I love Dragon*Con and all of the people that I get to meet every year…
But there is no place like home… with my wife… and my dogs… and SLEEP.
Just to give you guys an idea of what’s going on now that D*C 2008 is on the books.
- Still have to write up reports for con management.
- Making a wish list of game developers that we want to invite next year.
- Contact the folks who came this year to thank them and invite them back for next year.
- Compile final room counts and figure out which panels worked, and which ones didn’t.
- Figure out who is staying on my staff and who is going to move on to other things.
- Figure out how many staff I’m going to need for next year. (will we do one room? or two?)
- Have a baby.
The 30 day “don’t talk to me about anything Dragon*Con related” period hasn’t started yet, and won’t until this weekend since we’re all still putting the finishing touches on this year’s wrap-up. I would encourage you guys to get your thoughts down in a post on the forums here and let me know what you think while the memories are still fresh, but please understand if I don’t really get engaged with you about those ideas for a couple of weeks. I slept 12 hours when I got home last night, and I could sleep 12 more.
-Grim
Numero uno concern was the weak sunday party (aka wow meet and greet). I posted this over at WoW Insider:
I was pretty disappointed with the wow meet and greet this year. Last year seemed to situate the room in such a way that it forced others to mingle and talk and what not.
This year with the tables setup, people were already stuck in pre-made groups. Since it seemed to go nowhere too quickly, I bailed pretty early (after the for porn song).
Couple of suggestions:
1. Eliminate all but 5 or so tables to keep people on their feet or at least forcing them to mingle.
2. Have a better ice breaking event. The dodge ball event was fun (if not tiring… yes, I was a participant). Make a silly game that rewards people for talking to each other. People will do retarded stuff for the smallest of free swag.
Here is some additional constructive (hopefully) criticism… the add-on panel was poorly conceived. It appeared to be dumb luck that ck Knight was attending the con and able to provide valuable insight during that panel. Otherwise, it appeared we were going to be treated to a new UI enchancement from the beta (calendar… which isn’t an addon) and there was no attempt to compile a list of BESTS until the attendees chimed in.
The point above regarding the add-on panel is especially important. I want to go to panels that are fun and organized. Most of the time it seemed as if each panel was thrown together last minute or the panelists were poor speakers without charisma. I want to be excited and pumped up, else I’d rather recover from the previous night’s events in my hotel room or slumped in a lobby somewhere.
The good news is that you guys solved the space issue by getting larger rooms at the sheraton (even though that is a long ass hike from the main areas), but the quality of the panels and the party was not up to Con par.
I’d be willing to help in some form or fashion for next year as I live in Atlanta. I’ll post more ideas in the brainstorming thread, but I’d really like to respond to any thoughts you might have.
Hi Thomas –
I actually got your message on WI, but I’m physically in the car driving home at the moment, so I’ll have to keep this kind of short since we’re stopped at the moment.
We actually had a great deal more prep completed, but had a drive failure on both my secondary laptop and a 500 gig external drive that apparently did not like traveling in my car. Not that it’s an excuse, but it does hopefully shed some light on what happened in regard to those panels. Those problems also caused the footage hiccups on the Friday night WoW Q&A panel; it failed after that. Lesson learned. I’ll be mirroring everything I’m using to my server so I can pull copies from there if need be, as well as making sure Kevin has copies of all of the information/files we’re using well in advance too. Parity/redundancy is key to solving that problem.
Aside from that, I do agree we’ve underutilized the ability to get SMEs from the community in conjunction with the ability to grant “guest” status through Con management. We’ll be reaching into the community ahead of time to see who is coming to D*C that we can get. (We sadly cannot cover travel, but if they’re going to be here anyway we can certainly see about getting them in as guests.)
And I agree on the setup in the ballroom for the party. This was a product of the trivia panel running over because of these things:
* The “signup” was never printed on the schedule, so people were rolling in when we were expecting to start, hoping to join. This made us start later than intended.
* We need to dry run the trivia allowing for disputes, cheering, etc and make sure video bumpers are timed better to the questions so we’re not having to cut them early/late.
