I feel like some of my points will be repetition but I have a few things that I know can be fixed for next year and I've talked to a bunch of people from the org team and discussed things so it would be a waste not to summarize my points again.

First, some short bulletpoints about my situation:

• First Time at ESA, been to SGDQ15 and various smaller events
• Stayed from 23rd till 31st
• I had two runs in, one was pulled by myself due to tech issues (more on that below)
• I commentated for one run
• I did two host shifts
• I stayed at Scandic
• I arrived with car from Germany

OVERALL FEELING I feel like it is appropriate to start with a general summary of my personal experience at ESA without going into detail. The event was cool but didn't fully meet my - arguably - very high expectations. My main goal was to meet my European speed friends and that point was pretty much fully met and my absolute highlight. The tech issues and the scheduling made the onsite enjoyment of the stream, and also scheduling my hosting, a not-so-fun experience. Having had to drop my run didnt bother me too much since the bad hardware on site made practicing basically impossible and I rather sit out than having a bad showing. The second "run" went well though. The event got a lot more enjoyable towards the end of the week after I got used to the several issues and just decided to make the best out of it.

VENUE First impression: Damn, this Arena is huge... and empty. It wasn't ideal for our event but it definitely was spacious. I personally wouldn't mind having the event in the same venue again if a few things were adjusted but I'd also welcome a slightly smaller, better divided venue.

• Large space and room for the setup, never felt too crowded and the air was definitely breathable (the temperature was an issue but that's due to the hot first few days I suppose)
• The side room on top ("Kitchen") and tables was a great spot to hang out and look over the venue without too much noise. I just wished it could have been turned into a "side-stream" / laid-back stream room with a similar setup as the bonus stream where people could have just streamed their runs - OR - turned it into a room where the live stream could have been watched from.
• The B-Hall, although empty at first, was a great place for bonus activities. Having the Vive setup, Mafia, etc. there was a good thing.
• Overall, the venue >itself< was clean and - given the large size - relatively compact.
• The location wasn't too bad. Scandic was close enough and the mall + several restaurants were in walking distance. People complaining about the walking distance towards those locations are definitely too spoiled in my personal opinion.

• The empty seats were a bit depressing to look at. I know this is such a minor complaint, but the huge arena took away from the comfy feeling that ESA is known for. The place made the event look more serious/important than I felt it was.
• The distance to the city center is a bit too far. We still managed to walk to town several nights and it didnt bother me too much. But I can understand the complaints of others. I had the benefit of owning and bringing a car that enabled me to drive to more remote places and also drive people to the airport and the trainstation. I do not have insight in the bus transit but I am glad I got to avoid dealing with that.

HOTEL The hotel (Scandic) was decent. The people inside friendly and the fact that there was a noise complaint was slight dampener but understandable. The breakfast was ok-good, the restaurant itself too expensive though. Overall, the pricing was in the upper-end of what I would have been willing to pay if I were asked to name a price per night. And this was with the coupon, several months ahead.

ON STREAM Honestly, I didn't bother watching the stream much. The lack of TVs in the beginning and the total lack of a projector + screen made it not that enjoyable. When supporting your friends (aka couching/sitting behind the PC area specifically) all you got to see was the runner's PC if anything at all... This is my single biggest suggestion, add a big central screen near tech or in front of the runners so everyone can see the run and the runner knows when they are live and can check the timer. The layout was suboptimal. One example: Borderlands 2. Absolute catastrophy. Even my suggestion to simply add a black box as a layer between layout and footage to cover the misaligned layout to make it look a bit more bearable wasn't done during a 2h run. The layout wasted too much space and sometimes the people responsible didn't take the time to fully align stuff when it really isn't that much work.

