half of the USB ports on my PC didn't work because it was built incorrectly. When it came time for the run itself, setup was relatively quick, but that is probably because we spent literally 10 hours trying to get the PCs to run this game. The best part, though, is that 5 minutes after the run began, my PC decided to run a fucking virus scan which completely destroyed the connection between Mecha and me. I had to play that run with the most intense and unpredictable desync I have ever experienced, which is saying a lot because I intentionally stressed my home PC a few times to practice under those conditions.

The best I say can for that situation is "unacceptable". I am literally the best person for this to happen to because I am so technologically paranoid that I tend to be prepared for every possible disaster like this, but if it was any other game or any other runner, this would have been totally catastrophic. Please get PCs that function for SGDQ.

Aside from that, my other complaints are minor. The console rack was pretty far away from the couch, as mentioned, so controller extension cables had to be in a few situations. Fortunately, I didn't notice any lag with that so it was ok. More of an inconvenience than anything. I also had a lot of trouble hearing the devs during Battleblock Theater, but in hindsight I'm not sure what you could've done to make that better for me besides running it through headphones or something. I was just in a bad spot to hear them.

So, there's a lot of feedback in here so I don't want to clutter things up any more.  I'll try to be brief.

First off, great job to everybody who made this happen!  Obviously the planning stages were more chaotic than anticipated because Mike was ill, but you guys really stepped up and did a great job!  I also loved this hotel.  We had a lot of space and I feel like we made good use of it.  The free breakfast was a lifesaver.  The stream room was really comfortable for viewing the runs.  I never had an issue finding a see or seeing the projectors.  The food situation wasn't great, but there was a large variety of really good food just a short drive away.  If you don't have a car though, you're really limited.  Some of those places delivered, but that is tough to live off of for a week.  All the practice rooms had available TVs and consoles at almost any given point, and none of my stuff was stolen.  Really nice change from the other GDQs!

The main issue I had, besides my schedule getting absolutely fucked because of late schedule changes, were the PCs we used.  I don't know where we bought those, what parts we used, or who built them, but it absolutely needs to change for SGDQ.  There is no reason that it should take 4 hours to get a PC to run a game as simple as Battleblock Theater.  It took me 2 solid hours to even get past the Steam Guard on the PC I was supposed to use, and then we struggled for 2 additional hours with internet issues, screen tearing, some random vsync issues, and basically any other PC-related problem you can think of.  After I finally got that PC set up, I was told the following day that it "was fried" and I needed to get Battleblock running on another PC.  The PC in the practice room couldn't download the game because the internet was too slow (it estimated a completion time of like 3 days), so I was frantically trying to get it installed on random laptops to use that instead.  Eventually the PC that "fried" was fixed so Mecha and I hurried into the stream room to test it out.  Apparently the two PCs that were in there previously were swapped but nobody told us, so we had to set up the computers a second time with the custom files, control schemes, preferred settings, etc.  Also, literally half of the USB ports on my PC didn't work because it was built incorrectly.  When it came time for the run itself, setup was relatively quick, but that is probably because we spent literally 10 hours trying to get the PCs to run this game.  The best part, though, is that 5 minutes after the run began, my PC decided to run a fucking virus scan which completely destroyed the connection between Mecha and me.  I had to play that run with the most intense and unpredictable desync I have ever experienced, which is saying a lot because I intentionally stressed my home PC a few times to practice under those conditions.

The best I say can for that situation is "unacceptable".  I am literally the best person for this to happen to because I am so technologically paranoid that I tend to be prepared for every possible disaster like this, but if it was any other game or any other runner, this would have been totally catastrophic.  Please get PCs that function for SGDQ.

Aside from that, my other complaints are minor.  The console rack was pretty far away from the couch, as mentioned, so controller extension cables had to be in a few situations.  Fortunately, I didn't notice any lag with that so it was ok.  More of an inconvenience than anything.  I also had a lot of trouble hearing the devs during Battleblock Theater, but in hindsight I'm not sure what you could've done to make that better for me besides running it through headphones or something.  I was just in a bad spot to hear them.