Kronoberg, SwedenI'm not sure how many that's been sold. 40 perhaps?
There's a soft cap above 100 attendees.
Hope to see you there!
We've gotten 17 Dreamhack PC on top of that pool.
Same PCs as last year. We have them at the venue as we speak, just need to set them up and figure out which ones are working day 1.
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Announcing the details of ESA at Dreamhack Summer 2017!
After some time confirming details, we're now able to reveal the details of the ESA marathon happening at Dreamhack Summer 2017 Keynote. We were very happy with how Dreamhack Winter 2016 went and strive to continue on that path.
If you want to read more about the announcement, you can do so here: http://dreamhack.se/dhs17/2017/03/31/speedrunning-at-dhs17/
Dates: 17-20th June 2017 Location: Elmia Fair, Elmiavägen 11, 554 54 Jönköping, Sweden Opening hours: DHS17 is open 24/7, from 08:00 CEST on Sat 17th June to 10:00 CEST on Tue 20th June.
Keynote During DreamHack Summer 2017 part of the DreamHack Speedrunning crew will hold a keynote in the Fan Zone located in the Fan Zone in Lobby Syd. The keynote will cover the basics of speedrunning like history, tips and tricks and also some demonstration of some of the glitches in some of the popular games. The speedrunning keynote will be at the Lobby Syd Fan Zone on Sunday 17:00 CEST.
If you’re interested in being a part of the keynote, please contact Edenal or Planks.
Mainstage showcase During Dreamhack Summer 2017, we will have the opportunity to show speedrunning on the main stage. The sessions are limited to 1 hour and we will have one or two sessions during the event.
After submissions appropriate games will be decided after talking with the runners.
Submissions Deadline for submissions are May 1st.
Daily Blocks Depending on the submissions we will strive to go back to themed days. Viewer count was steady throughout the last event, indifferent to the theme of the day. Themed days works well with the groups who usually attend the Dreamhack speedrunning events and we see no reason not the stay on that course.
From 5am to 2pm the live stream will stop and show a time-shifted re-run of the previous day’s runs, without the setup time. This is primarily to make sure everyone is well rested and fresh, but it also means our friends in Eastern time zones can see as much of the the same content ‘as live’ as possible.
Location This time we are going to be back in the old spot in Hall C, but bigger. If you were there during Dreamhack Summer 2016, you know what to expect. The viewing area with a projector will be facing out into the hall, allowing more spectators to view the stream.
Attendees Sign up as usual, here at Speedrun.com. You attendance will be confirmed by Edenal closer to the event.
Questions
Please post them in the thread or at Discord (https://discordapp.com/invite/esamarathon)
I'll set up a station with Light Gun games.
Co-op fun!
Visited Royal Corner yesterday to talk to them about room availability.
They still have single rooms left for all day, but larger rooms are all out on Friday the 28th of July. The representative I spoke with assured me there were plenty of rooms left for all other days of the event.
Here's the info I have to share at this moment.
Scandic is fully booked over a few days mid week. Royal Corner is fully booked on Friday the 28th of July.
It's a possibility to move between the hotels for these days.
We've reached out to other hotels and await the results.
Looking into it!
I've previously been told Scandic is at full capacity but Royal still having room available.
I'll post an update as soon as possible!
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__Mass housing - Tipshallen__: Open from Fri 21 July to Monday the 31st at 10am. This is an unheated gym hall in the building opposite Fortnox Arena. You should bring an air mat, camping mattress or camping bed. You should also bring a sleeping bag suitable for indoor camping.
Mass housing is available to book through the ticket page, and air beds are also available for an additional 150 SEK (subject to booking deadline).
Early bird mass housing fee: 400 SEK Normal mass housing registration: 650 SEK
Hotels: There are six hotel options. You should compare location and rates and pick the correct one for you.
Hotel Reservations will be made by emailing the hotel or calling them. To get the discounted rate you need to make your reservation under the booking number/reference listed above. The discounted rate is different for each hotel. Prices include tax and gratuity.
