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PAX 2009 Suggestions Thread
Earley
juicyjonesSeattle WARegistered User regular
juicyjonesSeattle WARegistered User regular
Aww I get so sad when PAX ends. I hardly have the words to say how great this year was and to describe the feeling of fellowship I have. Putting faces to forum usernames is a really really great thing. So last year I started a thread to throw out an idea I had that might be fun to make PAX an even better time, and I thought this year we could to the same. I'm hoping you all can chime in with your ideas too.
Well I still think it would be great to get Dr. Scholl's to sponsor the event, but this time I was thinking a really simple thing to do would be to pay the event people at the convention center to put down carpet in all the halls where there's cement now. That would go a long way to shut up these barking dogs! My feet are killing me!
What do you guys think?
Best regards,
Earley
@juicyjones
Well I still think it would be great to get Dr. Scholl's to sponsor the event, but this time I was thinking a really simple thing to do would be to pay the event people at the convention center to put down carpet in all the halls where there's cement now. That would go a long way to shut up these barking dogs! My feet are killing me!
What do you guys think?
Best regards,
Earley
@juicyjones
Earley on
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Agreed ... it's a tough nut to crack though; a good chunk of concerts I've been too have had similarly poor acoustics - especially mid-sized venues like the main hall there.
Something I'd really like to see would be large events like the Q&A panels and keynote piped through speakers (and maybe if it's feasible, displayed on a monitor of some sort) in the line up area for those who couldn't get in. I wasn't so unfortunate for anything but the smaller panels, but I imagine that'd be a huge drag for the people missing the big stuff.
and maybe put a bit more focus on free plays and tourney's? granted i learned quick it's all about the exhibition hall and panels and concerts (in which freeze pop was just awesome, and some panels were great too) i cannot tell you how many new people i met during free play that were awesome (there was this nice woman, an enforcer who played Beautiful katamari on an x box, so that my sister could watch while i planed where we would go next, she even gave us some nice tips and such
either way, this con was more of a survey & learning experience, next year i know what to expect, what to plan and what to bring :O
a little side note, if they somehow get the 6th floor next year (and seeing this years number, i think that they have really good evidence that PAX could really put it to good use, the 3 huge stages on 6th floor are perfect for use, sakura con uses them for their electronic dances and concerts, still echo's just a TAD, but very nice up there, thou in trade off, it gets a little hot up there, and I believe fire code states no more then 5-10k on the 6th floor at any given time :P
PING PONG.
And yes I was at the make a comic panel and heard their answer as to why there wasn't ping pong. I don't care, having that many oponents to challenge would be so amazing!
I forgot about the 6th floor. No kidding, great idea. And Carpet
Also, I know exhibitors have time, space and financial limits, but I'd like to see more systems/screens at booths if for no other reason than to move lines that much faster! I almost completely avoided all the console playable games that I was so looking forward to just because I'd waste 1/4 of my day in line for 15 minutes (who knows, maybe it's worth it) of play time.
Only thing that bug me at pax.
Some more chairs or something would be nice too, since the handheld lounges were always full of people who took up like 3 sumos each, but I guess that's probably up to the company that provided them, so that's alright... more space in panels would be good too, since it kinda sucks not having a seat and having to stand in the back. It sucks even more when everyone else is taller than you, blocking your whole view. It was bad enough at the concerts. :P
Another suggestion:
What happened to the panel format this year? Maybe I'm too PAX old school, but in previous years when you went to a panel, the format was:
1) Moderator introduces topic and panelists
2) Open the floor for questions from the audience
3) Keep going until the questions are all answered or time runs out (generally time runs out first)
This year, the format for all the panels I went to seemed to be:
1) Moderator introduces topic and panelists
2) Panelists give a 15-30 min lecture (sometimes with powerpoint or video presentation)
3) Moderator asks the panelists a bunch of pre-made canned questions
4) If there's time, the floor is opened up to the audience and they answer a handful of questions.
I really liked the old way of hosting the panels. If I wanted a lecture, I'd go back to school. I thought the point was to give the PAX attendees a chance to ask questions DIRECTLY to the people in the industry. The canned questions were a real turn-off. Please consider going back to the way things were before.
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Dunno if there's anything you guys can really do about it, but some strategically placed fans in the open space midway thru the hall might help.
also. next year, go back in time and give me a pipboy puppet.
