Suggestions for Future Fan Fests

[Brickshouse]

I will post the positives in another thread as this is just for suggestions.
1. Yes its been said before but merchandise que, 3.5 hours we took to get the stuff and talking not only as a user to the fan fest but as a professional architect the building and merchandise location did not work well and what would be best suited to merchandise selling would be a larger open plan room with separate entrance and exit doors. Maybe a suggestion would be a ticketing situation where you get a ticket with a number on and like in argos you get a number called out. This way you could also give seating to a large number of people waiting. As said as well more members of staff would be great. there were 2 taking money and 2 at the front getting handed filled carries from behind the curtain. I don't know how many staff were behind the curtain grabbing items from the boxes. But in future festivals more staff would mean shorter ques and less waiting for attendees.

[Brickshouse]

2. The auditorium where the main starting ceremony etc was needed more seating. I can understand why they didn't as its easier to cram 2k people when they are standing than seating. However this caused issues when people couldn't even see the tv screens halfway down the room and those already been standing for an hour to get in were still standing for the length of the ceremony etc.
3. It is unavoidable to have ques at events like this but the space where the ques were going made it very difficult to get around the warren of the event location. I do understand a larger venue would be harder to come by especially as the fan fest was on the same weekend as Comic con in the larger excel exhibition centre in London. But a larger venue would surely be a better option.

[Brickshouse]

4. There is no issue with the 3 city state roulette gaming rules, we never had to que long and those people that moan about not being able to form a party, Myself and a friend who came to the event made friends with a couple making us a foursome and spoke to random people and never had difficulty getting the 8 members for the party, you just had to ask people (I actually found it easier to form a party at the event than in game!) However everyone wanted to do Odin and the 9 , 8 party computer banks that were there were to few. A one off event like the odin battle, more machines would have been better as the ques were quite long for it. The roulette rooms were just about right though as the primal fights were random and so if one was busier than others you could go to another room and have a chance at fighting the primal you want. At one stage staff were getting people queing up for one room to go to another where hardly any que was.

[LorenzoMoranta]

as a professional architect

Oh hey, were you the guy standing in front of me in queue? I remember someone talking about being an architect! :P

[Brickshouse]

Most likely lol yes had the t-shirt with the Pheonix on the back and my character on the front. Someone did ask me if my real job was an architect which it is.

[mbncd]

Hi mbncd,

Thanks for the feedback, and apologies for the current state of the archive. If you access the live stream now, you will find the following info panel as the offline message:
http://i.imgur.com/dIrVTfa.png

[Snip]

Thank you and I apologise for my sometimes harsh words.

I do understand you guys were doing your best; I was just a little frustrated at the time after hunting through the videos for missing sections.

It's great that you do have a local backup and I look forward to seeing the parts I missed (mainly the rest of the costume contest, the rest of the closing ceremony and the part where stream questions got asked of the devs).

What I did see on the day was great and what parts I was able to catch up on later via the archive were good too ^_^

[AlastorTGN]

I may have walked down there with you and your friend and the lass who went with us.

[MattyR]

the event was great, the merc line was too long, I wanted the Dragoon figurine but was not queuing for hours to get one.

one major thing for me was the food. or lack thereof in the bar, there seemed to be nothing that I would class as 'Con food' which as much as its called Fan Festival it was still in essence a final fantasy 14 con, burgers, chips, stuff like that would have been awesome. nothing insane, not asking for lobster but a cheeseburger would have been awesome. because of the food and the fact that the cash machines had run out of cash and with me and my other half not wanting to leave the event because her legs were in a bad way so walking to McD's was out of the question I was left with having a small cake for my lunch, which while it was really nice, it isn't lunch.

cont

[MattyR]

the way the event was set out in the space was seemingly to put as much in there as physically possible in the smallest space possible. There was seemingly another half of the tobacco docks that went unused. while it was cool because I ended up talking to people I accidently bumped into throughout the day and met some awesome people. it seemed like they wanted us to rub up against people which was a bit odd to me.

the looks from the staff for going outside for a cigarette as well. me and my friends got dirty looks off several members of staff for being outside the venue itself, still in the grounds, but outside having a cigarette while we had conversations spoke about what we just did and worked out what to do next time. that is out of order.

[MattyR]

the other major flaw was the cash machines ran out of money? how? did you not forsee that people would take cards instead?

I was also a little disappointed after seeing the amount of free stuff the LV attendees got compared to the London attendees got. they received pens and all that extra stuff, we got the phone charger, and the shirt. seemed a bit mean on SE's part and made me feel as though they thought the NA subscribers were worth more than the EU subscribers.

I enjoyed the event though, and can't wait for the next one.