SCHEDULING Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. The schedule was a hot mess. Obviously, tech issues in the beginning caused a big delay and moved runs back further and further as we progressed. But there were several things that could have been improved on site to fix it but instead every runner, tech and host was just asked to adapt to the delays. One thing that can be improved for next time: PLEASE, do not put several races/coop runs behind each other, especially for PC runs. Setup time can be drastically improved if the run logistics are kept in mind when scheduling. Obviously, the hardware issues added to this issue, but still, some of the delay could have been easily preventable with clever scheduling beforehand. And now another point: You guys realized you were 7h delayed. This is a very unwanted situation. Unpleasant situations require unpleasant solutions. Yet nobody proposed to move the 7h Final Fantasy Run towards the end (given the runner would have been available that day). That would have reset the entire schedule for everyone but this one runner (at least at that point). It could have more-or-less fixed the issues of having prime-time runs moved towards the morning graveyard slots.

AS A RUNNER / COMMENTATOR I mentioned the delays. Fuck those delays. They basically destroyed my sleep schedule and made the commentary less fun. Throughout the event the time for certain runs kept being unclear and although the Horaro was updated frequently, it was still confusing. But here's some room for my number one complaint during this entire event:

The PCs on site were... shit. Yes, that's Dreamhack's fault, but generally speaking, the environment for PC runners was pretty poorly managed. All practice PCs were super outdated. Sure, PCs are expensive, but if you are expecting PC runners to show up at your event and show their runs, you should provide PCs that are strong enough to run the games. And it wasnt just the poor hardware of the practice PCs... these machines were CLUTTERED with garbage programs and that's before anyone even laid their hands on them. I, and a few other PC runners who inquired about drivers were explicitly told to NOT INSTALL any driver software to keep the PCs clean but that really wasnt a concern when we first checked and found stuff like TeamViewer, Skype, DiscCleaner and other crap running on autostart + minimized in the background. Please, for next year, check your PC setup and make sure it runs. Because in theory, the one single main "PC" (aka laptop) that ran most of the PC games for the stream had better hardware than my own but refused to start my game. The one next to it ran it at under 30 FPS which is nowhere near enough and the game wouldn't render any textures on any of the practice PCs. This game isn't known to run badly, nor is it too old. We also had issues with games running just fine before we left and at time of setup for the run suddenly the game capture didnt work or the game wouldnt launch anymore. FIND A DEDICATED SPONSOR FOR YOUR PC RUNS. If you want to use Dreamhack machines, make sure they work.

AS A HOST Hosting was fun but also tiresome. Due to scheduling I ended up with some of the worst shifts after already having had trouble with bad spots the nights before. It still worked out fine because my partner and I were motivated and excited for the whole thing. The tracker is definitely great, that part worked just fine. What I believe needs some improvement is the communication between tech and hosts. The hosts are the ones ON STREAM in front of all the thousands of viewers, live, so please please please make sure that the hosts get to know what is going on at tech in case of delays and how much longer we need to be on air. Most of the time it was just a guessing-game, looking at the runner and the guys at tech, and then communicating to the stream that "we are probably about to start" or "that we have small issues with the setup". Better communication would help. At one point we had a no-show during our host shift and the runner of the previous run left and not a single person was at any of the stations (console or pc). Meanwhile, the two people that were left at tech stood up and LEFT, trying to find somebody from the org team or the runner or whatever. So my partner and I were left on cam, live, without having ANYONE to talk to or anyone telling us what is going on. That wasn't the best feeling to be honest. A permanent channel off-stream via headsets between tech and hosts (+ the runners during setup) would be fantastic. Sometimes the tech stuff didnt even hear the stream and werent aware of what we were talking at host station and cut us off or played an add over us (that improved slowly). They sometimes weren't aware that we ran out of things to say after 15 minutes of being on camera and that it might have been a good idea to cut to the wideshot/mute the mics. Also, putting the hosting schedules towards dedicated games was fine but with the many delays it would have been wiser to go by timeslots. ... regardeles, hosting was fun. Exhausting, but fun.

SMALL IDEAS To conclude, here are a few brainfarts of things that could be improved on:

• G2A scared too many people. Think of it what you want and I am aware that the benefits of basically no cuts were great but having people refuse to donate due to this payment site being used outweights the benefits in my opinion. The payment options didnt work well on mobile, the site itself for donations was too cluttered and small, something I've mentioned many times before, also talked to Maral about. I understand that this was a very recent addition and I guess it worked out, but for next year, build a dedicated donation site without the stream open, make the layout easier to use and user- (and mobile) friendly.

