Professional Second Banana
RPG Limit Break 2019 was our 5th event and the first one to the $200k fundraising mark; and as always we want to hear from attendees and viewers on how we can make RPGLB 2020 even better.
To get the conversation started, here’s some thoughts from Staff - feel free to add on to these topics or any others you can think of. Feedback can be posted to this thread (which allows for anonymous & guest posting), and is also accepted via the #rpglb-event-feedback channel on our Discord server (discord.gg/rpglb). Feedback can also be made privately to puwexil or Vulajin via PM here or Discord.
Schedule/Games
-This year's event was a week earlier than previous years' primarily because the DoubleTree SLC Airport hotel was not available the following week, and going later into May or June is not viable due to Memorial Day weekend and SGDQ. We're curious what people thought of these dates, as we're going to need to decide which week to pursue for next year (we're already aware some people were unable to make it this year due to school-related conflicts, and that some other people appreciated the event not starting on Mothers' Day).
-We are planning to keep the marathon 6 ½ days (Sunday-Saturday) for the foreseeable future.
-After having 6 runs drop from RPGLB18's schedule, having 0 games drop this year was quite unexpected. Next year the games committee will be a bit more conservative with schedule math to account for that possibility.
Venue
-The new venue was chosen for easier access from the SLC airport, more event space (which was closer together), and other niceties like an onsite restaurant/bar.
-The small size of the stream room was a tradeoff for having a larger practice room. As the hotel had some extra rooms we didn't use, if we return we'll be looking into options for a larger stream room.
Food
-Quality of the food catering was honestly a bit disappointing, and came at pretty significant expense to NAMI. The DoubleTree does not allow outside catering or stuff like food trucks, so if we return we'll be pretty strongly considering moving away from full meal catering, to something more sustainable like snacks/drinks.
Tech
- Our tech team had a 4-hour postmortem last weekend and we have a ton of planned improvements. That said, we're always open to public feedback on anything related to technology at the event. Feel free to direct tech feedback to HeroicSpiritGamer or Vulajin.
- Audio is a major point of focus. Audio is hard but we are always striving to learn more, train our volunteers better, and simplify our processes to reduce the incidence of issues. We also have plans to improve our cabling to fix the "can't hear left/right" audio problems that occasionally happened.
- Setup times are also on our minds. We "only" finished an hour behind schedule, which is an improvement over 2018, but we're still working to bring those times down.
- We're aware our stream is quiet. We'll bump it up next year.
- We're very happy with the improvements from having a specialist audio volunteer position. We would really like to hear feedback regarding the experiences of volunteers in the setup and stream tech roles.
Website
-Game submissions and event registration were done with our website for the 1st time this year, but otherwise were unchanged from last year (aside from attendance fee payments being done through Stripe rather than PayPal). Interested in feedback on the website functionality/experience.
Prizes
-Goal for next year is to better integrate prize submissions into our website (and make the prize form easier to find).
Incentives
-Last year the incentives for the last 2 runs were hidden until the last 2 days to allow them to be priced based on the marathon’s overall donation pacing. This year we extended that to all donation incentives/bid wars, pricing & activating them 24-36 hours in advance (which is a model that GDQ has had success with). Overall we feel this worked out well for focusing attention on upcoming incentives and preventing them from getting met too easily, but also resulted in some late-week incentives not getting activated until the same day, which was unfair to the runners. Next year we'll likely be continuing to price & activate incentives 24-36 hours in advance (or when we run out of other priced upcoming incentives), but activating bid wars 3 days or more in advance (if not the whole week at once, since the value add for doing it gradually isn't as high as with fixed price incentives).
Charity
-NAMI has been a great partner to our event for 5 years, and they’ve been using RPGLB as their prime example of ‘Do It Yourself’ fundraising campaigns. The cause of mental health has also clearly resonated well with our attendees and viewers. That said, we always want our charity cause/partner to have strong community support, and are always open to feedback. The main specific feedback we’ve gotten in the past is requests for as much donation money as possible to go towards international/global efforts, and we have passed that along to NAMI.
Volunteering
-Orientations will be determined much earlier than in the past. We'll aim to have a rough schedule public by the time volunteer submissions open up so that people can know whether or not they will be able to make an orientation for their position well ahead of time, and plan accordingly.
-Volunteer selections will become more specialized in order to focus experience in specific areas. We'll ask on next year's form to rank interest in each role, and will attempt to keep in line with that in selections and scheduling.
Pre-Show/Interviews
-Interview area being pretty far removed from the tech area (which posed some communication/coordination challenges) was unfortunate, but necessary due to the small stream room size - optimally we'll have a bigger stream room next time and this won't be an issue again.
