Oh, my, god.
Got there at 9 am saturday to get ready for soul calibur 2 tournament.
First thing Zig says to me, Can you help run pools and make brackets for the tourny currently running.
Sure i said.
Which fucked me in the ass for the rest of the convention.
After the tourny, which i placed 3rd in
someone jacked a halo case.
45 minutes later, someone jacked another case.
Apparently Halo cases without the CD in them are worth a lot???
I volunteered to help out Zig and Annie? forgot her name..for the rest of the night, till 8:30am the next day. Checking people in for tournies, running pools, keeping Zig from losing his sanity. Lots of fun, i plan on volunteering next year to help out, hopefully with a more prominent roll. Those Enforcer shirts are so tight...
After being up for 26 hours, i went home to sleep for 7 hours.
I came back to the convention to help out with more tournies. Which was a good thing cuz the other volunteer for the console room to help zig was going home, leaving me with Zig.
I organized the cases, moved boxes and shit, helped with more brackets and pools. Leaving me with the most stressful thing i have done in gaming.
Which was making pools, making brackets, recording EVERYTHING for mario double dash. That tournament, kicked my ass. Repeadetly, with a fucking shoe with spikes on it. Rusty ones.
The bungie people who did the Halo 2 demo, decided to disconnect the front row, 8 TVs, from the power, network, life. That fucked up the tourny for 45 minutes. Making us way behind schedule. The rest of the tourny went smoothly once we got shit going, sorry for the delay in games guys :P
Observations?
Holy shit people, stop stealing games, especially ones that are at the store for like 20 bucks. People stole games, empty cases, A WHOLE FUCKING PS2, controllers, wires, and...fuck probably a whole damn TV.
And thats just from the console room. Someone got into a fight today, no idea why, some dude punched him. Stop being fuckers.
I'd like to thank Zig for keeping his pills with him. And not killing someone, cuz i almost did. For organizing and being in charge of almost all the check in stuff. People need to clean up their hand writing
This convention was a lot of fun. Props to bald guy and gabe. Forgot your guy's real names
never got to met you. Great stuff.
And the rest of the Pax staff, your boxes of bawls kept me up to help with the console room.
Whoever stole that stuff from the console room.
I hope i get a time machine, to go back in time to when your mother was pregnant with you. So i can punch her in the uterus and prevent your birth.
Dear PAX, next year may i have an enforcer shirt instead of just a staff badge. Love, Tyler.
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MKDD was like..the most random tourny i think we had.
but it was pretty cool.
i didnt know that game was that fun. to watch or play.
People volunteered their time to help put this event together, and the fact that people would abuse that really disappoints me.
IT Director, Senior Editor
Planet GameCube
http://www.planetgamecube.com
With the first PS2 theft, they kinda deserved it because I saw zero security. If it gets worse next year, they'll just up the prices. $1 per person means $2500 or so to reimburse people for thefts.
i didn't see anyone watching the BYOC room for theft (although that lies mostly with the end-user to make sure his shit doesn't get jacked). i was tempted to try and take something just to see how easy it was (no real intent, i don't even have a car). just to see if anyone was at least SUPPOSED to be waching the pc's.
A: Um, we like to play games.
I got stopped and asked to check-out when taking my computer out of the BYOC room. But not when taking out my monitor and peripherals. So it might have been possible to... how do you kids say it? "Jack" something short of a system box, but it didn't happen. At least not to me.
Then again, it have been that the high schoolers I was letting play Counterstrike and BF1942 on my systems wound up sleeping under table beneath them. Nothing like having homeless de facto security guards.
Were you there for the great Bawls rush of Saturday night? I've seen people leave burning buildings at a slower pace.
The funny part was they were giving away Bawls for free Sunday night and I grabbed as many as I could pack on the plane home but everyone was watching the final match of the Omegathon so I had to find people and tell them it was free because barely anyone was there or cared.
I was asked to check out my PC as well, even though it was 10:30n or 11:00 at night saturday. I had left my PC/peripherals unattended for hours on end during the con, and wasn't missing a thing, which i was pretty happy with.
