Right time for my thoughts from the Ref's point of view
(a little bit more back from the dead than last night)
First of all would like to thank the HR Entertainment team who made this all possible thats Rebel, Shrike, Blood, Kev and Henck with special thanks to shrike and blood who stepped into help at the 11th hour (Shrike was working behind the scenes)
Also many thanks have to be extended to A2 who made the whole event possible in #planetarion - a great help we thx
And thank you's to the captains (many stepping in from drop-outs at the last minute or the swell the number of captains as the numbers exceeded expectations)
And the most thanks to the players who turned up and made it an event
First of all the dont take it for granted there will be another public w00fage, many hr people didn't want a public one - they weanted to keep it there baby - the idea of the event was to give you guys a little glimpse into who we are. I'm not saying there wont be one, just that it needs to be assessed before HR HC give their big rubber stamp of approval
Additionally this took hr about 200 hours to prepare and we have done many before - they are not easy to prepare at all and takes much time - we ahve lives as well (apparently)
Any other alliance is welcome to do their own events with the good will of A2 in #planetarion but as previously mentioned it takes a major investment in time so you'll have to have a good and committed team
- If you want advice/help feel free to pm one of the howling rain entertainment staff
Now onto the issues bought up
First from Martok yes it was late however it was not two hours late. The team picking was due to start at 19:30 and the event to start from 20:00-20:15 we were about 30 minutes late
The reasons for this i would say were
- The sheer amount of people - We didn't expect such a high turnout especially after i had only had like 3 pm's 30 mins before the event starting
- With such a large amount of people we needed more captains kindly icelady volunteered but it took me about 15 minutes to get this set up and all the appropriate channels notified meaning i actually got going properly with team selection at 19:45
- People turning up late so i didn't know if the [NT] people hadn't been contacted or simply wern't replying
- The NG protection which prevented me pm'ing people to much - this meant i pm'd some people info 6 times and they still didn't get it
What i might suggest we could do next time is people interested email me early so i can assign them a team a few days before we could still assign people on the day but this with a little organisation cut the load extensively.
The music round caused much contecntion with people not wishing to download and although i can say we really would not put malicious material to be downloaded (its just not the way we operate) we understand their views - I was considering using the pa-radio to relay the music links and hance avoiding the problems, also it killed our poor little server which didn't have the capacity for such a large event */me pets the hr servers* (only problem with this is we need the paradio people online).
Also some people wanted lyrics only - this will be looked into.
People seemed to enjoy the picture rounds but got them very quickly - do the pictures need to be more distorted next time or was that just right?
The silly round seemed unpopular, it wasn't the best silly round we have done (like the pa round it was last minute inclusion) but it is very traditional and we love doing it - we'll try to do better guys.
Other major complaint was the time it dragged on - well fair point, i was suffering like hell myself you have no idea how tiring it is ref'ing those things. Well part of the dragging on was the picking taking ages this should hopefully be fixed. Our normal questionmaster was awol so henck was feeling his way slowed things up a bit and i'm never the quickest (especially when people pm me constantly). So hopefully this should get better with experience, next time we will probably do a few less questions - question is which round to drop/reduce?
Some people wanted private teams - this idea was dropped early on as we didn't want horribly weighted teams and also we dont want alliances involved - its a fun event and as such we dont want bitching etc. So we need to come up with a way of picking teams which remain fair and allianceless the idea i have come up so far is that you mail me your name and 3 other 'buddies' you want to play with and yours and there alliances/how you are affiliated then i mix about 4 teams together and 4 random players from that nights random turnouts. It would prevent alliances owning a team and so claiming allaince victory etc. All teams will still be controlled by captains selected by the control team
Everyone seemed to liked the radio (even if they gave loads of answers) so that stays with maybe more prominance in future.
There will be an official #wehateskinny channel - you can all bitch about me in there
Had a problem with cheating which can be sorted by more staff (not ideal as they want to play) or giving captains ops and they police the cheats themselves - i prefer this option just need to trust captains to be responsible (talking about you seth)
Generally apart from a few arse ups and teething propblems i think it went well and eveyone enjoyed it i will try and resurrect some logs from my mIRC (it died a horrible death in the quiz) and get them all posted out soonish
[HR]Ref|Skinny
), but seeing many others enjoyed it you guys should continue it (under a less goofy name maybe? 
Still too lazy to update though
, oh well.
Sofa Longjump
Linear Mode