It's first come, first served so get your reservations in early. We have held a large block this year, so both hotel's online booking systems are showing very little availability. Please be assured that if you contact the hotels directly using the details below you will be able to reserve a room.
Hotell Värend Kungsgatan 27 352 33 Växjö Sweden Email: info@hotellvarend.se
Single: 550 SEK per room per night (10 rooms available - 2017-03-30) Double: 695 SEK per room per night (8 rooms available - 2017-03-30)
Booking through email only. Discount code “Wäxjö Gaming Week”.
Hotell Esplanad Norra Esplanaden 21A 352 31 Växjö Sweden Phone: +46 (0)470 - 225 80 Email: info@hotelesplanad.com
Single: 745 SEK per room per night Double: 795 SEK per room per night
Discount code “Wäxjö Gaming Week”.
Clarion Collection Hotel Cardinal Bäckgatan 10 352 30 Växjö Sweden Phone: +46 470 72 28 00 Email: Cc.Cardinal@choice.se
Double: 1050 SEK per room per night Triple: 1275 SEK per room per night (7 available rooms - 2017-03-30)
Included for this hotel is afternoon snacks and dinner.
Discount code “Wäxjö Gaming Week”.
Elite Park Hotels Växjö Västra Esplanaden 10-14 351 06 Växjö Sweden Phone: +46 (0) 470 134 00 Email: helen.lundborg@elite.se
Double: 990 SEK per room per night Triple: 1190 SEK per room per night
Discount code “Wäxjö Gaming Week”.
Quality Hotel Royal Corner (limited availability) Liedbergsgatan 11 352 32 Växjö Sweden Phone: +46 470 70 10 00 Distance from Fortnox Arena: 1900 meters according to Google Maps. Email: info@royalcorner.se
Single: 550 SEK per room per night Double: 750 SEK per room per night (sold out) Triple: 950 SEK per room per night (sold out)
Booking by email or phone, Discount code “Wäxjö Gaming Week”.
Our block of double and triple rooms is sold out in this hotel. Singles still available. If you email you may be offered a room at full price, but the discount is not available. You may be able to book via third party websites.
Scandic Växjö (limited availability) Hejaregatan 19 352 46 Växjö Sweden Distance from Fortnox Arena: 850 meters according to Google Maps. Email: vaxjo@scandichotels.com
Single: 650 SEK per room per night Double: 750 SEK per room per night Triple: 850 SEK per room per night Quad: 1050 SEK per room per night
Booking through email only. Discount code “Wäxjö Gaming Week”.
These codes are being shared with the other events happening at Fortnox Arena, and are spelt as you need to include them in the email! Wäxjö is a historic spelling of Växjö
Bots running wild in the ESA2017 forum http://www.speedrun.com/esa2017/thread/aqbfw
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ESA 2017 is a speedrunning centred community meetup and marathon. The doors are open from Friday the 21st of July until Sunday the 30th of July at 11:59pm The stream is planned to run from the evening of the 22nd of July the evening of the 29th of July. Mass Housing with cover this entire period and close on Monday the 31st at 10am.
What you need to know about registration.
If you attend ESA, you do not need purchase an attendance ticket for Azension II. It's included in the full ESA 17 ticket. You do however still need to register for specific tournaments at https://smash.gg/tournament/azension-ii/details
If you do not attend ESA, you need to register and purchase an attendance ticket through Smash.gg in order to attend the Smash event
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ESA 2017 is a speedrunning centred community meetup and marathon. The December round table will be streamed on www.twitch.tv/esamarathon starting Wednesday the 21st of December at 9 pm CET.
December round table: For this iteration of the (now) monthly ESA round table we're going to do go over the following topics:
ESA: Winter Highlights Recap of the feedback from ESA 2016 Game and schedule changes and announcements Viewer questions and topics
Questions from you guys!: We'd like to you give, the viewers and attendees, the opportunity to ask any question you might have before the round table right now. That will give us greater possibilities to give you a full answer during the round table.
Please post any questions or topic you want us to tackle in this thread! Thank you!
