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PAX07 Convention Center Feedback
amnuxoll
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Dude. Get the heck out of Seattle. The convention center is not only too small to handle PAX (with large events spread over multiple cramped rooms) but it's pretty lousy.
Did anyone else get tired of waiting in line for a toilet in a crowded, filthy bathroom only to find no toilet paper in the stall? And regardless of your reason for visiting the restroom, you always end up waiting in line to dry your hands. Five sinks and only two hand dryers (no paper towels) means a long wait and undoubtedly there were a lot germs passed around last weekend because just didn't bother.
But if you didn't mind the bathrooms, surely you did mind the dearth of places to eat. As I recall, our choices were:
1. Wait in a 1/2 hour line for crepes
2. Wait in a 1/2 hour line for subway
3. Wait in a 1 hour line for tacos
4. Wait in a 45 minute line for pizza.
Gee, how about none of the above?
So, as long as I'm starving I might as well not drink water either since the water coolers ran out of the life-giving liquid at around 10:15am and were rarely refilled.
Fortunately, as I stumbled back to my hotel (exhausted, starving and severely dehydrated) there were lots of friendly, scary alcoholic panhandlers willing to help me find my way back.
In short, the center was too small, poorly maintained and in a bad location. Dud.
Don't get me wrong, I had a good time at PAX this year but the venue left a bad taste in my mouth.
:AMN:
Did anyone else get tired of waiting in line for a toilet in a crowded, filthy bathroom only to find no toilet paper in the stall? And regardless of your reason for visiting the restroom, you always end up waiting in line to dry your hands. Five sinks and only two hand dryers (no paper towels) means a long wait and undoubtedly there were a lot germs passed around last weekend because just didn't bother.
But if you didn't mind the bathrooms, surely you did mind the dearth of places to eat. As I recall, our choices were:
1. Wait in a 1/2 hour line for crepes
2. Wait in a 1/2 hour line for subway
3. Wait in a 1 hour line for tacos
4. Wait in a 45 minute line for pizza.
Gee, how about none of the above?
So, as long as I'm starving I might as well not drink water either since the water coolers ran out of the life-giving liquid at around 10:15am and were rarely refilled.
Fortunately, as I stumbled back to my hotel (exhausted, starving and severely dehydrated) there were lots of friendly, scary alcoholic panhandlers willing to help me find my way back.
In short, the center was too small, poorly maintained and in a bad location. Dud.
Don't get me wrong, I had a good time at PAX this year but the venue left a bad taste in my mouth.
:AMN:
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There was lots of food only a few blocks away. Naturally there will be lines at the places IN the Center, with 30k+ eating there, but hop and skip a bit down the street and the wait is no longer than any other day.
Also, I'll take panhandling drunks over actual violence anyday. That just comes with being in a popular part of the city. *shrug*
coming away i felt this venue was a nice fit for our "little gaming festival" my only gripe was they were extremely anal about bawls having their own booth to sell bawls for a dollar and instead sold balls among their existing venders for 2.50 WTF!!!!
{Fondly remembers the PAXTrain}
Over all I thought the center did a very good job. Vendors in the center were a little understaffed I think.. but that's their fault. Though someone rumored that they were informed it was only going to be a crowd of 10K ... lol silly them
One "nice to have" I think would be ATM's on the floor of the exhibition hall, AND that they be restocked through out the weekend
I went to 3 different ATM's on Sunday , and they were ALL dry lol
Oh, and as a side note. We (as in PAX) wasn't using 100% of the convention center. There was still plenty of room to be had. Believe it or not there's a 5th floor to that thing.
Wow I can see you were annoyed, but it's a little obvious you didn't take even the most basic action to find out what other choices you had. There were about thirty trillion rest rooms at the center. I mean tons of them and I never saw a line once. So if you did, all you had to do is walk about thirty seconds to another one. Any enforcer could have shown you that.
When you're traveling, and you want to know where to find food, you ask someone from the local place or your hotel concierge. I am from Seattle and there are a LOT of choices of places to eat on the cheap. If you just ask everyone has favorites.
There is a full-on convenience store at the bottom of the convention center with everything any convenience store offers, including water that doesn't cost seventy-five dollars a bottle and run out by 10 am, porno, cigarettes, alcohol, you name it.
The reason you see homeless people is that we don't pass laws making it illegal to be visible if you're poor in this town. It annoys everyone, but all cities have them so if you don't see them, it's just an illusion. In my opinion, that's a lot more annoying.
