You cannot pause the timer in Portal 2, or any games that I'm aware of.

Source Engine games just have great load remover support and they all run on In Game Time, not Real Time, which is why you constantly see the timer stopping.

I'll take it a step back for you guys. Running leaderboards as active as these, with this many different runners is a real pain.

Back in the day, (2014) the runners were pretty much confined to a few people in the GTA IRC channel. The number of people involved meant that there was a decent conversation between themselves (usually) and they'd agree and update the rules etc.

Now, there are loads of runners, split across various discords, all with their own ideas. You want leadership, but noone seems robust enough to a) put their foot down and say "no, we're doing xyz" and b ) suck it up and take it on the chin when things do not go their way. You can't please everyone.

My advice to you folks going forward would be; find a leader by whichever means seems best, and respect their decisions.

You'll need someone who knows the history and the runs of past and present. Ideally a runner, but that's not strictly necessary. You'll need someone who can properly articulate their decisions.

Perhaps make another thread and get the word out on discord for anyone who thinks they might be able to give it a shot to register their interest then have a vote.

Good luck.

I have put the largest section of my feedback in a separate thread, so here we go with the remainder;

Who’s idea was this floor plan? You don’t have to change everything all the time. Putting the tech crew behind a projector screen was a terrible idea. Last year they could see everything that was going on easily without having to run around, but now, even something as simple as a thumbs up required having to move all the time. It’s clear to me that this contributed to the long setup times. It also meant there was much less seating area and you can’t see the stream from the whole room. Now, I speculate that this might have been a cunning ruse (fewer chairs means it looks busier on stream more of the time), but let’s face it, it’s never going to be packed 24/7. The organisers themselves know that for someone attending, the stream is actually only a very small part of the event. IMO, the floor plan from 2018 was far better.

At first, I was pleased with the decision to have both streams in the same room. In theory it’s great, However, it was brought to my attention after my run on stream two that i could barely be heard over the noise coming from stream one, which kinda puts a downer on things. Don’t know if that can be fixed or not, but I know I’m not the only one not happy about this.

Hosting going back to the desk set-up was great though.

Is one of the largest side rooms being dedicated to chat modding really necessary? The thing is (and this a personal opinion) chat it’s fine. Most of the things that turn it “bad” (excessive copypasta etc) can be filtered easily by a bot. Giving them their own office means they’re just going to sit there and think of ways to feel important, unless someone other than ESA is now trying to have a say in how things are done.

The schedule reveal could do without being a group discord call where everyone talks over each other and screams with joy at every game. Perhaps one or two of the schedulers talking through the process and saying why they decided to accept each run. Many people just turned it off this year.

$25% assumes that everyone who donates will be donating with something funny. Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with the gift of comedy, and many donations ended up falling flat. If you must persist with them for their pure donation harvesting ability, perhaps let there be a longer estimate on the run, or some other failsafes like disallowing ones that take the runners hands away from the game.

Someone denied the use of the name “JD Farts” as a name for the character in Fallout 4. Why? What on earth is wrong with that? “How Ridiculous”, a youtube channel whose hosts are youth pastors in Australia have the occasional fart joke in their videos. Why deny that?

Please, for ending and opening speeches, have cue cards or some other kind of prompt so that people are not stood in front of the camera thinking for ages. If you’re dedicated to production values, this is a serious flaw.

One of the senior hosting guys could do well to not talk down to people with snide comments.

<b>None of the preceding points should detract from the fact that I had a great time, just as I have every year previously. Thank you to everyone involved.</b>

Mass housing isn't "required". It's nice to have, but it isn't required.

Bring back the couch, unless the aim was to get all the commentators sitting in Arozzi® gaming chairs? In which case, fair enough?

I dont know how many CRT's were brought to this event, but you could probably half that number next year, even if you dont replace them with an equivalent number of low latency digital panels. You could probably reduce that even more if you could provide a few OSSC's and panels. Many CRT's sat unused.

We could have utilised the speakers built into the venue a little more maybe? They worked great for Quiplash (even if everything else gave up) so maybe we could hook them up for just voices have have the one speaker be game audio only?

I'm not a particular fan of the hosting layout, a desk or a couch works much better than two separate chairs. I feel like we're just reinventing the wheel here. the three monitor setup however (info, stream, chat) was just about right.

I was never a particular fan of it being allowed in the first place, I guess the three points in the first post solidify my position on that.

As for grandfathering in old runs, i dunno. We keep Hugo's controller runs using Ginput on the SA leaderboards because they were done Ginput was outlawed, on the other hand they were not (or even threatening) WR.

It's a shame there is no feature that allows you put a "UNDER DIFFERENT RULESET" marker next to runs on the board.

At the very least DV, if the ban does occur, could you put a note in your run that clearly states that it was achieved using features no longer permissible?

if you want someone to give some insigiht into the GTA community, let me know and I can round up some people

"There's kind of a point, We'd have to uninstall it and set up the new program, and Ginput allows you to have GTA IV style controls"

Allow me to play the worlds smallest violin for you.

EDIT: BlackmadeJay, I'm asking with all due respect, can you please start punctuating your posts correctly.

A reminder to everyone;

You can gain advantage at a task, but still lose at that particular task for a while. The victory (in this case, getting a faster time than non ginput users) may only come later.

You shouldn't have had that advantage in the first place.

The only true modification I know that has ever been allowed in any GTA game is "liveless.exe", which removes Games For Windows: Live from GTA IV. That was universally agreed by people who know what they are talking about.

As such, my vote is A.

Addendum; this really should not have been put to a public vote for the reasons evident in this thread so far.

As many people as I can remember because I left it a week;

RyeDawg - for being constantly ready to party, doxxing people, pushing the limits of everything and being a great hosting partner.