-Bring back the 24/7 Tabletop area. I know the Sharaton has a ballroom area which could make a fantastic freeplay area, and some of the most fun back in 06 I had was being up at 4 am playing whatever with whoever.
-Rethink the handheld lounges, truth is that when people usually use them, it's more for laptops, relaxing, or taking a nap. So why not take them and make them more of an overall lounge. Where there can be ping pong tables and/or pool tables and people can lounge around and relax. Taking a break from the chaos.
-Crane Game machines for swag, I made a topic about this a little while ago. So I won't repeat it. Put some crane games out there, have companies and PA itself stuff them full of stuff, put the money made from them into Child's Play, good times will be had.
-Put standards on the booths, up until now letting them do whatever has worked out quite well. However now when they make a big fuss by throwing around swag, it causes blockage and clogs up something already clogged up as is. Fallout 3's booth was defiantly guilty at times about it. So now they need to be more careful about how they conduct themselves when when the slightest thing can cause so many people to stop and thus start annoying anyone trying to move around.
-Maybe not bring back Chatterbox EXACTLY, but some type of trivia competition should be there next year. They were always a highlight in my mind and not having it there felt weird.
make the byoc room a line room and the line room byoc so people can walk through the line room. giant line before pax, two different lines during pax with a corridor in the middle for people to walk.
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I wanted to add to that. It was really hard to hear some of the speakers at the panels. The acoustics were often very lacking. I went to the Serpent Theater a few times and couldn't understand a word that was said. Not sure how much you can do about that with those ceilings though.
I don't want to just be negative here though... overall, it was a huge success and I really had a blast. Thank you to everyone that worked so hard to put this together.
i'd like to see more of those
the only thing i like about that is that huge room being used for byoc!
I think what you were looking for was actually BEER PONG.
No offense to anyone from that community or who enjoys Destructoid...but it was pretty much a celebration of them and fan service for them. If that's what the panel was supposed to be then next year bill it that way.
It was approaching the GameCock interrupting Ken Levine level of arrogance--having your posse come out and act like idiots, jumping all over each other and screaming like they were drunk doesn't make you hip, and it certainly didn't make me want to stay around and listen.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Sex, Violence, and Video Games panel was hands down the best panel I got to attend. The panelists read like a who's who of the gaming industry, and the conversation was intelligent and thought provoking. Could have listened to them talk for hours.
*Proud member of the Photoshop Heroes*
Better way of getting canadians their passes in the mail, and more importantly:
Broadcast the panels and audio! The vent feeds from panels as well as video feed from the concerts was HUGELY MISSED AND PLEASE WE WANT IT BACK :'<
Before I break into the negatives, I'd like to call out a big thanks to the staff that worked the booth. All I dealt with were very friendly and were helpful in making sure everyone was able to come up with some prize combination that used up their tickets. None of these complaints should be taken as a slight towards the cool guys and gals that ran that booth.
What is wrong and what needs to be done?
1. Improve booth restocking so late winners get something cool
As of mid-day Saturday, the booth was picked over. This meant anyone winning a tournament at that point was probably going to walk away with a handful of t-shirts and less popular games instead of some of the more sexy stuff earlier winners claimed. For the most part, that stock didn't change even until the event ended. At previous years, restocking was handled multiple times throughout the day with intent on ensuring some cool stuff would be left for late-finishing tournaments.
I ran the Starcraft tournament (last PC tourney of the event, and in my opinion, having the most competitive participants of any tournament this year at PAX), and felt bad when the winners ended up walking up to the prize booth and realizing they were going to have a hard time even spending all their points, let alone getting something they really were looking forward to taking home.
I know in previous years the late tournament winners always were left out in the cold, and this needs to change more than anything else on this list. Make it so that late-finishing tournaments still have a choice between some decent prizes instead of just taking whatever's left.
2. Standardize the value of a ticket
The Magic Booster packs were swag last year, yet cost 15 tickets to claim as a prize.
Rainbow Six Vegas 1 is new at about $30 in stores, but cost the same as all the other brand new 360 games, 60 tickets.
The Intel QX9650 Procs (there were four at the table throughout the weekend) retail for about $1000 yet were only 400 tickets.
Make each ticket be worth a set value, say $1 per ticket, ensuring a fair amount of prizes for tournament winners.
