Positives first:

• Location, as last year, was superb, same with the Hotel (though A/C was not working again, which isn't as tragic as last year but still annoying to sleep in a room where is 28°C).
• I actually liked having stream 2 in the same room as stream 1 as an attendee, it was easy to just look over to your left/right to see what was going on at the other stream, while cheering might be a bit disrupting, I personally don't think it was too bad with most runs in terms of cheering overlap between streams (compared to street boys). It also seems easier for volunteers to check out what was going on at the other stream at times and also the room for stream 2 last year was too small so this year was a lot better.
• Stream 2 in general, shoutouts to Liva for running this again, it's always a pleasure and always has great games plus gives stream 1 a bit of buffer in case they fall behind schedule.
• 20$ yakuza on stream 2 as last game of the day was a good idea as the donations made the game longer (and more funny / enjoyable, great run if you haven't seen it you should check out the vod.), didn't disrupt the schedule as stream 2 goes offline over night. Should've been done for both 20$% runs imo
• Arcade being in a separate room and not in the floor 1 lobby like last year. Last year Q&C was very noisy on floor 1 and with the added rhythm game machines this seemed like a very sensible choice to put it into its extra room
• Tournament room: shoutouts to feasel for organizing this. Was great seeing the tournament room in more use compared to last year and also having some high quality tournaments there (shoutouts to paulister for quizbowl.)
• infodesk being 24/7 operated. felt more secure leaving stuff around on floor 1 and could also always chat to people there or go there for different things when needed.
• general good atmosphere / attendees / staff / volunteers: you all make this event what it is. it's always a pleasure to just randomly chat up someone and ask them about what they do / if they're new to esa etc. I love you all.

Sadly there was also several negative aspects:

• Lack of practise pcs (keeping this short as people have mentioned this before). I'm assuming this is also due to the growth the event has experienced.
• Street boys being way too loud right behind stream 1. Not saying stuff like this shouldn't happen but it would be better to do it on floor 1 lobby when people realize for the first time how big it grows and how loud it becomes.
• senior staff being heavily overworked due to people oversleeping their shift or other issues. I personally am not on staff or a volunteer but I felt very bad for some people that had like double shifts or jumped in for others that overslept for double graveyard shifts. To people on senior staff: please don't overwork yourself too hard, it is risky for you health as well, please take care of yourselves.
• Schedule (stream 1) being a mess this year. I don't know what the issues were and I'm assuming it's a mix of several things but without stream 2 this would've been pretty much as messy as 2016 was in terms of delay.
• As mentioned above with the hotel: non working A/C. This and for some reason cleaning took our towels despite them not being places on the sink / bathtub and then not leaving new ones. Which I realized when showering and dried off with the super small hand towel :/ (not the problem of the event but this was weird to me as cleaning has been pretty much on point last year)

General suggestion (not really a negative point or something):

• Have someone swedish on infodesk make a list of cold medications you can actually get at the pharmacy at emporia: ESAids is a thing every year and sadly I caught it as well this year, only to shockingly realize the lady at the pharmacy could not speak english (which is like the second person in total in sweden I have encountered that could not speak english). Made it very difficult to look for specific things like cough blockers. While yes, you can still get ibuprofen / paracetamol very easily, for specific things it is very hard to deal with stuff that is written in swedish only.

Edit: almost forgot a minor negative this year: I don't know whose idea it was but honestly tweeting a tweet every 4 hours 4-5 days before the event seemed more like spam than hype and actually made me unfollow the ESA twitter account. Especially considering the countdown wasn't even to the start of the stream but some random around midnight time? It's fine to do this on the day before ESA and maybe like every 12h for 3-4 days prior, but every 4 hours is overdoing it a lot.

Edit2: another thing I sorta forgot. Last year we had some discount codes for escape rooms and dominos. Not sure what happened to this as some people that went to the Malmö escape rooms have said that the owner did contact ESA staff about a discount deal so I don't know what happened to this?