Maybe a good idea would be for them to have a sheet in the packet showing some things to do around the convention center and a map.
Wasn't there a map in the PAX07 book they gave everyone? I'm pretty sure there was, but I don't have mine with me to check...
On food lines though: on a friday night, in a downtown restaurant (Cheescake factory) I had a 20 minute wait for a group of 5... that's damn good wait time for such an establishment in any situation on a Friday night, even more amazing that half of the restaurant was packed with PAX'ers.
That's a pretty standard wait for that particular Cheesecake Factory, PAX or no.
Those Subway people were on point.
yeah.. that place is ALWAYS busy..part of the reason I've never ate there
Did you go last year? We had much more than twice the space. Yes, the room approach was arguable, but I never found myself cramped. THEY HAD EXHIBITION HALLS FOR US TO STAND IN LINE. They have enough goddamned space.
I went to the bathroom several times each day. They were always clean, stocked, and reasonably occupied. Only thing was some guy peed all over a toilet seat, so I put down some toilet paper in an X shape so noone would sit down on accident, and moved stalls.
First of all, how dare you insult Taco del Mar. You clearly never even ate there, because you dismissed it as Tacos. It is one step below most mexican restaurants.
Second of all, open up page 28 of the schedule (Which you probably threw away because it was like, so poorly designed, man :roll: ). What is this? Oh dear, a list of food at the WSCTC, as well as the nearest three malls and the food in there. Also, what about going outside, walking around a block, and finding dozens of places to eat? Oh, wait, going outside...
Fact: They don't actually owe you free water! *GASP*
You mean there were homeless people in the middle of a big city in the middle of the goddamned night? No way. You should check out New York at 2am, I'm sure it's lovely.
In conclusion, I would love to meet up with you at PAX next year. Because if this is a joke thread you'd be a fun guy to hang around, and if it's not a joke thread? Well, that'd be even better.
PSN/XBL: dragoniemx
If you don't like the food there, walk 3 blocks in ANY DIRECTION.
Goodness.
Life is hard when you leave your room.
However I never had a chance at seeing many of the other events that I wanted to see and the booths weren't quite what I desired. After the "line ride" filled up a space that seemed capable of satisfying 10k people it stood empty for 3 days
JavaOne is "over 15,000" attendees held in Moscone Center which is absolutely huge (in b4 $1k-2k admission is bad) - but I don't know if Seattle Con Center is that much different. J1 keeps the attendees outside until the opening ceremony. I could deffinately see that being done and then any of those spaces would have been adequate for the overcrowded sessions which were held in theaters A/B/C.
I really did like the openness of theater B - but that would have been a better space for more competitive events rather than panels. (good for game pitching / omegathon elimination rounds, bad for women in gaming / fragdolls - couldn't hear anything @ the later)
The console gaming was deffinately nice, but perhaps de-centralize it - putting different game titles or systems in different rooms and increasing the staff (if possible... in b4 "volunteer then"). Also don't let the guitar hero parties monopolize entire rooms and push people into corners, wearing headphones and surrounded by a fort of chairs in order to actually use and enjoy systems which were neighbors to the geekfrat plunk-fests.
edit: ok positive time - when I consider $55 vs $hundreds-thousands-invite only... this was awesome... and worth it. I think I would get the most for my money if I tabletop gamed... the facilities for TTG rocked!
Leaving 30 minutes slack time between sessions is the best thing ever... no really... extra time between quality events is better than stuffing your schedule full of sh%&... you guys did the right thing there.
I deffinately had a good time, but I see so much great potential in this event I couldn't help but offer up how my experience here was different from other cons.
Mostly I just left the center to eat. But I live here so I know my way around. The key I guess is to find a local when it's food time and journey outside.
The bathrooms, well, there's only so much they can do when you have 40 bajillion people coming in and out all day and night long. Some of them were in bad shape but some of them were quite clean, it just depends.
<TRON> if my calculations are correct SLINKY + ESCALATOR = EVERLASTING FUN
Also, this.
There's a fuckton of food in every direction from the CC.
I found... awesome burgers, pizza, pho, japanese food, like 4 other subways, a 7-11, etc.
EDIT: Also, I NEVER waited in line for the bathroom EVER. Even in the main hall.
Wil Wheaton should beat your ass for being too stupid to go outside.
-Theaters were too spread out. It was exhausting having to go back and forth through that tiny hallway to get to the theaters. Made only worse by the lack of any place to flop-down and rest. This also hurt the social atmosphere.
-Bawls.
