Sure, it's an emulator like any other :)

Good points : Location was super good Hotel was amazing A lot of resources free ice cream free popcorn amazing chairs amazing screens All of the games that were there were crazy good. Lotsa board games, lotsa PCs Stream 2 was great and all the games on schedule were great! Barely any tech issues on my end (!)

Points that can be improved (nitpicking) :

• I was a little surprised by the role Save the Children was having in this event. First of all, I double checked and I don't think Save the Children was thanked during the closing speech. The other thing is, I enjoyed having a video from Save the Children explaining how we impacted them at ESA 17, but there was no video of any sort this year. Now, I'm considering that ESA is a celebration of gamers on top of a show, but the fact that the donations were flowing were making me puzzled as to why Save the Children did seem to be less in touch with us than the previous years. The ads for the Charity during downtime were a really nice touch, though.

• The rooms were used well with one intriguing adventure that I had : The tournament room. For Puyo Puyo Tetris and another tournament I couldn't find people who had their GDoc time slot alotted. I had to walk around until I would find some of the concerned people in Stream 1 room. I really enjoyed the idea of a tournament room/google sheet but I think it should add a means to contact the TO.

• I was a little surprised that Ristar was in, I don't think that I had a notification aside from discord and I was not checking discord that often so I heard it from someone else first. If a bonus game gets in the schedule I think it is best to send an email to the runner :)

• I think the interviews were lacking a bit, and could have added a lot to the intermission hosting shifts. Could there be a form for the runner to fill indicating whether or not they would like to be interviewed, and anwsering a bunch of questions beforehand? This would ensure that the interviewers and the interviewed would have some anectodes to share and talk a little bit.

• I liked a lot that the streams were referencing each other in a bottom bar, but I don't think that was the most understandable thing for newcomers (especially when stream 2 was down, but still referenced in stream 1 as playing "Pringles"). I'm nitpicking here, but could it be that the feed of stream 2 can appear on stream 1 sometimes?

• Last and not very important, but the first donation incentives on stream 2 were a little too high for me

All in all : An amazing event. Going back to France hurt. Thanks to everybody who made this possible. See you next time!

Hey!

I'm the guy who plays fast Tetris (TGM) and randomly appeared in other people's runs, often for commentary. Thank you for being awesome!

It turns out I wrote this on my way home which was def awesome because I normally take months. So here we go :

ESA is one of the rare things where I don't regret spending most of my days off.

This year didn't disappoint as I feel it was an even stronger show than the previous year. A lot of the ideas there are crazy good and the atmosphere, man. That ambience is bliss.

I am listing here the + and - I encountered as a runner and commentator. Feel free to discuss!

• :

1. Tech problems were definitely rare. Layout and chat display to the side with the timer and the timer button felt amazing. When I was commentating on stream 1 I felt I had the POWER, man. Stream 2 had crazy good acoustics too and sound mixing on both streams was so powerful. This is the only event where I bring no gimmicky arcade capture stuff because I know what's up. It's so fucking great.

2. Speaking of stream 2, I was rather surprised but it's actually quite great! I think Liva and the staff there did an amazing job with it, so it was really a strong point. Also, the 70 star relay run I was rather lukewarm about but it was a great idea, too. Hopefully this keeps going!

3. The game schedule was rather original in how some choices were made. It was definitely for the best in my opinion! Glad a slightly unusual format like Trackmania 2 Stadium all flags got prime time on Sunday. Cool that there were so many different blocks with so much crazy stuff on it.

4. The arcade stuff was godlike. I wish I had hung out more with people there (shoutouts to Koston btw) and Quick & Crash was just mental.

5. Hosting was there at almost all times and the donation reading part was even less intrusive than last year with the flashing box out. Hosts were reading chat as well, which was a good interaction.

6. Memes were big.

7. Mafia was good.

• : A] Stream 1 host was probably too loud at times while the player mics were not very audible across the room, so that balance was slightly off from my opinion of it. Nothing major but still noteworthy.

B] Hosting during stream 2 had as policy "If you want to host while the chair is empty, do it." It was nice, but it seemed very different from the stream 1 policy. I can tell it deterred people from going to the seat and made it look like we were breaking a rule. Maybe have something written on it next time? Like "vacant seat"? Tell me what you think.

C] I do understand the room that Save the Children wanted to take this year. I am rather sensitive to these topics and I appreciate that there was a possibility to understand our impact, especially during the conclusion speech. However, some points seemed rather weird to me :

First of all, I am not sure what to think of the abundance of ads during the actual stream itself. Some of them made it look like we understand little about the charity itself ("What has aid ever done for anyone" was slightly odd to me, but this I feel is not the place to discuss that.) But I understand that the organization wanted to showcase their mind and most public stance about it to the viewers so this is not a problem per se.