3. Make winning a ticket mean something
In previous years, tickets were only given out to teams and individuals that placed top 4 in tournaments. This year, thousands of tickets were given out for a range of things including random BYOC contests, participation in special tabletop events, and a handful of other mostly non-competitive events.
An extreme example is of a guy we ran into at the prize booth that had won over 900 points from playing in a handful of tabletop events, not winning a single one. He won 200 of the tickets after just winning a single match with the rest coming from giveaways.
To put that into perspective, if you were on a team that won the COD4 tournament, TF2 tournament, AND the Battlefield Heroes tournament, you'd walk away with only 300 tickets for winning three large tournaments that took about 16 hours in total.
Let random contests give out prizes, but at least award far fewer tickets than the competitive events.
4. Make the inventory sexier
Penny Arcade could snap its fingers and have crates full of video cards, consoles, games, signed posters, motherboards, processors, headphones, and other cool stuff to fill the prize booth beyond fire safety codes. Instead, with the exception of a couple of cool signed things and a couple of high-end Intel procs, the inventory was lacking much that people actually really wanted.
I remember seeing Madden 05 and Battlefield: Vietnam in the prize booth last year and thinking "Wow, those are old." To my surprise, those games were still a part of the inventory this year, and needless to say, they remained unclaimed as the doors closed this year as well. Also untouched were a pile of Magic starter packs for 15 tickets, which were free swag at Wizards booth last year.
No one expects very impressive prizes at PAX, but there should be enough higher-value (or at least, higher-interest) items to give tournament winners something to go home with and brag about for their success.
Make it so that people walking by will look at the prizes and think "Wow, I'm totally playing in a tournament! Look at what I could win!"
5. Standardize prizes to favor the more competitive events
The winning World of Warcraft 3v3 team won 450 tickets, or 150 tickets per person.
The winning Starcraft player won 200 tickets, so 200 tickets per person.
The winning Call of Duty 4 team won 500 tickets, so 100 tickets per person.
Why the variance?
Here's a way to go about making things a bit more fair, albeit it is still subjective. The larger the tournament, the harder it is to win. Pretty straightforward, right? The more skill-based the tournament is, the harder it is to win. Not every game is equally competitive. The more established the tournament game is, the harder it is to win. Not every game will have decent competitors participating.
Prize rewards should scale with the accomplishment. Some tournaments will be easier to win than others, so the rewards should account for that. Tournament organizers of all three areas (PC, Console, and Tabletop) should be able to work together to decide which tournaments will attract more people and are more skill-based, and can weight prizes more fairly. In general, this would mean console and PC tournaments would have larger prizes than tabletop, as most tabletop tournaments are both smaller and offer less competition due to game mechanics (dice and cards = random) and no established competitive events.
6. Keep the prize redemption line moving
A small gripe, compared to the others, but the prize redemption line seemed to seize up for long periods of time because folks were unsure what they should get. With the small window in, folks would park themselves in front of the booth for long periods of time, ignoring the people waiting behind them. I saw a handful of folks who waited patiently for over 20 minutes.
Make the prize booth more open so people can look at the inventory on their own time and enforce a time limit for people holding up the line.
when are we going to get a Khoo Q&A?
Jeff: I see
jsn: and I was like "I wonder how he goes to the washroom, does he just like...brush his loincloth to the side or what?"
jsn: friend was like "DUDE he's BEHIND YOU"
I too would like that because who wouldn't want to pick the brain of the guy who took the PA brand to next level, huh?
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this seems really obvious to me. have a room with a projector or some plasmas that show the omegathon events. when the omegathon events are not happening you can either show other events or just loop an hour block of trailers or something. beverages and snacks could also be sold in this room.
2. please sell shirts with passes, or tickets that can be redeemed for a shirt.
3. please advise brawndo to bring their own cups. most of us do not carry around cups.
4. demo room
everyone likes playable demos but nobody enjoys waiting around to play them. here's what i envision:
-5 dollar non-refundable reservation fee. reservations are made by platform (pc, xbox 360, ps3, wii) and time of day. you can only reserve one session at a time. the fee is less about money and more about making sure people show up to what they reserved. that way people will stop and think about when they are available before making a reservation.
-each console/pc has the demos loaded onto their HDD (or for the wii, a SDHC card) they can play whatever they want for that platform in their timespan. this is so there is no fumbling with disks and as much time is spent playing as possible.
