I think a large part of lower viewership comes from the amount of content uploaded each day; day 6 having almost 8 hours of content was ludicrous and harmed viewership for every video of that day. Day 6 in particular was scheduled such that all of the projects from last year’s FEE3 day 6 were on the same day this year, which is arbitrary and played to the detriment of every hack involved. I definitely think the amount of content each day should be capped around 2-3 hours and I’d almost go as far as to suggest caps on length of individual videos but that may be too much. I do think that encouraging more trailers and less LPs would be a good way to balance showing off 40+ projects but I also wouldn’t want to arbitrarily prevent newcomers from having their projects LPed, as that’s antithetical to how I think this community should conduct itself and I can’t think how else that would be done other than arbitrarily.
In order to schedule videos to cap the amount of total runtime per day, videos would also need to be all in before the deadline, which I know has been an issue in the past with projects not yet recorded getting thrown to the end of the schedule. Deadlines need better enforced around here in general, and definitely so to improve FEE3.
Premieres I really enjoy in concept and in execution, but YouTube’s premiere system has a number of issues that likely contributed to other aspects of this year’s FEE3 (If you premiere a video YouTube is less likely to reccomend that video to users in the long run, likely contributing to lower overall view counts). I think best case would be coordinating an actual livestreamed FEE3 event, but I also understand the challenges that would entail.
For reaching out beyond just FEU, submission threads on both FEU and SF, as well as advertising the event in Fire Emblem communities all over the internet leading up to and during the event, would be a great way to spread the word and garner a wider interest in the event. Making it clear the event is for absolutely anyone and everyone that wishes to participate can only improve things.
It’s also possible that FEE3’s format may need a radical change to it. The format has been the same since 2011, at which time there were only a handful of projects involved. As hacking becomes easier and more projects pop up all the time, the flaws of the format become more pronounced. Focusing an hour+ on each submission leads to 40+ hours of content, which is a looot for a viewer to sit through and the sheer volume of likely puts people off of tuning in at all. Perhaps a structure more similar to an actual E3 presentation or Nintendo Direct would be a better idea; a pre-planned, pre-recorded showcase of projects that spends only a few minutes on each submission, perhaps longer on some of the higher profile submissions, that runs in total around an hour would be much more accessible than 40 hours of gameplay. This could then be followed by more in-depth gameplay of most or all submissions, with the hook of the initial presentation to get people interested in seeing it. This would definitely increase the workload of the event, but it would also likely improve viewership across all aspects of it.
As for LPers being informed on what they’re playing, I’m definitely guilty of not submitting more than the bare minimum information for projects - in the one case where I submitted anything more than a patch, the save file given to me to send in the creator of had cheated their way to the chapter in question, which completely threw off the unit balance and reflected poorly on the game. If there had been communication between the dev team and the LPer, this likely would have been avoided. So, both increased communication and requiring more specifics at the time of submission both would be beneficial to the quality of the final product.
Tl;dr
Space out content more
Appeal to a wider audience
Better communication between LPers and devs
Premieres likely harm the growth of the content, thanks to YouTube
Restructuring the event entirely may be in order to deal with the ever-increasing number of projects
while I have no data in favor or against this, I personally felt that the premieres were cool. it was nice to see what kind of projects were up each day instead of just waiting to see what popped up throughout the day.
I am just going to throw in my two cents here from last year’s FEE3 where a hack of mine was showcased. I am not exactly sure whether it would still be relevant/pertain to this year’s and going forward, but I figured I may as well drop my thoughts here since there is an existing thread.
To be frank, I was pretty disappointed(if not completely) with what ended up happening with/through the showcase of my hack. The gameplay and commentary were okay, not too many complaints since it was at least neutral, but the comments were overall rather negative; I understand that the comment section is really out of the realm of control, but hear me out here. I think which portions of the game that were showcased(Chapters 0x and 1) were okay, though looking through FEE3 2018’s playlist, I noticed mine was the shortest, at 24 minutes, which excludes animation/ASM-type showcases, which were shorter, while the average was probably 40~60 minutes. However, I had private messaged the LP’er beforehand regarding organizing details such as which sections to showcase and whether a joint commentary would be possible. I never got a response, and the LP’er just did essentially two chapters and called it a day, and even to this day, the LP’er never responded. What disappointed me was the absolute lack of response/communication with the LP’er and me that occurred(I believe I messaged at least two days in advance[even simply a “no, sorry” would have sufficed, as I at least know the message was read and acknowledged]), not being able to co-commentate or at least give insight/heads-up [to the LP’er] to what I wanted in the showcase, how overly short it was compared to almost all the other showcases, and the overall mostly negative comments in the comment section which did little in providing constructive criticism or guidance, essentially amounting to calling my work terrible, to some degrees. One thing to call it terrible, another to call it terrible, state why, and provide insight as to how it can be avoided/improved, even if very briefly.