PogChamp
Rayman has too many bits. Released for the 32/64 bit console generation.
Retro has been arbitrarily limited to 8 or 16 bit consoles for this event. Or pre-5th console generation.
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TLDR; It's the same story as last time!
SIGNUP HERE It is really important that you sign up. If you're not on the signup sheet, you won't be able to get access to Dreamhack or the speedrunners area.
Dreamhack Winter Thursday 24 November 2016 - Sunday 27 November 2016[/centre] Speedrunning is returning to Dreamhack Winter in 2016! This event will be treated as a full ESA main event, meaning amazing games, hosting and donations. This marathon will be a hybrid live/online event with the opportunity for live runners to take part in races with online opponents and with scheduled online-only blocks to allow the speedrun attendees to experience the rest of Dreamhack to it's fullest!
Submissions Submissions are being taken via the speedrun.com submission form. There is no hard deadline for submission but we request you respect a soft deadline of 24 October, a month before the event. Late submissions may be accepted, but we'll be in the process of making a schedule.
Runs/races can be submitted up to 2 live players.
As with previous Dreamhack Speedrun marathons, we can cover your entry and mass housing costs if you are prepared to take full part in our event. Do not book a general admission ticket!
Please sign up using the speedrun.com signup link if you are planning on attending
There is a discord group for chat about the event, find the ESA at Dreamhack group here. ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ Accomodation arrangements Plan to arrive as early as possible on Thursday 24 November. The stream will start in the afternoon on this day. Stream ends at latest on 12 pm Saturday 26. Everyone must be out of the building by 10 am Sunday 27th November. There is no activity on this day (Sunday), only packing and cleaning.
Mass housing will be available on Thursday, Friday and Saturday only. If you need to arrive early or depart late you must book a hotel in or around Jonkoping. You should bring your own sleeping equipment, an airbed, pillow and sleeping bag are reccomended. Limited airbeds might be available to borrow by prior arrangement and on request.
Volunteers We will need some volunteers to help run the online portion of the event. See Edenal for details :)
Travel Dreamhack provide a full travel Q&A on their website
Planes: Best Choice: Fly to Gothenburg Landvetter and then take a direct coach (see Swebus below). Second choice: Fly to Copenhagen Kastrup and then book a train to Jonkoping Centrum.
Trains: Jonkoping is one change from Gothenburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen, SJ.se has prices and timetables.. Upon arriving at Jonkoping Centrum you should go up the escalator, cross the footbridge to the main square and take local bus 1 to Elmia (cash accepted). Alternatively, a taxi from the station is about €10.
Buses: Swebus provide buses directly to Dreamhack from the following points. Use ‘Dreamhack Elmia’ as your destination to check availability with the promotion code 'DHW2016': Stockholm, Södertälje, Nyköping, Norrköping, Linköping, Mjölby, Ödeshög, Gränna, Ulricehamn, Borås, Göteborg, Karlstad, Kristinehamn, Gullspång, Mariestad, Skövde, Tidaholm, Mullsjö, Gränna, Värnamo, Markaryd, Örkelljunga, Helsingborg, Lund and Malmö
Swebus also run many extra services to Jönköping Centrum from where you can take a local bus or taxi.
Swebus buses all have power points and free wifi.
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Hi!
Thanks for your feedback about this year’s event. We realise there were problems and in order to fully address everyone’s feedback, we’re going to go over these problems one by one, and leave the bigger picture and upcoming events mostly for a later time. It’s a lengthy read, but needs to be to address everything.
This post was co-written by the organising team, consisting of: Bangerra, Edenal, flicky, oasiz and Planks
Tech Issues We figured out why tech issues happened during the marathon: inadequate pre-marathon setup time and making compromises with the hardware we use. While everything was tested and ready, even more than last year, some vital functions in the setup started to actively work against us and many of the delays could have been avoided if the issues and workarounds would have been found in advance instead of during a run setup and these snowballed to cause major issues. A very similar situation actually happened during last ESA where a lot of things were built on the fly, that time however we had luck on our side and no major new surprises appeared.