I missed the bawls rush though . I left right after the announcement that said 'the bawls guys were supposed to be back at 10, we don't know why they aren't back yet or when they will be back, sorry".
I just couldn't last any longer w/o bawls. Especially since by that time i was wanting to play halo pc or COD, but everyone seemed to be playing CS or UT2k4 (or some far cry at like 8PM). I can only play so much ut2k4 before i want to play something else . And steam kept bitching whenever i tried to use it in offline mode on my PC, ah well...
Same night, someone managed to steal a banner. Though wasn't like the security folks didn't try and thwart it. I was out on the front steps having a smoke with a few of them. They got a call on the radio, and all ran back inside, joining up with more. They shut down the exits and elevators, then began searching the rooms. I was actually surprised they didn't catch the guy (or girl I guess).
I'm sorry to hear about the PS2 being stolen. Who did it belong to? Was it replaced?
A: Um, we like to play games.
It was like 2-3 am, wasn't that big a deal since not many people were up and moving around. The impact was pretty much nil (except for me, had to use the stairs to get back up to the lanwerx room, not that I was in a hurry since the tournaments were using up all the PC's).
Damnit.
most of all, most of all
someone said true love was dead
but i'm bound to fall
bound to fall for you
oh what can i do
Although im happy to announce that nothing was stolen from the PC room Although we had a few misplaced power cables that I beleive found their right owners (just got moved around the room cause they were loaned out or whatver) but those are a dime a dozen. If anyone needs one that lost one PM me and ill ship you one :P
I didnt ask for a checkout on people hauling out monitors cause I have a pretty good memory with stuff like this. I help run lan parties a lot (www.lanpartynw.com) and I remember who comes in with what pieces of hardware.
The major thing was that people who are hardcore enough lan gamers to come to somthing like this ive found to be quite trustworty. I was just a tad worried about the random people wandering about in there which is why I was telling people to not leave stuff laying around thats easily pocketable (like anything not attached to the computer). Another lan gamer stealing someone eleses stuff is... unheard of.
But I was there at the desk the whole time (aside from the 3 hours I got for sleep sat night) I worked 60 hours in 3 days. Saturday I was roaming the inside of the byoc room to help people who needed it to get set up and for any problems. Sunday I was outside the room at the desk. Sunday night I was there the whole time because a bunch of the volunteers flaked out and didnt show up for their shift. Bastages.
I am happy to say though that the PC room had NO problems. I made sure everything was set up right and worked with the power guys to make sure that shit wouldnt go off. Network was up and non laggy thanks to my gigabit backbone switch I purchased just for this event. If I didnt get that I would have had to daisychain switches and right when someone started to transfer files the network would have been owned.
I just wish I had more time to organize stuff inside the room instead of watching the door but all of pax was slightly understaffed for the amount of people that came.
Did the best I could with the available resources
First, the escalators were never shut down during the entire con. The escalators went down a total of about seven times due to people doing things like running the opposite way on the escalator which, I'm told by the Meydenbauer maintenance staff, can shut it down because the system assumes when it "feels" resistance that someone's limb is caught somewhere it shouldn't be and stops. The resistance in this case is, of course, the people landing hard because they're trying to take two or three steps at a time ... but the escalator doesn't know that.
Second, we didn't even bother trying to hold the elevator during the chase of the thieves (there were two separate incidents, one successful and one unsuccessful by two different people from what we can tell) because by the time we would have gotten the elevator to stop ... the thief would have already been off it.
Additionally, perhaps you haven't dealt with the printing industry at all but large format banners can cost hundreds of dollars. Also ... if you went to the trouble of putting on a con ... and had it be such a huge success ... wouldn't you want to keep maybe one thing from it ... like, I don't know ... maybe the super-huge banner of the art you drew specifically for the con?
so what happened to the guy you guys caught the first time?