I believe there was a list in the original post that indicated who the LP’er of each hack was, though I forget if it also listed the time/date of recording and/or posting, which is how/why I messaged the LP’er beforehand to see if I could somehow influence the showcase of my work.
A big part of why I refused to participate this year(and even watch any showcases) was how poorly mine resulted from last year and not wanting to waste my time preparing for a presentation that will get my work called terrible once more that yields no constructive feedback/criticism. (Also that I want more to be shown off than I have worked on currently, though an easy solution to that would be to showcase anything past Chapter 1 in this case since that was as far as the showcase of my hack got). Still have that bitter taste left in my mouth from last year when seeing this year’s pop up.
I see that at least the discouragement of negativity was encouraged for this year, which I think is quite a nice change. As I chose not to participate, I cannot say whether or not communications were/would be better, though good communication is always key in many aspects of life.
Overall, the baseline of my thoughts are:
Better communication, less negativity without criticism/feedback/ways to improve, possibly “peer review” with the hack(like what one would see with scientific papers and such, though it need not be overly extensive, yet should still provide some insight and guideline as to how/where to improve) that could be done by a separate person/crew or the LP’er themself [though this probably has less to do with FEE3 in general than many other aspects, but could possibly contribute to the “less negativity” if there were comments encouraging positivity/constructiveness already present at/near the time of posting].
Let me know if I stated something that is not comprehensible or contradictory or has already been addressed/fixed in this year’s FEE3.
I think some limits or structure in terms of how many videos are shown, and how long said videos are would be preferable.
For those new to the format like myself, we may not know what is going to be reasonable or not in terms of what we ask the LP to do? I was lucky enough that MK404 was excellent in communicating with me, and I was able to share a little bit, and also warn him ahead of time about a glitch in the patch.
I watched both the original Twitch stream(after the fact), and then the Premiere of the LP. Actually being able to chat with the viewers during the LP was great, and Bluid and I were both lucky enough to be on and available for that. It’s enjoyable seeing peoples reactions, and also being able to warn/defend little glitches or design decisions that didn’t pan out.
That said, our video ended up being over 1 and a half hours, which isn’t short. Next time around I’m going to cut that showcase time down. The very first video, Sacred Echoes, was short and sweet in its showcase, as were the animation videos and they left you wanting more because of it. As some have suggested on discord, 30-50 min in general is a solid time but multiple videos going past 1 hour or 1 1/2 hour may not be given a chance by the general viewing public if they don’t have something to draw them in?
Some people prefer the longer LP videos though, so maybe things could be structured so that the long videos end up as the last video of the day? Let’s Play Long Last Video? Or something?
Of note regarding engagement to add to the timing bit for comparison in future FEE3s:
I basically attended every single premiere (one or two exceptions) and on average the live view count tended to be in the 50 viewer range, with some some lows in the 20 viewer range and highs in the 60 viewer range, and usually upon finishing most had between 100-200 views. Unfortunately I didn’t have the foresight to document exactly which one is which to compare how they relate to the hour they premiered however I can say that the high of 60 was from what I believe was Wednesday? But mostly it seemed to be affected by popularity, the SRPG Studio projects tended to be in the 20 viewer range, any project that has been around for a while and with a decent amount of popularity tended to be in the 50 range. New projects without threads of course also were more in the 20 viewer range (although I remember Book of Exiles having a bit more?). And notably the short showcases like trailers and animation showcases didn’t have high counts but would see significant increases in views after the premiere (this can be attributed to them being too short for the live audience to come in before it ended tho).