We’d like to take this opportunity to once again offer a sincere and profound apology to all of the runners and tech volunteers for your unbelievable patience. It willl be better next year.
Since we feel that this is an important point to address, below is a small breakdown on this with more details.
In an effort to keep event cost down, we’ve always tried to keep setup days to a minimum. This is because hiring the venue for a day that the event is not ‘happening’ has a very high cost. Next year however, we absolutely need two-three days of ‘setup time’ in order to make sure the early issues with the stream aren’t repeated. This will allow for setup, experimentation, learning and a 12-24 hour rehearsal stream to allow any initial setup issues to be worked out.
Our ambition was to go all digital for capture (Whole chain, unlike ESA15). We learned the hard way how one glitch can break the entire chain and make it very time consuming to debug. With an analogue chain we’d maybe introduce noise in the picture with a glitch, but not break it completely. This is where the above mentioned compromise comes into play, Digital equipment with the features that we need is still being actively used in broadcasting environments and the similar quality (not cheaper chinese) stuff that was using during ESA15 can cost up to 10x more than the ‘obsolete by broadcasting standards’ analogue version. Since we want to keep entrance fees reasonable while still trying to make the best possible outcome, we decided to take a risk here, which didn’t pay off.
Adding to the heap of technical issues, XSplit starting to become very unresponsive after prolonged streaming sessions. It’s safe to say that the unresponsive front end added several minutes per game, and in certain instances 10+ minutes, after everything else was setup. We have never experienced issues with XSplit in this magnitude before, not during any of the previous events nor during Dreamhack Summer where we used the exact same capture PC and hardware as ESA16. Outwards, the encoding was running smoothly and the local recordings are without errors, these facts added to the runners and viewers frustration because issues with Xsplit were isolated to that one choke point. This was especially visible during times when the tech had to prolong the setup as the capture cards kept getting locked after switching from hosting to the run in question. If the 10 player SWAT was anything to go by, this wasn’t actually that far away, except that this lasted for days.
For reference, the capture PC including any of its components never came close to high or even moderate load over the course if the event.
Runner PCs The PCs we had this year were the same hire stock that has come from Dreamhack since 2014. While back then they were adequate, they are now clearly showing their age. They also cost a lot to collect - both in time and money - because they come from Stockholm and the current arrangements seem to be more hassle than they’re worth, and thus we won’t continue to borrow equipment from Dreamhack for 2017.
Next year we are going to explore other options, primarily beginning to build our own stock of practice PCs in addition to the three machines already in our possession. This is because we recognise the value PC gaming brings to the event. This will need to be weighed up against other costs, as even a small stock annually will be a significant part of the budget. These decisions will be made in due course.
Big screen being unused There was a ~600x200 pixel scoreboard which required a proprietary media server to turn on. While it could be argued that it would have potential use cases aside from showing the stream, the equipment that was needed to even use it wasn’t there as it doesn’t use standard inputs.
Lack of projector Last year’s arrangement with the projectors was fantastic, and in retrospect it was a big let down to not have a big screen you could see from almost anywhere in the venue. We decided to trial using just the TVs which we were loaned free of charge this year, this decision was taken as renting a ‘big screen’ capable projector for two weeks is very expensive. In the past, the stream rooms were already fitted with projector screens (and at Nyeport, also projectors) with a smaller audience in mind. In the planning meetings to come, we will review options to bring a projector back.
Day 1 lack of equipment On day one most of the ‘borrowed’ equipment was yet to arrive from Dreamhack. This fed into the feeling of unreadiness and chaos of the first couple of days. This was due to a failure of logistics on multiple occasions even with all possible precautions taken by the organisers. As addressed above, a solution is being sought to deal with as little Dreamhack equipment as possible.
Lack of chairs Yes! Our chair stock was not flexible enough and we’ve already made arrangements for increasing the amount of chairs available next year. We’ve had an offer of more effective floor planning for next year, and now have a much better idea of what we need in a venue of that size. This will likely involve redistributing the sofas to some of the console area, a stack or two of folding chairs (think Dreamhack) so that there’s always spares (even if they’re not as comfortable) and rearranging the console gaming area to be less ‘rows’ and more ‘u shaped’ to give more room for everyone to huddle round.