-sessions are 25 minutes and start at the top and bottom of every hour. this is so you have 5 minutes to clear the room before letting the next batch of players in.
-reservations may only be placed in person. a list of available games for each platform is on the website and in the pax booklet so people can plan ahead.
-this is not for profit. all money paid will go towards snacks and drinks for the players.
let me know what you guys think of my ideas. especially number 4
this would be MADNESS. everyone trying to cash in their tickets at once?!?
I think that may be one of WSTCC's big flaws--the way they decided to lay it out. I wonder if taking the 6th floor also would help this problem?
Heh, I like to think that Khoo is secretly like that guy that manages Dethklok.
Seriously though, some suggestions:
That's all I got.
[edit]Oh yeah, whatever happened to pre-reging and having your badges already and getting in early? It seems like everyone was forced to go in all at once every morning. I thought getting in before people buying passes day-of was the incentive for pre-regging.
Also, and this might be kind of off topic, but I ran into three different members of the press that were way too pushy in trying to get pictures from the edge of the stage. Like I said before, the experience for those who are there for the music outweighs whatever importance some game blogger or photojournalist's photos have.
Chairs for the Omegathon round would be nice, but I don't think you should have them for the concerts. If you're sitting down, that kind of ruins the whole energetic part of it, and if there were chairs, people would probably stand up anyway since it just doesn't feel right. Also, most enforcers I saw did seem to be enjoying the show. Maybe they weren't. Maybe they're just really good at pretending to have fun.
- A LFG room with no consoles where people can go to just try to meet other people. One thing I saw in a convention once that worked really well was putting up signs around the room of topics so people could congregate to meet people with similar interests. You could have big sheets of paper and tape so people could write their own topics and pin them up in that room and then people could go there to try to meet other people with similar interests. (Examples of topics: movies, MMOs, WoW, FPS's, Girl Gamers, Tabletop games, "People wanting to go for burgers at 1:30pm", etc)
- For tournaments: A big board with velcro strips and pre-velcro'd lines so that the winners of various tournaments could be posted somewhere for everyone to check
- For tournaments: At least for team tournaments, tape on the floor inside/outside the tournament area for groups to gather. Example: I register a group and upon registering get told, "You're group B3" so when I show up to the tournament having never seen my teammates before, I can go stand in the square labeled B3 and wait for them to show up, plus it means the tourny organizers know where my team is instead of having to shout, "Is XO here?! Anyone?!" while 100 people are standing there struggling to hear what the hell he's saying over the din of the crowd.
- For tournaments: A big sign above the table of the rules for the next tournament so they don't have to keep stopping games halfway through because someone is "cheating" because they were a pickup group and were never told the rules.
- If getting enough barriers are an issue (it seemed like it was for the PC free play area etc), give some enforcers big rolls of bright colored tape so if they need to they can put tape on the floor to show people where the lines should be so you don't suddenly have giant clumps of people in line blocking hallways
- Fans in the line room to circulate air (and try to clear out some of the BO)
- For last minute changes maybe a large sign in the big hall (right before the exhibition place) labeled "Changes for today:" or something like that, we didn't find the Penny Arcade booth in the exhibition hall until Sunday because we kept going to where it was labeled on the map and getting confused about why there was just a table selling card-type stuff there
- Some kind of sound dampening walls or something if all the music games for free play are going to be put into one room, we walked in and were instantly deafened, and trying to talk to anyone in there even though it was labeled LFG was impossible
That was kind of spammy, but it was an awesome time, just really confusing a lot of the time. I had a ton of fun at my first PAX! Awesome job! If any stuff needs clarification just PM me.
Oh, one other thing: Please don't put female gamer stuff opposite the keynote, it sucks to have to choose for something like that.
even better, just post pairings that say which seats group b3 should take, so you can go take your seat and warm up for the tourney.
as you may have noticed by now (even thou only first year..) crowds were HUGE right off the bat X-x. Unless you guys can get the 6th floor, i would strongly suggest an attendance cap? Sadly even sakura con had to do this at least a few times. It seems the most safe of options, and might promote that people pre reg so room blocks can be filled asap? and to think of everyone say....reserve 85% of passes for pre-reg, and the other 15% for at the door sales? meh still thinking on this, seem logical thou