Don’t know whether it will help or whether Ray can access the youtube analytics to get a better picture.
Edit: As an addendum to the timing, this might seem insignificant but if we look at the anime style videogame community as a whole, fee3 had some bad luck this year of happening during a sort of “pokemon season” with their big new game coming out during the event which which basically killed any potential growth it could have had outside the utside of the dedicated FE ROM Hacking and fangame community. Heck even in the general Fire Emblem community it went by without much fanfare as nothing fee3 related on the subreddit managed to leave the New section.
I like a lot of what I’ve heard about the scheduling, and had my own thoughts as well. My attempt to synthesize into an actionable plan:
Day 1: opening, and then all of the tech demos and animation showcases for the year. These videos tend to be only a few minutes each, so bundling them together works for balancing out the overall video time. These should not be premiered because there’s no point - even if they were long enough to draw in an audience, nobody wants to comment in real time on this sort of thing (I think?). Just dump the videos and let the view counts roll. Putting these on the first day also helps set the stage for the rest of FEE3, since a lot of the tech and animations being demonstrated will be present in the same year’s gameplay hacks.
Days 2…N-1: Gameplay videos. Everything that’s going to be livestreamed should be livestreamed during the actual event; set up 4 time slots per day every 6 hours (so every time zone gets a chance and so insomniacs can stay hype 24/7) and assign them after it’s been determined who’s going to LP what. (Credit @Zanryu for the idea; I do think that four videos per day is a good number, and the issue really is more to do with video length.) Fill in the remaining time slots with premieres for hacks that have prepared videos. Either way, everything should be at most 1 hour long, optimally closer to 30 minutes. If possible, the livestreams should be pushed towards the beginning of the schedule, to allow editing time for…
Day N: Highlight reel and closing. A few minutes from each hack, all edited together (with YT timestamps) as an executive summary for people who couldn’t be awake at the right times (or who just want to watch the first and last days). For the streamed hacks, take an excerpt of the footage - perhaps a turn of gameplay, or perhaps a moving cutscene - whatever got the audience most hype during the stream. For prepared hacks, this would also be provided in advance by the author - it could be a section of the original video, but it could also be some extra content like a promo reel or a brief interview segment. 3 minutes each for 40 projects would make a 2 hour video here, which seems reasonable.
BTW: I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have gaps of a day or two in the schedule, if it lets people work when it’s most convenient for them. Ideally this would allow the opening and closing to both happen on the weekend.
Now then, the other aspect of scheduling - the calendar. FEE3 was announced early August this year and is now finished mid-November - and it still feels rushed in some regards. While I like the idea of doing two events per year to keep up hype levels throughout the year, I think we need to be aware of what we’d be getting into, organizationally. (Also, they’d need separate labels instead of just being “FEE3 <year>”, and I can foresee angry arguments about which projects go in which event…)
As far as the timing goes, keep in mind that the time of year when the videos are shown won’t be the same time of year that the hacking work is done, but it will be a lot of the same people in both groups who have the same calendar scheduling pressures. IOW if you want to show videos in summer to accomodate the school crowd, then it needs to be right at the end of August so those same people can also take advantage of June and July to do the actual production.
I already briefly said my piece about premiers in the thread proper, but this definitely provides food for thought. I’ll post my thoughts about everything addressed.
Timing: Summer is generally a more convenient time for projects, as students would be on their summer holidays and would have more time to work, since there wouldn’t be the pressures of school and study. Older FEE3s were earlier in the year as well.
Premiers:
The timing for me was pretty good since at 5pm GMT I was out of school and at home. However, I still feel like I’m missing out on something if I don’t watch the video live, which disincentives going back and watching the video later. Traditional videos can be watched whenever, and while premiers can also be watched whenever, the psychological feeling of missing out does affect things. Chatting with people while watching the video is nice, but maybe I’m just an old bore at the end of the day.
Project quantity:
Ever since FEBuilder came on to the scene, the amount of projects skyrocketed. They all have to be accommodated in some way or another. I’d be wary of extending the event too much: logistical burnout and viewer fatigue may kick in. I’d probably set the limit at around 14 days, two weeks: if the event lasted a whole month it would just feel dragged out by the end. Video length is also a part of this, as well.