Växjö is far Here is the first point we’ll substantially reserve judgement on. Yes, Växjö is 2½ hours from the nearest international airport, but there are many more variables to consider here. For one, the journey is about the same as that from Gothenburg to Skövde when you consider the transfer times to the city center etc, and Växjö is far closer to Copenhagen Airport than Skövde is. We’re committed to stay in Växjö for the upcoming two events. It’s convenient for the organisers to host the event where there are several local personnel and communities. We’ve made great progress with local connections that will be essential for coping with the rapid growth and assure long term sustainability, both personally and financially.
Fortnox arena is far Mixed opinions on this from attendees - the major shop was close and there was quite a number of fast food options close by. Several groups made daily trips into town.
Next year we are going to explore local options to enhance the ease of leaving the area. We would like to see the reception kiosk act as a concierge, providing better local info of places to eat, making restaurant bookings, etc. We are also going to explore a bicycle hire option that can be available to everyone at the time of booking (following great feedback from those that had them available at their hotel), and maybe even a minibus option to transport people between the venue, hotels and town easily, especially at night time when the buses have stopped running.
Mass housing Mass housing had some complaints this year, mostly regarding the condition of the building on day one (lights). This we can fix next year easily now that we know the mass housing venue.
The remainder of the points regarded what are intrinsic problems with mass housing - it being cold and people snoring. We’ll provide better information next year going into the event on what to bring - sleeping bags, extra sheets and earplugs are absolutely key.
Stream layouts We’re going to be reworking and simplify the stream layouts for Dreamhack Winter and try to keep them uniform from there on out for all ESA-related events.
Interviews and hosting This was the first time we organised a rota for the host desk, and the first year we tried to break out of the format of the past. It had problems that are being discussed and learned from. We hope to have some ‘long distance hosting’ during the Dreamhack marathon for people to further practice their skills talking :)
At the end of the day, we don’t consider this a totally failed experiment. We will continue to fine tune the hosting format as it continues to bring a lot of memorable moments to the stream. We have a lot of information to work with for next year and feedback can be easily implemented.
B-Hall The B-hall wasn’t planned for, and it showed. We’d like to apologise for the unexpected arrival of the LAN party on the final weekend. Edenal takes full responsibility that it wasn’t properly communicated.
We’ve realised that empty areas will not be spontaneously populated, and need to be prepared from the outset. Together with the better floorplanning, we’ll make sure there are tables, chairs and power in there next year.
Cleaning Cleaning of the venue was kept to a much higher standard than ever before. It was noted that Tompa did a lot of that, and our thanks to him are in order. His feedback will be taken on board next year.
The mass housing toilets were not cleaned nor were the paper dispensers refilled over the course of the week. This will be kept in mind for next year.
The mass housing floor was itself left in a less than satisfactory condition. If attendees themselves don’t prefer to keep it clean, a paid cleaning crew will be brought in after the event.
Food problems There are plenty of food options in both in the immediate area (admittedly, mostly fast food) and in town. We hope with the concierge and/or bicycle service (as discussed above ↑), we can remedy most of the concern which appears to boil down to lack of local knowledge and restaurants not being used to a sudden influx of larger groups.
This is something that will of course improve as repeat attendees will get to know Växjö better and better information is provided.
The in-venue catering situation will be discussed in depth before next year, so that the catering better suits the needs of our attendees. Northern Sky intends to widen the selection of hot food that will be available during the night.
Final days The final days went to the plan we set before the event, but this wasn’t communicated clearly enough. We would anticipate the same programme next year, 1 to 1 ½ days of bonus stream followed by a rapid intensive tidy up and a final night for those who want to continue to hang out. We understand that while this may not be a massive amount of time difference in the grand scheme of things, closing the venue ever a few hours early can affect the final attendees massively.
