Fanfest (stream) thoughts

[Blackwind121]

So now that the NA Fanfest is done, I want to share my thoughts and see what everyone else thinks.

I'm gonna start with the bad stuff just to get that out of the way.
$30 was a really good price considering all that we got access to, even if you don't count the minion and outfit we're getting. However, when I purchased my stream thing, it said we were guaranteed an HD stream. When that guarantee is made, it's a very safe assumption in 2016 that HD=1080p. That wasn't the case. The maximum setting was 720p and while that is somewhat acceptable, I couldn't even play the stream in 720 half the time because the streaming service was so awful. The stream froze a lot and would sit there buffering and by the time it resumed, it would skip over everything that I missed. This was especially annoying during the concerts. For future reference, I hope SE goes with a different streaming service for future fanfests.
Now that the one bad thing is out of the way, I wanna touch on everything I liked about the fanfest in order, starting with the Costume Contest (I missed everything before that because I slept through it all lol)

I think the costumes that were shown were all really amazing. Personally, I would have given the BLM first prize because I feel like more work went into that. She added her own accents to it and even got the shoes right (I can't imagine how painful it must have been for her to walk around in that cosplay all day lmao.) Overall it was really amazing imo. I'm not saying the DRG wasn't outstanding btw, because it was mind blowing. I just feel like it was less unique than the BLM is all. [Side note, if anyone knows that BLM cosplayer, please send them my way I'd like to personally let them know my complete thoughts about the cosplay but don't wanna turn this post into a massive cosplay discussion lol.]

Piano Concert:
I really thought this was amazing. Susan Calloway is an amazing singer and everyone else who performed was equally amazing. I loved the little bit when Soken came out too lol. Personally, I think he looked a bit nervous and maybe got major stage fright. As a performer, I have firsthand experience with that and know exactly what it's like performing your own music for a crowd. No matter how experienced you are, it can be intimidating and exhilarating at the same time. I loved seeing that from him.

Lore/Localization talk with Koji:
This was honestly one of my top two favorite things from the whole weekend. It was really interesting seeing how the names for things are chosen and how things can change from different translations. One thing that I found the most interesting is when he mentioned why Primals look the way they do (especially why Garuda looks humanoid instead of Iksalion and why Sophia has a dark skin tone.) I also loved the discussion of lyrics for Alexander/Sophia and how the intention was to tell a story with them.

PvP Exhibition:
This was really cool in my opinion. I don't have a lot to say about this because I only saw a little bit of it, but what I did see made me want to do more PvP lol.

Live Letter:
I can't even lie, this was mostly underwhelming. Almost all of it was info we've heard before. I personally expected to hear more about 3.45 and maybe at least find out one of the new 4.0 jobs (RED MAGE OR RIOT!) but nope. What we did see was really interesting and I'm glad that they're finally introducing the egi-glamour system in 3.5. I just hope that Scholars can glam over their fairies too. (Let's be real here, who DOESN'T want a green carbuncle to heal them?)

The Primals Concert:
This is probably gonna be the bulk of my post because I've got mixed feelings on completely opposite ends of the spectrum here.
I absolutely loved the concert overall. The set list from beginning to end was super impressive and I thoroughly loved all of it. The one song that was kinda iffy to me was Ravana's theme because it seemed like Koji was maybe struggling with the vocals for that. He actually did really amazing with Titan's theme and Sephirot's theme though so I don't know what happened with Ravana. I actually liked Sephirot's theme the most lol. This concert was the highlight of the fanfest stream for me, personally.
Now you might be thinking, "But you just said you've got mixed feelings about this one!" and you'd be right. The main issue I have isn't with the performers, but with the crowd. I feel like the crowd was a bit disrespectful towards the band when they asked what song the crowd wanted to hear again. People kept shouting for songs that weren't played, even when Koji said the band didn't have the music for those songs (Shiva and something else) and I even heard some people booing when Koji said they didn't know those songs. As a performer, this actually upset me because it would be like me going on stage to play Mozart only to have someone shout, "PLAY CRAZY TRAIN!" I know this is probably an overreaction due to my experience as a musician, but the point is still valid.

The most pleasant part of the concert though was seeing the interaction between the performers and the audience during the songs. The passion for music was obvious from the performers and from the audience. I could clearly tell that the performers were up there, not because they were being paid, but because they loved music. They loved that they had a crowd that appreciated the work that they were doing. As a music teacher, I loved this and it actually further validated my beliefs about the career path I've chosen.

Final thoughts:
I'm absolutely proud to be a member of this community now more than ever. I've been an active player since Beta 3 for 2.0 and I won't be unsubscribing anytime soon lol. I'm going to also make an effort to post/comment more in the forums since I apparently haven't been super active in the forums since I started playing years ago.

[Greedalox]

So now that the NA Fanfest is done, I want to share my thoughts and see what everyone else thinks.
I'm going to separate this into separate comments since apparently it's 5900 characters (not including this sentence) and you can only have 1000 characters per post? lol.

Just edit your first post to get past the limit.

[Lexia]

$30 was a really good price considering all that we got access to, even if you don't count the minion and outfit we're getting.

Except if you compare it to the last fan fest and no longer such a good price.

[Blackwind121]

Thanks, didn't realize that was possible lol. ^^; I don't post to the forums a lot...or like...ever.

[Blackwind121]

Except if you compare it to the last fan fest and no longer such a good price.

No, I still consider it to be a really good price for everything we were able to see.

[Vaer]

Camera shook a lot during panels.
The VOD system is terribad.

[Lexia]

No, I still consider it to be a really good price for everything we were able to see.

Yea cause lets charge $20 for one fan fest then just do that exact same formula again but charge $10 more.

[Remedi]

Yea cause lets charge $20 for one fan fest then just do that exact same formula again but charge $10 more.

Tbh they charged 20$ for the keynote and I think the concert, this time was 30$ for everything on the stream, which can be better or worse depeding how you want to see it (personally I think it was much worse since I could see the fanfest only if I bought the stream for example)

[Blackwind121]

Camera shook a lot during panels.
The VOD system is terribad.

This is actually one thing I meant to touch on but didn't. This was really, really bad. Surely it couldn't have been that hard to get a stable camera stand, could it? I've also heard that going back through the archives is tedious at best. I wouldn't know because I just watched everything live.

Yea cause lets charge $20 for one fan fest then just do that exact same formula again but charge $10 more.

I dunno, I still feel the price was pretty good. I will say that paying for a stream in 2016, I expect a higher stream quality and a stable stream, none of that "720 but only sometimes and only if you wanna deal with buffering once every few minutes" crap.

[Criticaldanny]

Price was fine, but using ustream Service to give us the HD Stream was a horrible idea, i don't know if anyone that purchased the Live Stream Ticket did what i did was using twitch to watch the live letter and let me tell you one thing, there was no lag, it didn't freeze and it never buffered, i had the "HD Stream" open on my other monitor and it was unwatchable. JP Fanfest will probably use NicoNico but for EU FanFest use something else.