Avenir is an extreme case, but many videos broke the hour mark. The most popular videos were short and snappy, such as Nuramon’s animation showcase. A large amount of the videos were also just unedited Twitch streams, with one incident coming to mind was a random Twitch bit scheme being advertised in the Olethian Princess video on Youtube. That is completely irrelevant to the video and should have been edited out. This all adds up to large videos that aren’t really reviewed for quality. Banning streams of submissions and forcing prerecorded videos would be extreme and alienate some contributors. Perhaps a team of video editors can be gathered to review Twitch streams so the actual video can be trimmed and polished, while the original content creator can still get their exposure with a livestream. This still leads to disjointed chat references that can’t be seen, though.
Communications: This is vital for running a good event. My own submission this year nearly had the wrong chapters recorded due to a memo not being sent with the project, and last year an outdated patch without documentation was sent instead of the correct one. Of Pandan’s three proposed solutions, I like idea #1, but expanded so everyone who has submitted a project get into a “backstage chat”, so to say. I typically just let Arch select an LPer himself because I don’t really know any personally. With an organisation chat, I could discuss details of a project with any LPer interested in LPing it without relying on a middleman who might forget to send something in by mistake. As for 2, FEE3 has always been traditionally dogged with delays, and unforeseen circumstances might force delays. FEE3 2017 got severely delayed due to a bad hurricane, for instance. I wouldn’t support 3 outside of special circumstances: having two videos for the same project showing largely the same content would be somewhat pointless. Being upstaged is bad, but improved co-ordination should mitigate upstaging.
Bringing in FE Youtubers: I wouldn’t be too enthused by this. They’d have to do it for the sake of the event and not just for a paycheque. Their own interests would lie elsewhere. We could reach out to them, yes, but we’ve done it before and their records have been spotty. I’d also be against having the videos scattered around the internet, since it would make things harder to find.
Advertising elsewhere: The community as a whole is a lot larger outside of FEU. FEE3 was officially supported by Serenes in 2016, but they don’t seem to have considered it worth their time and have since deleted the sub-forum the event was organised in. Still, I would support trying to advertise it elsewhere to get more attention. Restoring submissions from Serenes would be a good start, but that would require more middlemen in order to get the submissions back to Arch.
Foreign community participation: Language barrier. The event is run in English, and communication breakdown would be even more likely and severe if the prospective entrant did not know how to speak English. Entries from East Asia, Latin America, and anywhere else in the world should of course be welcome, but I’d say actively recruiting someone to facilitate entries from their respective communities would be difficult. They’d need to be competent at both English and Japanese/Chinese/Spanish/whatever, and I’d say it would be a logistical nightmare that wouldn’t be worth the effort. The videos should be exclusively in English, as that is the language of FEU. Non-English videos would severely turn off people from watching them. As a consequence, the creators wouldn’t be able to understand their project being played and so would not get any feedback. It’s awkward, and I wouldn’t consider it worth the trouble.
And that’s all of Pandan’s points. I want FEE3 to be successful. Next year will be the tenth annual FEE3. We should do something special, and make it an FEE3 to be remembered.
Youtube can automatically add subtitles by voice recognition.
and, The subtitles can be translated and displayed by machine translation.
Because it is machine translation, the quality of translation is not good, but we can still understand the meaning.
I think we can overcome language barriers if technology advances in the future.
It seems that you can also post subtitles manually, but it’s not easy because it takes time.
This was my first thinking on the issue, but I was swayed by @anon64156711’s argument about streaming during the event to enhance engagement. Hence the idea of having final-day excerpts to get the benefit of such editing. Ideally it would be possible to reach the livestreams via Youtube, and perhaps have the video replaced with a slightly edited one after the fact if there’s a need to remove extraneous livestream-setup sorts of things (like the thing about Twitch bits).
Even not knowing the LPers, it would be helpful for submitters to include a submission statement that categorizes their work, so that it can be more easily assigned to someone appropriate. Not every author is going to want to negotiate this sort of thing personally, though.
This is a risk as the community gets bigger and more projects are shown. I think Zan and Zahl’s recommendation of a new video every 6 hours makes the most sense since it appeals to all timezones fairly. As long as creators have some say in their timeslot for the premiere, then that would be ideal.