Bonus stream It was noted some personalities were detrimental to the stream. From Planks’ point of view however, it ran perfectly - he wasn’t involved at all beyond re-rigging the stream PC to the simpler setup. We can set some guidelines but we need any bonus stream to be self moderating. We won’t ever set a schedule or tech crew to look after it, that day is cool down time for the volunteers and organisers.
Tech volunteers We didn’t have time to do our briefing because of the setup issues, and even after the stream started, it took a day or two for all the tech to be worked out. It’s very hard to explain what’s going on when the situation changes every hour, and for that, we apologise. This feeds back into the time problems at the start of the event and something we will be working on hard to avoid in the future.
Scheduling Many people didn’t like the three rounds of cuts this year - we’d like to explain that the decision regarding a single or double stream was still to be made during cuts, so we had to keep our options open. The feedback seems to be that as a group the attendees want stricter first and second round cuts so people know where they’re at from an earlier date.
We will endeavour to do this but need to balance the fact that by and large we take submissions from people who’ve never run a game (so long as they show sufficient progress before Summer) and people who only practice in the run up to the event. These people benefit from late cuts.
Less relaxed event A part of this is just what happens when an event gets big. Next year we’ll be addressing this as much as possible by revising the layout. We were by and large very relaxed with what people did with the layout this year though perhaps it didn’t show. We’ll be talking about this in the coming months. We think a lack of perceived freedom has affected this so more information about what you’re allowed to do may help.
Personalised Lanyards Wound up being not as popular as we thought, and significant work in administering. If they return next year, they’ll be printed graphical cards that can be written on in permanent marker rather than individual.
In hindsight, not sticking to deadlines was a major mistake. Even though the intentions were good.
Scandic We’ll be taking the following feedback to the Scandic: • Please put the ESA group in a block together. • Please price per room and not per person, to reflect the much inferior nature of the rooms when the bunks are used
The Scandic will still be an option and we’ll be completely upfront next year about the nature of their offering. We will make sure we have accurate reports of the hotels so that you guys will know what’s up and be able to book accordingly!
Hosting/tech communication From Dreamhack onwards, we’ll have a firm audio design for the digital mixer that will allow the tech to talk to the hosts. This will mean a limited amount of distracting chatter in their headsets, but will solve the awkward situations of this year.
Lack of second stream We’re still split as an organising group about if the second stream was worthwhile. At this point, it’s impossible to brand a community driven stream as a ‘main stream’, as we discovered with the bonus stream this year.
We’re not closing the door for the return of the second stream as we have most of the hardware to make it possible, however we do not have the manpower. If we can find an independent second crew to run a second stream under the same standards as the main stream, we will consider. However, we also want to prevent the second stream from cannibalising volunteers from the first stream which is a big risk.
Hosting area / Camera work We’ll try and cut back on the complexity of the hosting area next year. We also need to, through the hosting organisers, communicate better that the hosting area is somewhat independent and doesn’t need tech’s approval to change things up for the better.
Food services (Fridges, microwave) We set expectations low regarding the availability of fridges in the upstairs room because two fridges simply isn’t enough to satisfy the demands of 400 attendees. Nonetheless, the facilities were used and left in a broadly OK standard. It’s better for everyone if we keep the fridges to drinks only as one person can quickly fill an entire shelf for their own bread, cold cuts, cheese, milk and drinks. However it should be mentioned that the possibility to use them at all was unexpected and it should come as a no surprise that if any need to clean up stuff pops up, stuff will be thrown out with/without notice.
Runner headsets The quality was low this year, and the hookup is being revamped to remove this problem. The headsets are here to stay, it was conspicuous that this year we had no feedback that ‘the runners couldn’t hear the hosts’ or ‘couldn’t hear those they were running with’
No on-site mods This might change if next year there’s a dedicated on-site area for modding, as this would help with communication in general. On balance we’re happy that not having random attendees as mods was advantageous to the organisation within the mod group itself.