Noz - for allowing the good times in his hotel room (because it was his name/card on the reservation)

Stabby - for his brilliant impressions (seriously, it was like Pac was in the room)

Gael - for his company at the end of the event when rolling up the floor and walking to the train station

MizterConfuzing - for actually showing up.

Tezur0 - and his lovely girlfriend for their insights into Russian culture and the group photo.

English_Ben - for sorting out THAT problem so noone else had to.

KZ_Frew - for making the first reason he ever leaves the United Stated to be to come and see us.

Joshimuz - for installing some totally legal and above board software on his laptop so what we could watch the Grand Prix and being another great hosting partner.

mhmd_fvc - for his company at breakfast early on in the week

Omega - for losing his keycap and getting it sent back to him by me.

Etem - for being on the same flight as me on the way to the venue.

IrishBlondie - for literally breaking her foot.

(anyone else from the GTA group I forgot)

Edenal - for giving me a tour of the city when we took some stuff to the storage area.

Planks - for figuring out a way to play Ryedawg "Never Gonna Give You Up" on his co-commentary headset without anyone else hearing it during GTA IV.

Liva - For running the second stream. No witty comment, but i think 6-7 days of 14+ hours streams is a big enough task to undertake to be considered a joke.

The Mafia Crew - who I played two games with this year (double the number of last year) but they were both great games. Four next year, maybe?

All the Leaders and Organisers for all the hours they put into this. The number of combined hours between everyone who has given their time for free is probably enough to make your eyes water.

Anyone who gave their time in some way to the event. Setting up, tearing down, hosting, tech or scheduling. Donating to charity is one thing, giving your physical time and energy is quite another.

Breaking this down into three sections;

Tech Volunteer

Much better than last year, but I still couldn't get the hang of it. I'd need far more time with the set-up to learn it - mixer, capture racks etc. My knowledge lies more in PC internals, but even that pales in comparison to the senior techs knowledge.

Hosting

I really like hosting. I like to think that I'm not too bad at it either, feedback to me personally has been good. The StreamDeck was excellent. I was initially concerned about the camera being that conference cam thing above the TV but of course it was replaced.

The biggest change that I would make is the TV not actually being there in the first place. We only really need a small monitor off to the side just to let us know when we are visible. The way it was set up, when I was talking, I found that I was looking at the TV, not the camera lens, which, due to how close they were to the sofa, makes it look like we were just gazing off into the distance. Sure I could train myself out of that, but would others have the presence of mind to do so?

Yeah also, we could set a $5 floor for donation reading. If people want to make us meme it up, then they can surely cough up the extra to do so.

The donation alert box from last year wasn't a bad idea. I understand it's fully configurable. Maybe we could have just set it to light up, instead of the disco party started when we flicked the switch last time. Runners would have to say in advance whether they would be cool with it though.

I liked the sofa. I also liked the desk setup from last year. Either one is fine next year, do not mind.

Attendee

I didn't really have a lot to complain about last year. I don't mind walking and I did not want food in the middle of the night. Therefore, I have even fewer things to grumble about this time.

As for the chat, I'm in favour of just straight up turning that shit off. Causes more drama (if you call childish spats "drama") than it's worth. Or make it Sub Only. if people want to pay to attempt to make questionably borderline racist memes, then we've already got your money, and you can just deal with being banned. There are more ways to have fun than seeing how far you can push things. If chat was not heavily moderated, then I guarantee it would just descend into stupidity. "Oh some mods timed you out in a Twitch chat? Allow me to play the worlds smallest violin for you."

Finally; Many hands make light work. When I left on Monday morning, there was still a good few hours worth of work left to do, namely moving boxes and sweeping and rolling up the false floor. And it looked like Planks and Edenal were about the only ones left to do it. If everyone pitched in a little more on the tear down, it could have been finished by the end of Sunday. There were plenty of things to do. Get involved. See people moving tables to the storage area in the back? Grab a couple yourself, they're not heavy. Grab a few of the countless bottles that had been left around, empty them and put them in the bin.

Noone can force you to do anything, I know. Technically it's not your responsibility, and Edenal did occasionally call for a few extra hands when an extra task came up, but I don't think it should be like that. I dunno, maybe i'm just more prone to feeling guilty about just sitting around when I see others working.

I'm in.

EDIT: For Thursday only.

It's what I set my stream title as anyway.

Yeah I said that but either noone saw my post, or they thought it was a bad idea so I just deleted it.

Twitch: "You can have them until someone yells at all of us for it."

How badly will twitch yell at us (or, more accurately the channel owner) if we try it but fail to see what we can get away with?

Then how does witwix get away with his Blastoise emote?

Paintballing is expensive.

I don't know if it's gonna be the same in Sweden, but what they often do here [UK] at least, is tell you a really good price that includes X number of free paintballs. However, that X number is always significantly less than what you would actually use, and the price for more is very high.

It's going to be tricky trying to book if you don't have confirmed numbers, but I'd be cautious about signing up until I know how much it is AND how much extra painballs are.

None of MizterConfuzing or S's games. Not this year, not ever.

As a brit, I too would like to see an increase in Carol Vorderman in all forms of media Kreygasm

I plan on volunteering for tech (and hosting) again next year, so my question is this; What will you be doing to help us non-senior tech more knowledgable about the job?

I want there to be less reliance upon the senior techs, because I felt like they were pretty run down a lot of the time, with Edenal even setting up a bed in the shower room behind the tech area. I know this was his choice, but man did I ever feel guilty that he had to be woken up because of the PAL Super Nintendo incident.

(also Cereth, I don't think bandwidth was the problem, more that the WiFi router ran out of IP address to give out. Oasiz pointed that out.)