I disagree. I’d rather have an LPer chat. It’ll streamline comms for Arch since he just needs to ping people in a chat versus finding people individually. It also provides transparency for who is covering what.
Ideally, content creators include all pertinent details in their sign up so that the need for comms between the creator and the LPer are minimal.
Yes. This should be solved with more detailed sign up form.
The challenge with this is that it can create a dichotomy where hacks that are well liked get preferential treatment. This may happen today with how things are scheduled and dispersed, but I would want to avoid creating this. I agree that length can be an issue and we should provide guidelines for creating a good video submission, but not disqualifying people for making their video too long. I think the general consensus is that the premieres were too long in general, and hopefully we can all take that to heart and improve next year.
This is an interesting point. It’ll be curious to see lifetime views of content and if it decreases compared with years prior over the same time period. I can say that VQ has already surpassed all views of last year’s premiere, but the project’s popularity has also grown and it looks way better now. So it is hard to say.
Live streams would require a lot of additional coordination and should only be done if the LPer/creator want to go that route. I had fun doing a livestream for Ternon, but for the co-comms it was easier to do that privately.
My only issue with this is that it puts the onus on one person to edit things down. I like the idea of having something like this to supplement, but I’d be wary of putting this on someone, especially since there are so many projects to look at. I’d rather put it on creators and LPers to do a better job showcasing their work, than have someone else need to review and edit out.
Big agree here. I can draft up a new form to use for next year and a sample we can use to help guide folks for next year
This is probably the right range to recommend. 30-50 minutes is ideal, with 90 minutes as an upper limit. I don’t think we should have hard cutoffs, but share some guidelines based on what we see being successful.
Yeah this is big, and something that was overlooked. We can do better next time to schedule around big game releases that would impact viewership. Good callout.
I love this idea, but again, to my earlier point, it creates a burden on whoever is editing to keep tabs on all of the footage. Perhaps to the point of shortening videos, we call this out as something that will be done, and highlight that it makes it easier for the editor to splice together footage if your video is shorter? Could be a way to encourage shorter videos.
Agree. I do not think two events is the right solution. A gap could be a good idea too.
Agreed. I think if we announce FEE3 in June, have submissions until July, use July to record, and then launch in August - I think that would be the best since we can wrap up the show before end of the month.
Yeah, this was inappropriate and I don’t like that this was included.
Agreed. As long as the system allows for creators to give LPers what they need without requiring much back and forth, I think that would be ideal.
Fair point. I’d like to think that they would be more altruistic and see the opportunity to help bring attention to games that they may be able to play and profit from, but so far it seems like they do not seem interested. We’ve all heard horror stories on mangs making a comment on a hack which can make it difficult for its reputation to recover from. But, if done right, can help broaden exposure. It is a tricky balance and I think with what Xenith suggested earlier about choosing LPers, that the risk of a bad showcase decreases.
I disagree with this. If there is enough coordination and the LPer knows what they’re getting into, I do not think this is a blocker. I’d be happy to showcase a hack in another language if it meant getting other projects shown off. Machine translation is decent enough to cover the gaps for closed captioning.
I agree. We can make this work, and I think there could be more interest in cross-cultural projects and exchange.
Yes. This is what would help solve it. I don’t blame creators if they don’t want to do back and forth. If there is enough info upfront, there is less of a need. Oftentimes submissions have no notes and so it is hard looking at a project for the first time to know what to do or what to highlight.
I agree with everything @Pandan has said and just about everything in the rest of the thread, but I feel like there’s something being overlooked.
As someone who has fingers in a fair number of pies- i.e. keeping an eye on the projects that interest me, there wasn’t really a whole lot of stuff that I haven’t seen already.
Take Ternon for example. The videos were fun to watch, the concept is interesting, and Kirb’s wizardry is always impressive. Yet still, I’ve been aware of this content as its being developed just by keeping channels unmuted in that server. Even though I’ve yet to play VQ, something I plan to remedy this week, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on over there by being activeish in the server. Don’t get me wrong, it looks impressive as hell. The content in the video looked cool but not entirely new to me.