• The overall tech setup seemed too complicated. I don't know much about tech but I talked to people who do. And pretty much everyone agreed that some of the mechanics behind tech were too specific, too complicated or over-the-top and ended up breaking and bottlenecking the entire system. It worked the years before, even with two streams, so it came as a surprise to see this many issues.

• Gather tech and give them a group-runthrough for the setup. Often times crutial people were missing when shit went down and that could have been prevented if everyone was schooled on the setup beforehand.

• Make sure the camera positioning is actually capturing the people and not showing an empty venue. This slowly improved. A lower angle would have helped for a few runs, also sometimes some of the commentators were cut off...

• Not enough seating. Please make sure you have enough chairs inside the venue.

• The music should have been added from the start. Prepare that for next time in case shit goes down again.

• Give hosts an on-site mod account so they can use chat to update on the status and also moderate in case the scheduled mods arent around. We had to have tech crew (only people with access to a modded account) to do chat moderation during a run when the scheduled off-site mods didnt show up and spam got bad.

• Have people dedicated to communication. This does not only include communicating between runners, hosts and tech but also talk to upcoming runners regarding schedule changes - via social media or on site - and also READ and LISTEN and COMMUNICATE feedback from chat, reddit, forums and especially on site to the people that are responsible.

• Make it clear that people have to clean up their stations. It should be common sense but apparently many people had some lack of just that. Print out and hang up/tape down some signs telling people to actually throw their stuff away...

I guess that's all for now.

Thanks to all volunteers and everybody that worked their asses off to make this event great fun. I know I posted a lot of negative feedback but I tried my best to make sure I gave all positive feedback on site directly to the people involved. Things weren't nearly as bad as many people claimed they were. I personally had lots of fun.

Cheers

I wouldnt mind the layout if things would actually work. I can get used to new designs, but the search function is still broken, lines arent shown properly on a bunch of leaderboards and verifying runs and other things have gotten at least 1 click more complicated.

This is mainly a design/hosting issue but currently, all URL prefix have the same root (speedrun.com/...)

this leads to an issue when a user and a leaderboard share the same name.

speedrun.com/dishonored doesn't link to the game Dishonored, instead we get an empty profile. This is incredibly counter-intuitive. The leaderboards for the game had to opt for either an abbreviation, which, given for the name of the game, isnt favorable, or go with speedrun.com/Dishonored, essentially the same URL, just case sensitive with a capital D.

To avoid the confusion, could you KEEP the simple way exclusively for game names and change the user profiles to speedrun.com/user/username without the double take? /user/ already exists but it doesnt have any purpose as you can take it away and it will still redirect to the same profile.

Thanks.

I take it that there will be no mouse software like SteelSeries 3 Engine? Because my game is somewhat DPI dependant and I'd love to bring my own mouse. Will there be a mouse to use or would I need to borrow it from somebody else if I cant use mine?

If you want to create a permanent invite, click on "Advanced Settings" in the invite screen

and change "Expire After" to "Never"

Winter is always coming.

I'm up for it!

"We planned to cut down more substantially here, but it turns out the run quality was too high, so really it's your fault... "

Well... a ¤second¤ stream would have solved that issue :P Excited about the cuts nonetheless. The current selection is already awesome and it's definitely not easy to pretty much cut a third (?) of it off. Good luck to everyone that is still in :)

Is there a way to sign up for mass housing separately after already having signed up for the event?

Updated again (2nd cuts)

• Jazzpunk will be Cakeless%. It is, in my personal experience, the better run for a marathon. It is basically the Any% route (which means the game can be advertised as "any%" but I am not doing a save corruption/wrong warp due to potential difficulties in a live setting. This route is ~20 seconds slower but I am definitely still under 19 mins either way. I've been hitting the low 18:XX consistently in practice. There's also a visually funny and neat trick that replaces the wrong warp in the regular any% run that's fun to do and show of. Donation incentives still stand and those can be seen in the end of my submission video. I've done a few commentaries in my past broadcasts but nothing I have highlit.