* We must be absolutely 100% firm on the “please leave the room” bit between panels. It’s not that we don’t want to see people – quite the opposite! However, if the hotel staff can’t get in there without people milling about and move things around, we can’t really blame them for that – the fault there is ours as a first-year track.
Those things contributed to the Sheraton staff not having enough time to flip the room properly to the seating we were actually planning. This is where I feel we definitely failed the crowd. Well, that, and we didn’t get our dance floor. Sad Next year, however…
As for ice breaking, silly party games and ideas for what to do on schwag giveaways, we’re all ears. What would you suggest/like to see?
No doubt about the technical difficulties, and that explains the perceived lack of preparedness. Take that comment with a grain of salt in the brainstorming thread.
I’m going to keep coming to these events as long as you guys keep hosting them, but my hope is that the friends I bring are as pumped as I am. Keeping the game WOW centric, I’d say put together a mini-game that requires each participant to go on a scavenger hunt of sorts. It will be chaotic, BUT, if it’s a timed event, then you can control how long the chaos lasts.
I think a fun game would be to have 20 participants volunteer for the game. There are 5-10 quest givers. Each participant is divided amongst the quest givers and must go into the crowd and find a certain type of guest, such as:
Find a guest of the opposite faction.
Find a guest of each race.
Find a guest of each class.
Find a guest with exhalted Kurenai (sp) faction.
ETC.
When the participant returns with that guest as proof, the returned person has to go out and find the next type of person from a different quest giver. This would mean that the number of people involved in the game would be [Initial Participants x Quest Givers]. The winning group would be the first group to complete all the quests.
If you keep it to 5-10mins and have the guests make a line for designated turn-ins, you can somewhat control the chaos.
Here is some information that will help you think about next year.
The very heavy odds are that assuming the two Hilton ballrooms are available, y’all will be in the Hilton with the rest of Gaming. It’s not a guarantee. The Hilton has stated that the renovation of those two ballrooms will be completed well before the show next year. However, they were supposed to start on the renovation in June and you see how that has worked out for them. (We used both ballrooms this year in case you did not know.)
Getting “Guest” status for community managers, marketers, developers and the like is not easy. While they are prominent people in their company and their particular game the scale changes when you compare them to people like Edward James Olmos, Hayden, etc. I can get them badged if they are participating in presentations and panels but they must honor our deadlines so that we can properly promote their appearance – which they should desire as well to promote their product. The basic guideline is that they get a badge for each day they are on a panel. I can bend that because there are not enough slots to do that.
The same generally applies to MMO industry press websites. I can help out with that given enough notice.
Also, chances are there will be one MMO panel room and not two. You can probably assume that the mechanics of differing panel sizes will be handled the same way, i.e. big events will be in a different room.
Dave Cody
That’s why we’ll be starting earlier this year. Hopefully, I can get a few confirmations this fall and start the ball rolling. Folks like Funcom and Sony aren’t the issue as they’ve been here before and know what’s going on.
We had a BUNCH of first-timers who I hadn’t had any interaction with that popped up at the last minute, and I’m trying to figure out a way to reach out to those people ahead of time. Some of them did rather well with respect to turnout, and some could have used a little more promotion.
I also heard that the Hyatt will be doing room renovations next year. Looks like the other hotels are scrambling to catch up to the Marriott.
-Grim
Originally Posted by Grimthorn:
I also heard that the Hyatt will be doing room renovations next year. Looks like the other hotels are scrambling to catch up to the Marriott.
-Grim
What are the odds that it will actually make it possible to find panels there? or is that too much to ask?
Originally Posted by SDRG:
What are the odds that it will actually make it possible to find panels there? or is that too much to ask?
Hah.. You are a dreamer, aren’t ya.
Actually, speaking of “finding panel rooms”, I’m considering making some banners and signs to put in our hotel… “THIS WAY TO THE WOW PANEL –>”
Think it would help?
-Grim
I dunno if they’d let you but assuming they were in those second story rooms in the Hilton, People would notice if you hung a sign off the railing overlooking the lobby.