In my eyes, this is a fundamental issue with FEE3 that I don’t have a solution to. What’s intended to appear as new content doesn’t seem that new to many of the active members of the community, the people who care. The people coming to visit the YT premieres generally seem to be the same people active with that project, which kinda defeats the purpose of “premiering” content in my eyes. Do I think the premieres are a bad thing? Not really, but I think we as a community need to think about what we want FEE3 to mean to us. Is it to show off fun new content? If so, I think that the current format does not suit that goal. Is this a hot take? I’m honestly not sure, but this is my two cents.
I feel like our main reason for this was in attempt to show off as much novel stuff as possible in order to stand out… and even then we wen’t overboard… This is entirely my fault because if you actually watch the thing, Noguchi wanted to cut it off, so I apologize. We’re definitely gonna rethink what we want for next year.
I’m skeptical here. Not everyone is going to have your experience of this, but also there’s value in seeing a plan really come to fruition. FEE3 gives hack (and animation and tech) creators a deadline to work towards and a sense of recognition that comes from the community. The premiere chats might be dominated by people with fingers in pies, so to speak, but those are always just going to be the more outgoing members of the community anyway. (I can assure you that when 50 people are watching a premiere, most of them are silent most if not all of the time.)
Besides - as long as the content is new to the person doing an LP, there’s still the potential for surprised reactions.
On the problem of many of the active members having already seen it, I don’t think there’s much of a solution, people on the specific project’s discord are bound to see something of it, there can be surprises like Nuramon’s Dread Fighter, and at least on the FEU discord Ternon only had small bits of it shown off. Surprises are hard to pull off as people like to show things off on Discord and get feedback.
For the language, auto closed caption, while not ideal, are good enough, of course keeping the actual commentary in english is ideal, going more global would mean the possibility of hacks where the text is not in english, gameplay would still shine through in spite of language barrier but the story will be lost, I don’t know, maybe a speaker of the language as a LPer could work, having them read the dialogue out loud so it gets caught by the CC, but that might complicate matters. I don’t know, alternatively bilingual LPers? Might be hard. If by next fee3 I’m not too busy I could sign up as a candidate for LPs as I can speak english and spanish fluently (if you ignore the countless typos I make on Discord)
not going to comment on much, these are points i largely agree with and I wasn’t actually involved with the event this year
I agree with the sentiment, but in a lot of ways this is a logistical nightmare. Way back when we were starting out, Tangerine (is she even still the SF admin?) and I spent hours trying to coordinate things, and there was a comparatively small number of entries then. This site was a lot smaller then as well – at the time, we didn’t have much choice but to let SF push us around, but with the growth we’ve experienced in the past several years (something I’m incredibly proud of!) this just increases the potential for friction.
One thing I am quite on the fence about is the role of FEU, in general, in this event. Should Colorz and I be more involved? This year we were basically entirely hands off, but I do know the advantages to having some kind of “official” backing (not that having MK404 and Arch on board is nothing – I"d argue that having loud community voices is way more important than having a forum!)
This is similar to asking the major FE youtubers to help us out. As seen, the logistics with managing Mangs was already pretty difficult. Do the organizers have the manpower to help coordinate everything? I think we’re long past the point of being some grassroots group trying to put something slapdash together, but I’m not so sure our attitude has changed to reflect that. This is kind of reflected in the deadline thing – how many Serenes contests extend their deadlines by upwards of a month?
One thine that might help with content fatigue is to space out the really hyped-up releases. This happened to some extent this year, but I absolutely think that big ticket showcases like FE7x, SoA, etc, should be placed strategically to avoid burnout. This might mean at the end of days, spaced out with animation and tech showcases (I’m actually opposed to putting these all into one video – I think that they provide a nice breather between larger, less technical content). Of course, we do need some strong showings on the first day, but by putting the lesser-known releases between the most hyped ones, you encourage viewers to at least keep track a little.
This is fair. I suppose it depends on the level of involvement and coordination. At minimum we should ensure that someone on our side is posting content to other places. Ideally, we would have a relationship with a mod or admin that could help promote it on their sites, but unsure what the historical relationship is with FEU and other sites.
That’s up to you four to decide - The general sentiment is that FEE3 is now hosted by FEU, so I don’t think anyone sees it as not being endorsed by leadership here, but I am curious what you think involvement on your end as an admin would look like.