What bothered me is that until the very end, I have never seen any attempt at explaining what Save the Children actually does to the audience at home. Do they dispense education? How do they do that? Do they support blue helmets? Where do they intervene? How much money does giving a young child food rations cost per year? Some of these questions might be exaggerated but you can get that Save the Children is easy to misunderstand.

Conclusion of this : I felt my donation was essentially contributing to the ads themselves, which do some work towards raising awareness at the cost of some heart-drilling, gut-wrenching moments, but nothing else (Okay the Hispanic kid was absolutely amazing.) I feel knowing exactly what is done is great motivation compared to just "Saving the Kids."

I ended up in the hosting seat of Cave Story (stream 2, seat was empty so I told myself why not, but I had 0 experience) and tried reading some of the paragraphs from the StC website while there was no donation. I didn't feel I had done a good job, but after that I realized that I was not hearing any of these bits of info from other hosts.

Just speaking my mind about it. Let me know what you think.

D] Tech problems do happen, in my case I do cast quite a lot of curses involuntarily because of my TGM setup. Apparently stream 2 staff was unaware of the weirdness of my run so I had to contact different staff people about it. For reasons impossible to foresee, TGM 2 refused to cooperate (went perfect last year), so Planks and Edenal proposed that I run it early the day after and play TGM 3 right now. Having TGM 2 the day after seemed like a good idea to me at the time. It eventually went okay, but it did cause a few hiccups in my show : Presentation was in the incorrect order so I had to explain things very differently on the fly. Also I was slightly tired for day 2 more than I would have thought. I'm sorry, I tend to keep things for me until it turns out weird. Still, many, many thanks for moving the schedule for my sake.

E] Donation tracker had problems so some donations were lost. You might be very well aware of this but I did not find sufficient info as to what caused this. If there is, it would be greatly appreciated :)

F] Some of the donation incentives I felt were too demanding. I was very afraid this led people to give up donating for said incentives. The other problem that arose from that is some people tried to snipe some of those incentives with a great deal of money, which probably didn't look very sound as a charity event (especially with the tracker problems lurking around.) Another problem is that some other people actually made the call to fulfill their incentive when the goal had not been met, contrary to other players who resigned on it.

The thing that made it all look weird was that people donated quite a lot on some of their incentives, but when the donation goals shifted again, they had a different feeling on what they donated.

Regarding my case : I was very interested in making the glitch showcase of Castlevania 2 : Simon's Quest happen (I was the commentator of this run along with Burb, the runner.) It was about two minutes of something I felt was very funny. I saw the goal and I was very puzzled : For something I had found this quick and entertaining to go to 700$ (went down from 1000$) was very high to me. I talked it out with Burb and he told me that he had shown the video to the incentive staff, so I assumed they knew what they were doing.

The run was going very well and I was caught up in the moment. I eventually tried sniping the donation incentive during the actual run with a 500$ donation to make sure it is met. The VOD of it is pretty self explanatory. I actually was commentating a bit less because I was focusing on paying with PayPal. The donation did not go through the tracker, so the incentive was lost to RNG, dude. Seven was hosting at the time. I think he made a very good call to refer to the tracker to say that the donation incentive was not met. In the end it was just a sad moment which resulted from the different abovementioned problems.

I think ESA is getting bigger for the best, and I'm really excited to go there next year. Most of the problems I described probably emerged as a result of that growth. I understand it is difficult as a staff to overcome all the difficulties along the path and I hope you'll have the proper expertise to deal with all of these soon.

Love!

I'd like to be part of this :)

Hey everyone,

ESA was gud.

I had a very fun time and I enjoyed the atmosphere. The trust of staff that I do my Tetris Arcade run and they record everything instantly has been a huge relief. I spent a wonderful time there!

I think everything has been said so far (I relate especially to this post https://www.speedrun.com/esa2016/thread/veyrb/1#obkeb by JohnUK89) concerning the pros and cons of the event except for this :

• : The chairs were nice (I had to use something to get myself above the usual level for my arcade stick but it was okay)

• : Upon looking at the VODs, I noticed that the sound jumps from time to time. At first I thought the commentator was forgetting words in their sentence, but it's actually obvious that sound is skipped every minute or so. It's noticeable in every run but this one probably shows it best at 5m02s :

And also I was at the Elite Park Hotel (a good opportunity that presented itself) and aside from downtown being a bit scary at 3 AM it was great. I just didn't have a bad experience with the housing.

See you next mission!