To get the conversation started, here’s some thoughts from Staff - feel free to add on to these topics or any others you can think of. Feedback can be posted to this thread (which allows for anonymous & guest posting), and is also accepted via the #rpglb-event-feedback channel on our Discord server (discord.gg/rpglb). Feedback can also be made privately to puwexil or Vulajin via PM here or Discord.
Schedule/Games
-This year's event was a week earlier than previous years' primarily because the DoubleTree SLC Airport hotel was not available the following week, and going later into May or June is not viable due to Memorial Day weekend and SGDQ. We're curious what people thought of these dates, as we're going to need to decide which week to pursue for next year (we're already aware some people were unable to make it this year due to school-related conflicts, and that some other people appreciated the event not starting on Mothers' Day).
-We are planning to keep the marathon 6 ½ days (Sunday-Saturday) for the foreseeable future.
-After having 6 runs drop from RPGLB18's schedule, having 0 games drop this year was quite unexpected. Next year the games committee will be a bit more conservative with schedule math to account for that possibility.
Venue
-The new venue was chosen for easier access from the SLC airport, more event space (which was closer together), and other niceties like an onsite restaurant/bar.
-The small size of the stream room was a tradeoff for having a larger practice room. As the hotel had some extra rooms we didn't use, if we return we'll be looking into options for a larger stream room.
Food
-Quality of the food catering was honestly a bit disappointing, and came at pretty significant expense to NAMI. The DoubleTree does not allow outside catering or stuff like food trucks, so if we return we'll be pretty strongly considering moving away from full meal catering, to something more sustainable like snacks/drinks.
Tech
- Our tech team had a 4-hour postmortem last weekend and we have a ton of planned improvements. That said, we're always open to public feedback on anything related to technology at the event. Feel free to direct tech feedback to HeroicSpiritGamer or Vulajin.
- Audio is a major point of focus. Audio is hard but we are always striving to learn more, train our volunteers better, and simplify our processes to reduce the incidence of issues. We also have plans to improve our cabling to fix the "can't hear left/right" audio problems that occasionally happened.
- Setup times are also on our minds. We "only" finished an hour behind schedule, which is an improvement over 2018, but we're still working to bring those times down.
- We're aware our stream is quiet. We'll bump it up next year.
- We're very happy with the improvements from having a specialist audio volunteer position. We would really like to hear feedback regarding the experiences of volunteers in the setup and stream tech roles.
Website
-Game submissions and event registration were done with our website for the 1st time this year, but otherwise were unchanged from last year (aside from attendance fee payments being done through Stripe rather than PayPal). Interested in feedback on the website functionality/experience.
Prizes
-Goal for next year is to better integrate prize submissions into our website (and make the prize form easier to find).
Incentives
-Last year the incentives for the last 2 runs were hidden until the last 2 days to allow them to be priced based on the marathon’s overall donation pacing. This year we extended that to all donation incentives/bid wars, pricing & activating them 24-36 hours in advance (which is a model that GDQ has had success with). Overall we feel this worked out well for focusing attention on upcoming incentives and preventing them from getting met too easily, but also resulted in some late-week incentives not getting activated until the same day, which was unfair to the runners. Next year we'll likely be continuing to price & activate incentives 24-36 hours in advance (or when we run out of other priced upcoming incentives), but activating bid wars 3 days or more in advance (if not the whole week at once, since the value add for doing it gradually isn't as high as with fixed price incentives).
Charity
-NAMI has been a great partner to our event for 5 years, and they’ve been using RPGLB as their prime example of ‘Do It Yourself’ fundraising campaigns. The cause of mental health has also clearly resonated well with our attendees and viewers. That said, we always want our charity cause/partner to have strong community support, and are always open to feedback. The main specific feedback we’ve gotten in the past is requests for as much donation money as possible to go towards international/global efforts, and we have passed that along to NAMI.
Volunteering
-Orientations will be determined much earlier than in the past. We'll aim to have a rough schedule public by the time volunteer submissions open up so that people can know whether or not they will be able to make an orientation for their position well ahead of time, and plan accordingly.
-Volunteer selections will become more specialized in order to focus experience in specific areas. We'll ask on next year's form to rank interest in each role, and will attempt to keep in line with that in selections and scheduling.
Pre-Show/Interviews
-Interview area being pretty far removed from the tech area (which posed some communication/coordination challenges) was unfortunate, but necessary due to the small stream room size - optimally we'll have a bigger stream room next time and this won't be an issue again.
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