Edit3 (sorry for so many edits my brain is a mess right now):

• The intermission videos were great. Too bad most of the time they were inaudible because volume wasn't turned up enough. Great idea behind this to show off some tricks / glitches. For longer set up times even shorter speedruns / funny moments / frustrating rng or stuff like that could be shown off in the future. Also (and this is a hot take i guess?) hosting and donation reading could maybe be combined? With longer intermission videos for longer set up times and set up mainly being 2-3 minutes of hosts and then donations / shout outs to the sponsors and the charity, volunteers could probably easily do both hosting/donation reading. Maybe also fill intermissions with more interviews if runners are up for it about general stuff like how did they get into speedrunning, why this particular game, etc. this was way more prominent back in 2016.

As a 2nd time attendee I felt the huge improvements over last year.

1. Almost no schedule changes / delays / tech issues Compared to last year, this is probably the most major and noticeable improvement. good job everyone at tech on this. I think a small part of this is also due to the 2nd stream kind of acting as buffer on the last day in case runs needed to be moved to stay on schedule.

2. 2nd Stream As someone who's not overly interested in a lot of the 10-30minute runs of megaman (no offense, just personal taste) and the likes I loved the comeback of the 2nd stream this year, not only for the longer runs (like Final Fantasy, which btw Baunsgaard no offense but there was never 2 Final Fantasy games on at the same time, WoFF was mondays, ff8 was tuesdays, ff1 was a 2h run on a different day and 13 was on saturdays so I dont really get your problem as there's other kinda long runs like smgalaxy? but thats beside the point, please dont take offense to this, it's just sad to see FF being critisized every year for the same reason, even last year when FF12 was the only final fantasy in the schedule) but also as a more "chill" variant to the hosting thing. I enjoyed hosting on the 2nd stream quite a lot and might consider doing it on the mainstream next year.

3. The Kiosk / BK Delivery I personally didnt really use this opportunity much but considering how many people I saw ordering from BK instead of having to walk anywhere to get food was a big improvement too, especially when you were running longer games / just had a long run and just wanted something to eat.

4. Hall B + more practise PCs Filled with a lot more stuff this year, the new pcs, more TVs, more chairs and generally the layout of both halls were a lot better than the rows last year.

5. Donation Tracker sadly not everything can be positive and though I know this was on paypal's side of things, it's still unfortunate to see the donation tracker kind of break and donations not being able to be read out.

6. The runs themselves I feel this year was a pretty good mixup for all people. Some short runs, some longer runs, action, rpgs, platformers, co-op, races, ... I personally liked the schedule a lot more than last year probably also thanks to 2nd stream being a thing again as mentioned above.

7. General Thanks and last words I'm thankful for everyone making this year possible and even greater than last year: thanks to everyone on tech, hosts, behind the scenes, attendees, runners, donators, viewers - you are all great. ESA wouldn't happen without everyone kind of pulling on the same strings. Hoping next year will be even bigger and better.

EDIT: Small things I forgot to mention 8) Lanyard While last year's lanyard was too tiny to read, this year's are too big to wear, hopefully a middle ground can be found next year

9. VODs: While I understand this is a lot of work and the automatic youtube upload bot...? broke? It's still one of the few points i have to critique as most runs haven't been uploaded to youtube yet, the youtube links arent in the VOD thread on reddit (which is all the more annoying since twitch is incredibly bad to watch VODs on).

EDIT 2 after being reminded of the shirt: As pac stated, I also really couldn't even care to buy the shirt this year, not because it was badly designed or anything (good job actually on that one) but because the design was a dead meme from 2015. Last year's shirt I still wear when going out in public, this year's shirt i couldn't see myself do that ever and hence considered it a waste to buy it. I like the subtlety of last year's shirt more - just a simple logo with some game related stuff around.

i'd definetly be down for playing as well, sadly i got no instruments