If we continue as we have been, then no. Arch shouldn’t be running around by himself and running point without support. I proposed the LPer chat (I believe someone earlier referred to it as a back room or back stage) so that we could coordinate amongst ourselves more easily. I think this would help with some of the communication gaps and add a sense of shared responsibility.
I’m not really sure what exactly caused this communications breakdown with Mangs or why others signed up and failed to show up. I don’t think we need to treat more prominent youtubers any differently than other LPers, nor do I think we should - if they say they’ll play a hack, we should hold them to it or pass it to someone else. The issue is less about who the LPer is, and more about the mechanism for communicating with them. Is a group chat the best mechanism for this? I don’t know, but it would make Arch’s life easier and provide more transparency then by extension, accountability. That should help quite a bit with level setting too.
This I agree with 100%. If we go with the drip of content every 6 hours, 1 in 4 should be one of the more prominent or well-known projects, so at least once every 24 hours there is something that will draw a crowd and keep the hype going. There were quite a few days this year where there were only unknown or early stage projects, which I think hurt turnout for the day overall, while others were a bit more stacked.
I agree that spacing out other content amongst LPs will also be better than putting them all back to back. Similarly, spacing out project formats or ideas (like not putting two SRPG studio projects back to back, or avoiding putting remakes/demakes adjacent to one another) should also help with diversity day-by-day.
This is tricky and I felt a bit similarly this year. But that’s part of working backstage on a play - you know what’s going to happen. You’re putting on the show, not sitting and watching.
The event, in my eyes, is to showcase our community’s hard work to a broader audience and celebrate our mutual success. I think it is easy to say it’s less hype because you’re involved so heavily. But that doesn’t mean the format is flawed.
The question is how can we continue to reach a broader audience so that we can grow the viewer base and the hacking community.
With 40+ entries and just about 80 hours of video content it was really hard to choose what to commit to clicking when all I might have going into it is the title name and the thumbnail. A highlight reel or light summary of what sort of hacks are in store for the given day would go a long way, I think.
Hard agree on capping time constraints for non-livestreamed showcases, via editing or just managing to make a presentation within 30 minutes.
One of the things I would like to see is the event’s development become more of a community event (people can pitch in as they are able to and incorporating videographers more widely). Yeah, it would spoil the surprises for ourselves (and I guess there’s always the potential of a bad bean spilling the soup), but if we’re trying to put our best showcase forward to people outside the community, we should be trying to use all the resources available to us.
Chiming in on this, I personally enjoyed being at my own premier, since it gave me the opportunity to directly reach out to answer people’s questions and comments being made live.
Was thinking a bit about this earlier, and wanted to summarize a bit to see about recommendations for this year’s upcoming FEE3.
Schedule 4 premiers per day, 6 hours apart. Have an inclusion on the sign up form for people to request the preferred time in their timezone so they can view the premier (if they care to).
Share guidelines with users on best practices for making a good recording. (length, topicality, things to show off, etc.). We shouldn’t put any restrictions that wouldn’t normally break our rules.
For a sign up sheet, I’d recommend something like:
Project Name
Project Creator(s)
Description of project
Showcase Chapter: [what do you plan to show? Are there specific things the LPer should show off?]
LPer: [Self record / arranged LPer / request for Volunteer]
Timezone preference: [Midnight EST, 6 AM EST, Noon EST, 6 PM EST]
Part of the application should include sending a patch to arch by the submission date.
From there, all LPers should have a chat group and a spreadsheet with links to a source for Arch to collate videos and submit to MK404.
Will think this through more but want to continue the conversation especially if we are still considering moving up this year’s FEE3 to the summer.
tl;dr Opting to go with YouTube Premiere is shooting yourself in the foot by limiting exposure.
Turns out YouTube Premiere doesn’t count views during the premiere, so after the premiere is over it’ll have no views.
Not a problem, right?
Wrong. It’s publish time will be when it went live, not after the premiere. Which means that for the entire duration of the premiere it will accumulate no views.
YouTube’s algorithm doesn’t like it when videos don’t have views within a short time frame after being published and the video will be less likely to be suggested to potential viewers (i.e. less exposure).