In fairness, the issue Klok was trying to address was FEE3 being unwieldy for the viewers to keep up with, not necessarily the time it takes to produce.
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Problem: Event is overwhelming to organize and execute due to sheer volume of projects.
Solution: Require the volunteers and participants to do more work.
There are two problems being discussed:
- Event is overwhelming to organize and execute, which sucks for organizers and LPers.
- Event is overwhelming to watch and projects get lost in the crowd, which sucks for viewers and creators.
Kolk’s suggestion addressed the latter and did yes, make the former more of an issue, as quite a few people, Klok included, noted.
Fair. If you believe that this mention in the registration form is enough and nothing else needs be done, then by all means, don’t do it differently next year. We only disagree on the amount and detail of the encouragement, here, really.
My prediction is that viewer fatigue will be reduced by having a 6 hour gap between videos versus all of them dropping at once, but will be keen to see feedback to see if I am wrong.
I would be concerned with merging too many projects into single videos since it would mean they’re more likely to get lost IMO.
The wording on this submission option does not imply strongly enough, “Please do as much of the work yourself” as you might think. It comes off to me more as “please take the time to contact someone who will record your submission for you.”
In other words, the wording implies that rather than just throwing your project out there willy-nilly, you should try to do the ‘bare minimum’ of contacting a specific LPer and asking if they will record your video.
I recommend rewording this in the future to specifically ask that participants record their own footage, and something something the organizers can help teach them how to do that if the participants don’t know. Give a man a fish vs teach a man how to fish or something along those lines.
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That isn’t the intent. The form asks what their situation is, there is no attempt to encourage people one way or the other. Given the amount of requests we got and constraints on bandwidth, the language will change.
I’m confident we will be updating the submission form and having more robust guidelines for next year.
Personally, I’d kill off FEE3 entirely. 
Wait, hear me out.
Viewer fatigue is a big problem. If you read anything about building an online presence or youtube channel, it is highly recommended to:
- Share regularly
- Once a day or once a week is optimal
- Pick your timezones / days to release content
Perhaps we don’t need to strategize to this extent, but I think it’s worth a thought.
Project of the Week (PotW)
Make PotW an all-encompassing entity. A grotesque amalgamation of features - the good projects and the bad. Same time, every week, release a video & feature the project on feuniverse. Put the youtube video at the top of the featured project’s OP.
- One of our Let’s Players would record a LP for that week.
LP Details
- (The .UPS patch must be submitted a month or more in advance. Videos ready a couple weeks in advance, generally, and already uploaded, but only made public on the PotW date.)
- (Say you can’t record some weeks, between us I think we could pull off one LP a week. Someone might occasionally record 3 week’s worth all in a row, or we just alternate when various people are available.)
Users would submit their project for review.
Requirements
- A project can be featured once per year.
- All projects pass as long as they have a project thread or sufficient evidence of a hack being ready (eg. pictures)
- Eventually, there would be a steady flow of projects erasing the need to order them far in advance. But I expect that initially a huge number of people would express interest in being featured this way.
- I made a suggestion for PotW recently. Basically, a voting system where users can select multiple projects from a long poll that lists out a bunch of projects. This makes for a quick and easy way to vote for each other’s projects.
- If we ever have too much of an influx of self-nominations to be featured, we could potentially rename PotW to “Featured Project” and do it twice a week until things die down a little bit, assuming Let’s Players are up for that.
Mod Involvement
I want to minimize the amount of work for mods.
Ideas
- Is it possible to schedule & automate featuring a thread globally?
-
- If not, a mod would need to do this each week.
- We could require users to edit in the youtube video link in their project OP 2 days in advance, otherwise they’d be skipped over that week. The video would be private still, so it would just be an eyesore in the OP for a couple days until it’s made public.
- Alternatively, if mods want to insert the video into the post each week, that would be fine.
- ALTERalternatively we do some sort of megathread of PotW and someone like Pandan can edit it to have the youtube video & to link to the current PotW’s thread. Or even a new thread each week could work.
FEE3’s fate?
Now… all of this doesn’t actually need to be mutually exclusive from FEE3. We could do both. 
But that’s too much work (and I think this idea would be much less work). But I know FEE3 must hold a special place in many people’s hearts. Therefore, I’d suggest severely scaling it back and adopting my above suggestions. FEE3 could become an annual recap of the year instead. Someone voices over 52 minutes of a random 1 minute clip from each PotW (that goes in order). We also might accept LTC/speedruns or videos under 5 minutes that people make. Event organizers will NOT do this for you. Let’s Plays are strictly for the PotW features. That way, FEE3 still kinda exists but it’s only the work of making one hour-long video. If editing random clips together to speak over feels like too much work, then just someone talking while browsing the forums here looking at each project thread could work.
Conclusion
FEE3 is a really cool event, but we can tackle the issues it’s been facing and improve the site & increase the amount of traffic we get at the same time. Everything said, this would not take place for this year’s FEE3. If anyone is in support of this idea, I’d suggest we aim for December to start it up. There may also be some issues to iron out. This is just my thoughts.
- Let’s rebuild PotW!
- No, PotW is a bad idea
0 voters
FEE3’s fate is not related to this poll, as both FEE3 and PotW could exist. This poll is purely for measuring interest in PotW’s revival.
I am terribly sorry for the length of this post.
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I think the spectacle of FEE3 is part of what drives viewership to this one event; I just don’t think that one project once a week will draw the same amount of audience. It’s a testament to how poorly at drawing attention Project of the Week is that it goes by months with the same one because everyone forgets about it.
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i think everything is fine as is ngl.
The problem there is that the pop up only shows up again when it is updated. If globally pinning a thread is forgotten about and not updated for several weeks in a row, then that’s several weeks of no new pop up for anyone to remember PotW’s existence. Almost a catch-22. Additionally, the pop-up doesn’t actually link to the thread and you can’t expand the preview window, so it becomes kind’ve just an annoying pop-up. That said, I think it could hold more value. If mods are able to schedule it to update, that would be ideal.
I know there would be less centralized hype and I see your point there. I think the occasional hype-building community event would be fine, though. Putting all of the hype into one event per year seems to be is to be a really difficult task to handle as the community here grows, but that discussion can happen with the fee3 debriefing discussion later.
A good comparison is the olympics. At least in the US, unless it’s that 2 week period every four years, I doubt most people are watching curling (although they should be!)
I think you’re over engineering it, Vesly.
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This will be my first time attending the event, this year has been quite exhausting and tough for everyone, hopefully with this event some people will manage to encourage that desire that soon things will get better!
I’m very grateful for the time and effort of both those who sent their projects and the organizers.
I hope everyone has a great time at the event! 
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We couldn’t wait until midnight, so we dropped this instead.
Welcome to FEE3, everyone!
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Exciting stuff!
Please be sure to share the videos, and as all youtubers say, like & subscribe for more content 
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Arch says in the video that showcases will come out every 3 hours; I assume he misspoke?
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Showcases are scheduled for every 6 hours.
Yeah, that’s my bad.
5 hours ago. These thumbnails are really bland. I should have offered to help make some.
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Looking at the current poll results regarding my PotW proposals:
- 12 in favour, 6 against
I think that’s a significant number that’s against the idea, so perhaps PotW should just be left alone. Generally if something isn’t popular with approx. 25%+ of people, I’d be hesitant to try and move forward with it.
Thanks everyone for voting.
project of the week is nice but fee3 is hype cause it’s all one big event annually while potw lasts for a week before going on to the next thing. eventually interest in maintaining it will wane.