FIRST

Akisto could be your walking Wi-Fi Hotspot, it's 2017! :>

I learned Magic from eTholon at ESA14 and only actually played the game in the subsequent years at the event, yet still somehow managed to win. Sealed really is a very beginner friendly format and you should totally join even if you only know the basics, which are easily picked up (there will be people playing Magic a lot who are always willing to help).

We played Pandemic Legacy on Tabletop Simulator earlier this year. We thought about playing through Season 2 at ESA which was supposed to come out close to the event but decided not to. The main reason is that it's just a really big commitment putting a lot of pressure on the group. You need to play on average more than one game per day. And if you're trying hard (like we did) that can take up to three hours. Every defeat adds another game to the list, and when games go bad you might not be in the mood to play more. At the event there's always more things going on than you could ever participate in anyways and I feel like having this thought in the back of your mind that you absolutely have to play and try to finish this game as well is pretty daunting. However the game is pretty fucking amazing and I do suggest checking it out. I think there was a case where all the assets had to be deleted from the Tabletop Sim Workshop. If you google it though there are ways and means around that. (:

We'll fix that!

/e: Moved Forced two games back. New timeslot: 1:45am

I wish we could make an Arena tournament work, but you really need a lot of cards to do it properly. :<

An update happened! We added Luigi's Mansion and The Incredibles to the 1st stream and Eggomania to the 2nd stream to account for dropouts. It's not unlikely that because of all the changes a timeslot that was previously fine isn't anymore. Contact me if you spot your run during a time when you're not even at the event yet/anymore and we'll work on a fix asap. Cheers!

@SuperSqank: Sure thing. I will keep you as part of the race for now. Just get back to me when you made a decision. :)

@Everybody With just about two months left until the start of the marathon I'd like to remind every runner to sign up (in a friendly way). Included is a list of people who are part of the schedule but haven't yet done so. It's perfectly fine if you're still unsure about attending and there's no reason to hurry or worry just yet, but if you haven't bought a ticket by this time next month, I'll come after you personally. (: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h3TW1HdRhRyImVMCej4E_ZNN-xgA2vEhxu1hf51h7bI/edit?usp=sharing

If you do find your name on that list even though you already bought a ticket, please message me so we can get that sorted. Thanks!

We will in fact be running two streams!

The first one will be on for the entire week continuously from 6pm on July 22nd until the late evening of the 29th (fingers crossed). This will be happening at http://www.twitch.tv/esa .

The second stream on https://www.twitch.tv/esamarathon2 will start one day later, end one day earlier and also won't be running for 24 hours each day.

@Mergy: Yeah, seems doable. We'll make a list of changes we want/need to make and then release a bigger update as opposed to making small changes all the time. So don't worry if nothing changes for a while.

@YumeTsubasaCH: We felt like in order to showcase these kinds of games properly an exceptionally high skill level is required. We let them pass the 1st cuts in order to give you a chance to reach that. With dropouts already happening there is always a chance that a game can make it's way back into the schedule though.

@SeductiveSpatula: We decided to go for a bit of an advanced approach this year regarding SETUP™ times. The 1-hour blocks on every day except the last two are designed to get the schedule back on track should something go horribly wrong. In this case the SETUP™ games would not be played during that timeslot on the 1st stream. However, we will show all the SETUP™ games that got cut because of delays at the end of the 2nd stream. That way people with SETUP™ games can be sure their game will be part of the marathon.

@KennyMan666: Fixed.

@EmeraldAly: The schedule is still going to change. There will be a number of dropouts happening and some people who are not at the event for the whole duration probably require their timeslots to be changed.

@Crrool: That's just due to the current workaround on the horaro version. The additional seven minutes are an additional SETUP™ time for races. In the next version those will be hidden and the normal estimates will be shown again.

Being able to submit runs you haven't yet mastered or even learned has always been part of ESA's philosophy. It has worked well in the past and there's no reason so far to change that. To my knowledge last year was the first one where we had the occurrence of games being submitted that were not released at the time. We decided to give them a shot and were not disappointed. If the games/runners in question don't meet the standards by the time we do the final cut, they won't be in the marathon. I don't see a problem with this.

The first round of cuts has quite a few reasons:

1. Getting rid of games or runs which are just not interesting and we don't have to discuss anymore later
2. Showing runners which of their submissions they should focus on
3. Giving a more precise preview of what the final marathon might look like

You could argue that it would be enough to do those internally, but is publishing them inherently bad? I don't think so.

I do appreciate all the feedback, it means people are passionate, keep it up!

We'll post more comments/answers to your submissions questions later or tomorrow.

I added some comments and answers to your questions in the 2nd post. Keep them coming!

Hey,

I was wondering if there is some kind of written tutorial or at least notes for the current route. Trying to figure out everything from the video is quite tough.

Cheers

There is a denerim gates skip I don't know of? :D

With the Inferno, yeah. Apart from that I can't think of any real changes. Maybe going oob in the 2nd Denerim random event? I think your tutorial might still do the fight there.

Some things I should've posted here a year ago:

At the Landsmeet, Loghain won't die from damage over time or the Inferno, but an auto-attack once he's at seemingly 1 HP will help:

Fastest way I've found so far to do Fort Drakon Floor 1 (do the Sten-glitch to get to the middle of the room without triggering the shades): If something goes wrong like tripping at the trap I will however switch to the safer version with Fireball first, as seen in my PB. Also make sure you go into Fort Drakon with pretty much full hp. Casting Drain Life at the end of the fight before will do that.

I also added my practice saves for almost probably every major point in the game to the resource page.

It's not just that it's more convenient, but this directly impacts the affordability and quality of the entire event.

"Everyone that attended previous ESAs had a negative opinion about it, [...]" is also quite frankly false. The majority of people I talked to, me included, liked Fortnox Arena as a venue. A lot of the issues and problems we had within the venue were not necessarily connected to Fortnox and can be solved next year.

Wording my fellow gamer Odyssic

Better late than never:

http://imgur.com/a/GRyfn