I'm just curious, how much bigger is the Convention Center?
As for the Convention Center itself, that is pretty much the biggest place possible. Sakuracon (anime convention) is held there at the end of March and they fill it up. There really is no place bigger to go. I was disappointed that the whole place wasn't rented out. The top floor has the hugest auditorium. Seriously. I thought that would be used for the big panel/events, but I think it had already been rented out (there was some conference happening on Sunday which used the top floor). Which is why I am so hoping PAX can have the whole area next year. It is a huge place and I really want to see it all filled up.
I honestly don't know what convention center you were looking at. Not only were there the PAX enforcers running around, but there was the convention center employees running around too. If something was up that was seriously irking you, you should have found an enforcer or convention center employee and raised the point.
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BALLROOM! That's the descriptive noun for the uber-large auditorium that I couldn't remember.
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There's escalators. QQ more about having to move between floors.
The space was great - I only had one drawback where we didn't get into line early enough for a panel and missed the first 10, 15 minutes. I would have liked to have larger theater seating space for a few of those panels that were in Theater A or B. At the very least a display set-up with audio and visual for the overflow audience would have been nice. It would be perfect for someone like me who often doesn't have questions to bring forth but am intensely curious in other people's questions and answers on the topic.
The location in Seattle I think is as close to ideal as you can get other than one-way streets which occurs in any downtown metro area that I know of. Food is pricey near the convention but if you get a few blocks away and look around there's some reasonably priced food that is very good. There's also a wide selection of hotels around that can house such a massive gathering as this.
I never had to wait in line for a bathroom, but I'm also a girl. There were like, 3-4 bathrooms for each floor. It was more than sufficient. Something that may be considered is converting one on each floor to a double guys-only bathroom given that I know females are a little lower in attending population wise. They'd just have to VERY well marked if they were going to do something of that sort.
Both nights we walked down to Pacific Place (just a block away), and got seated within 10 minutes at one of the restaurants upstairs. Easy as pie.
The event was extremely well done, considering how much is done via volunteer-work and the PA group is less than a dozen employees. I left very impressed. So were a bunch of my co-workers (we're from MS Games), and we've all seen dozens of game conventions (and many people went to previous PAXes).
All in all, :^: to the folks involved, and excellent choice of venue. Sure, it's not perfect, but for a first time there, awesome. And it'll keep getting better too!
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I would of liked to have seen more retailers on the exhibit hall and there weren't any games there that haven't been so overhyped in trade magazines that I felt I already knew everything about them. After reading an article about Bioshock [insert any other game at PAX here too] every month for the last two years I didn't even want to play the demo.
With E3 so reduced in scope, and possibly dead next year, I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more companies set up shop at PAX. I think that's a good thing, because it's becoming a great way to interact with gamers at a more personal level. Let them see your game in-person, rather than trying to bombard them with ads.
That said, I do hope the rest of PAX (BYOC, the tourneys, get-to-gethers, panels, etc.) remains "marketing-free".
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I guess next year we'll have to rent out the fucking moon, but someone will still bitch about it.
As for convention center food places, we warn them ahead of time, but after that it's in their hands. We can't exactly enforce private businesses. Although it would help if they didn't fuck up the count. Subway thought there were 12,000 coming total. They were wrong. It was more like over 37,000. Oh well, I guess we just held up PAX tradition. Subway ALWAYS runs out of bread. If anything, this should encourage you to get out and explore the city. It's a really cool place, honest. Just don't make eye contact with panhandlers.
I must say I think the venue was a great choice. As someone who has worked for years for a convention logistics and transportation company, and worked in many of the convention centers in major cities, this one worked well for an even like PAX.
I did not find that the bathrooms were either dirty or had abnormally long lines. I didn't use them excessively, but they weren't a problem.
The food situation was wonderful! 3 blocks in any direction and you had your choice of restaurants of almost any type. I realize lots of others have said this as well, but the longest wait I had for food the entire time was 10 minutes the one day I did choose to do lunch at Subway in the convention center. This wasn't due to lack of options elsewhere, this was due to a desire to save time and spend as much of it as possible at PAX that day!
The layout of the hall worked well. There's always room for improvement, especially after the first time in a venue, but overall things were good. The handheld lounge B on the second floor was difficult to find for many people, and rearranging or providing better signage for that would be greatly appreciated. I didn't end up getting my HDTS buttons until Sunday afternoon :-( Yes, I could've looked harder, there was too much other cool stuff to do! :-)
Overall, great first year in a new venue!