• Traverser estimate stays 37 minutes because just for the sake of unpredictable things that can but really shouldnt go wrong and the fact that the final boss fight can potentially give me incredibly aweful RNG. The WR is down to 33 minutes, my practice runs were all consistently sub 35 and I am doing more runs in the following weeks to push the time down even further. There is a live commentary of me on the NLG_Organisation twitch page and the current WR on SRcom.

• No update on The Witness Any%. I am going to be honest and say that the run is my least priority at the moment and I do not expect three runs to make it in. I did offline runs to derust the puzzles but I havent any recorded practice runs nor have I improved my PB lately. The run is, focus wise, incredibly consuming but at the same time relatively consistent. Since it's more muscle memory and memorization, the best practice is done in the month before the event and I'm currently just doing a few derust runs every week or so. It's nothing I want to grind at the moment but if the committee wants this game in due to it being a very cool run and a recent game with a bit of a following behind I would invest the time needed in it to deliver a run of sub 24 easily. The 25 minute estimate still seems reasonable though although there is pretty much no indication that I would not make it under this time.

I will edit this whenever something improves.

Okay so no personal name on lanyard by default or do I have to specify that somewhere? I'm okay with photo+nickname but yeah, personal name is a bit weird to me.

The googledoc has two tabs:

The red games are the ones that got cut (are not going to be in the marathon) and the green games are the ones that will be further decided on during the next cuts in May.

Thank you for adding XXL :)

I'll arrive late on the 23rd and will stay for the entire even till Sunday :)

Ive never actually seen a full run of Harry Potter so that was great and Ollie's 007: Nightfire run was entertaining as always.

for 100%, a higher FOV is definitely favorable since it makes a lot of environmental puzzles easier. I prefer 75 for low/any%. Anything lower gives me trouble with the pillars in the end.

When it comes to sniping, I find a lower DPI setting to be preferable.

Due to a lot of discussions regarding the timing and the categories, I made a few changes that of course can further be discussed for the future. For now, these new rules seem to be canon:

100%: Timer starts from first input. Adjusting settings before the timer is allowed. Idling before the settings are opened or between closing the settings and starting the timer is banned. This is to prevent people waiting for their first input in order to achieve a more preferable cloud cycle. Idling is for now defined as "anything that takes longer than 3 seconds" but common sense is definitely recommended.

Any%: Timer starts from first input. Idling is not important but still banned.

Low%: Changed from 118 to 117, Timer starts from first input. Idling is not important but still banned.

The Challenge (All Lasers): Changed to a default category. Timer starts from first input, Idling is banned, Timer ends when the challenge is completed (rather than backtracking to the final elevator for the regular ending).

Added "All Pannels" category that just requires the regular 523 pannels as completion.

"99.7%" (no eclipse) added as a misc category - it's mainly considered as a marathon category and I highly recommend to not perceive it as a "better 100%" category. It will definitely stay a misc category for now. Regular 100% is the actual competitive category here.

"107%" (100%+Audiologs) will only be added when we finish a required tracker tool that has to show the complete progress of the run (in works apparently).

Added Arctice as a super mod since he knows codes'n'shit and can help me out with leaderboard formation and in case something breaks.

I am a bit sad that they don't have better patch notes available.

Also: "4 February 2016, 7:55pm: We are switching to a system where patch notes are listed in the News tab instead, since that is more traditional. Un-pinning this list since it is no longer up to date."

So the go-to place should be:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/210970/announcements/

but theres even less info there :/

I've added "All Pannels" as a misc category. The eclipse ending will stay for 100%, same with the Easter Egg pannel since both count towards an obelisk (and hence, 100% completion).

I'd be ok to discuss a "99.7%" (522 + 135 + 5) as a misc category to leave out the eclipse video but for that I'd require at least one full run of it. I'm kinda against flooding the leaderboards with more misc categories if nobody is doing runs for them.

I have adapted the categories that we decided on in the "Witness Discord" but since that one has become somewhat obsolete now, I figure we could open the discussion on the forums.

The current categories are chosen to represent the standard SRL format in % and the two additional endings have been changed to misc categories.