A: Um, we like to play games.
gg
from the game Fable. check the box art and you'll see.
as for anyone stealing, that's just lame. hope you have fun playing CS with your aimbots and turning off you xbox as your about to loose cause your the type of ass everyone hates.
if i'm not mistaken, aren't there system locks for consoles that they might be able to use next year? sad that they would have to resort to that...
heavyness
game artist/designer
www.heavyness.com
A: Um, we like to play games.
that wouldnt be andie would it :P
And yes, the theft was pretty low.
If Three consoles are going to be on each tv for next time , I would suggest buying some of those cheap $10 or less footlockers. Each footlocker could have all three units in it and still be locked. The cabling could be ran through small holes cut or drilled through the footlocker. If a system had to have a disk swap or such a volunteer would bring the key up and do whatever needed to be done.
Umm, I actually think that I was the guy who got first on that particular race.
Sorry, I guess.
She was asian, and had a Mario and Luigi shirt on and her partner was an enforcer. Second round, apparently. Was it her?
It was the team I was going to be on, but I had the 40k in 40 minutes tourny. We for 2 and a half hours saturday night.
You were going to be on her team? She'd have shoved you in back seat and not let you do anything, you know?
I didn't really want to be at PAX Saturday night. I was feeling awful for some reason, so I spent most of my time in the Hotel room.
Sunday was great, though. Shame there was so many tournaments and not enough freeplay.
Haha, I was sitting beside her. I felt kind of bad cheering like that for winning 3rd. Oh well.
But the mario kart one was badass. i have never seen someone so happy for getting 4th in a race.
i was pretty hardcore for mario kart 64, but jesus tits, MKDD is insane.
i almost want to buy a game cube and get into that game.
only problem i saw, was that...it looks like you need 2 people, always.
and your game cube controller receives the worst handjob ever. literally.
one of the joysticks ate shit, and broke during the tourny. Team Dysfunkshunal Controller was the unlucky team to get that pad... sorry guys.
Most definately the most dramatic tourny i saw. Good job to all the people who played. Its too bad Fragdolls didnt play, i wanted to comentary them.
Actually, you only need 1 person, but co-op is way more fun.
with a game cube.
a suggestion for next year and the cases...would be to paint the outside border of the case with a certain color that only the volunteers know. And they dont find out the color till the day before, when they have to paint them.
Say the color is like...Pink, everyone who brings their own games would be like ...which game is mine? oh not this one, its pink, definately not mine. I think we had a few people taking things they thought were theirs.
This clashes with what I saw saturday night/sunday morning (however you want to call it, it was sometime between 2 and 4 am I think). Several security folks were standing in the elevators holding the doors open for several minutes at least.
Were they just really indecisve about which floor they wanted or something?
As I recall though, the effort wasn't to catch him, but to keep him from leaving and isolate him to one floor.
I would have loved to throw down some blue sparks in that tourney. It was too bad we were all completely thrashed from being at PAX for 14 1/2 hours the first day and we lost a couple of our girls to plane flights right on 5:00 on Sunday. It must have been something to see, though. Whoever won that tournament, I salute you.
Gimme about 10 more TV's + systems and it's a deal.
Otherwise, we need every station we can get for tournies.
I am sorry to hear things didn't go so well after the Halo2 people left. I really wish I could have stuck around for the entire thing, but frankly after dedicating 38 hours of my life to the console room and needing to drive back to Oregon... I was done :P
As for the security thing, yeah, things were a little unplanned and disorganized. For the whole thing if this all happens again I have a ton of ideas and I know Zig has a bunch too for how to get things running far more smoothly and safely.
But over all, my weekend rocked. Thanks to everyone, especially the guy who gave me the ticket to play Halo2.
Quote " The winner of this gets tickets, and a date with this sexy bald man here "
umm...have they called you? cuz i was serious...
ya annie, almost forgot lol, i dont say peoples names much unless i yell at them, or need them to throw something away, or i need bawls.
Bawls: ribbed for your pleasure.
Jeez.
I had more fun with the freeplay then I did with the tournies. In the end, we spent more time watching then we did playing.