Intermission screen / No music The intermission screen was the direct result of unfinished tech setup and done as a quick placeholder for actual intermission screens that happened later on. Should have been seldom seen, but the hosting area wasn’t ready from the first run. It was a mistake to have a “dead scene”, this won’t happen again and was fixed after the first day. We will have an idiot proof solution to music next year too.
Donation light too flashy The light was fully configurable but was not adjusted during the event as no one complained on site. The alternative to the light is someone telling you that there’s a donation waiting to be read. Overall, based on feedback it was welcomed. Flash patterns will be re-evaluated.
Showers We were happy for you to lock yourself in to shower and change, but many people were unaware that they had to latch the door after they left, leaving rooms out of order for hours until someone told the kiosk. We will put a warning up on every door next year to make sure people don’t do this again.
Attendee <-> Organisation communication Will be improved with some form of mailing list and discord group for attendees.
Changing of mass housing location The move was necessary to a literally adjacent building to accommodate everyone who selected mass housing. We think that the distance between venue and mass house was incredibly reasonable.
Stream separate from practice? We feel like the ‘all together room’ is now a part of the unique atmosphere of the event and on balance gives more benefits than it takes away.
Entry security (lack of) This should have been tighter and will be briefed to whoever does security next year.
Big red button Cut to save on disrupting the stream any more to enable it mid event. Returns at Dreamhack.
No practice consoles We have never and will never provide practice consoles.
24/7 emergency contact It could have been more clearly stated, but there was always someone responsible at/near tech and most of the time one of the Northern Sky leaders at the kiosk.
Printed schedules Too many changes to maintain. With working wifi, this is not a concern.
Price of ticket For the first time this year ESA didn’t lose money. We try to keep costs as low as possible but €30 for a week is not sustainable, not even with all members of the staff being unpaid volunteers. We understand that a raise in price may be upsetting, but it’s a requirement for us to be able to comfortably run the event and we hope that you can see that it still remains great value for a 7+ day event.
This a topic that will be discussed in more detail at a later time.
Restream issues We don’t moderate restreams, it is their content. The additional setup time should help mitigate their concerns about testing streams. We’d like to apologise to the restreamers for the rocky start and being hard to contact. We will make it a point to have a person on contact on site whose only responsibility is communication with the outside world.
Needed more and better tvs We had more TVs than ever and the vast majority were good. Any ones marked as bad, broken or not working have been quarantined and won’t be re-used. LCDs we got from Dreamhack were the wrong batch, where a majority were missing stands and a couple had cracked displays. See above section about Dreamhack equipment / Runner PC’s.
Gaming4good / G2A / Donation tracker The alternatives we had for donation trackers were to host the open source GDQ tracker ourselves or use an existing solution like Twitch Alerts or Gaming4Good. We’re not capable of building our own in-house tracker. For reference, the Pre-ESA online marathon used Twitch Alerts and a manually updated spreadsheet.
Gaming4Good offered to develop a tracker tailored to our needs free of charge. They also offered support throughout the entire event. Which is the main reason why we went with this solution.
The criticism of the tracker seems to be mainly with G2A and not Gaming4Good. They’re exploring options of payment processors other than G2APay who performed unsatisfactorily during the event due to the repeated blocking of the venue’s IP addresses.
We want to make it clear that we understand the heavy criticism of G2A and their practices, but for this event using the Gaming4Good tracker was our only viable option.
Pac has expressed enthusiasm about developing the marathon section of speedrun.com to have a built-in donation tracker system for the next marathon, so if that’s ready by then, we’ll definitely be using that instead.
Finance thread Give it a month or two, it’ll be posted once the bills are paid and the accounts are settled for the year.
Thank you for taking the time to provide valuable feedback.
After all individually reading your replies, the ESA staff had a long meeting yesterday evening going though it all together. We're currently preparing a reply, we're hoping get it out late this weekend but it might be delayed a few days further. Our work schedules are currently nightmarish and while we don't want to keep you waiting for an official replay longer than necessary, we also don't want to rush it.
Stay tuned!
Any picture I've not received by tomorrow won't make it into the final batch.
