Hello, all! Long time no see! The event has only been over for a week, but I feel as if it’s been much longer than that.
As promised, here is a thread to serve as a place to discuss FEE3 2021 and your thoughts on the event as a whole. Possible topics for discussion include:
What you liked about the event
What you thought worked with the new organizational format
What you would like to see in future years
Areas for improvement in the future
I do ask that this thread should remain civil and respectful. Specifically, if you plan on mentioning a certain showcase or individual in particular, I expect constructive feedback on the event itself, and anything even bordering on a personal attack has no place in this thread. Additionally, as with feedback for any romhack, the more specific the feedback given, the better.
As the organizer of the event in a year when many operational aspects were new, I do have my own fair share of thoughts on the event. However, I plan to share these at a more gradual pace so as to allow discussion to develop organically. I look forward to seeing the thoughts of the community!
I don’t actually have much criticism for this year.
It was a big step up in quality from last year. Whoever was primarily/partly responsible for that deserves a lot of kudos. They made the whole event much better than pretty much any of the past five years. We had a great mix of projects. We had several shorter trailer-type videos for the squirrel brained idiots like me. Even the commentaries were a big step up in quality. Xilirite especially made for a very pleasant commentator on the LPs I actually watched, though I’ve never even heard of him before this.
My only real criticism is that the videos should have listed the LPers in the video. I literally only remember Xilirite’s name because he stated it clearly once or twice at the start of the videos I’ve seen. The others either didn’t say or were very muffled. (Bad microphones) So having the LPers get listed in the video descriptions even post-release would be a good fix.
And that’s it! Great year, exceeded my wildest expectations!
Edit: I must confess though,. I’m still surprised there was no FE7x. It’s become such a tradition! Even if people whine about it.
Overall I think everything went really well. Everything was really well handled and it was cool seeing everything the community had to offer. Super grateful to everyone involved. It was interesting seeing all the different types of showcases, very curious how people will expand on the newer presentation styles next year.
Only concern I have is with a small one but I think it would be beneficial to get a consistent policy on how to deal with weird or off-putting stuff that doesn’t violate the content policy. Even though I agree with the criticism that was given to Terror of the Forest, it feels weird to have a presenter insult/criticize the hack they’re showcasing. Seems like something that could spiral into a larger issue if it’s left in the weird gray area it’s in right now
Hi, I was managing the quality checks this year. If anyone had any comments about specific videos where they thought something was strange, please feel free to bring this up.
This is the first year where we tried anything like this and while we did catch some things, it’s possible we let things slide that we probably shouldn’t have due to this being a new thing and me not having put together a compete guide to quality checks. Something like the comment above with the Terror of the Forest showcase is a good example of what we’d like to know. The more things like that we get, the more of a big quality policy document we can put together so quality checkers can know what’s good and what’s not.
I’ve got some more thoughts on my mind, mostly from the perspective of the quality checking side, but I’m a bit busy at the moment. I’ll get around to it at some point.
I found the event was pretty fun as a lp’er, the only thing i can think of is if the lp’ers got credited would be nice.Like we dont plug ourselves in any way, shape, or form in the vid but get added to the description lol
I also believe it’d be nice to mention the LPers in the video description.
I don’t think an FEE3 video should have the LPer providing criticism of the thing they’re LPing unless it’s a project they’re involved in. I feel like it should be more about showing off stuff.
Can we use UTC to indicate when videos go up? There was this whole confusion about videos appearing an hour earlier because the timezone given wasn’t the one used. UTC doesn’t come with daylight savings, so should be easier to understand.
Something I know that I was super worried about was if the first few seconds of my trailer was gonna be too much for the event and would have to be chopped or if that was gonna be allowed to stay. Glad to see it made it through the check at the end of the day and was allowed to play in it’s entirety.
This was a great FEE3 and I just want to once again thank everyone who helped ensure this went as smoothly as it did. With that said, I have a minor nitpick, that being the thumbnails.
Putting the game screenshot in the bottom right corner means that a decent portion of the image will be covered by youtube’s time indicator.
Some hacks are not affected since they don’t have anything interesting in the bottom right corner but in the examples shown above, the time indicator is obscuring cool portraits on the thumbnail.
Not to mention that a decent portion of the screen is taken up by the graphic on the left and the blue bar on top, though I assume that was done because of the aspect ratio of the GBA screen.
But like I said, this is just a minor nitpick and I have no real complaints this year which shows how great of an FEE3 it was. Cheers!
FEE3 was fantastic this year, both as a viewer and as a member of the LP team. There was a lot of good communication and transparency that made the process of working on the event painless and stress-free, with lots of time between deadlines and ample understanding from the organizers when problems would arise. As a viewer, the mix of shorter trailers and longer gameplay showcases ended up being very pleasant overall, with some bite sized videos to look at when I wasn’t in the mood to really watch a bunch of FE gameplay and some meatier options for when I had more time to watch. I still haven’t seen every showcase, but most of what I saw was fun and engaging stuff.
Most of the issues this year were minor, isolated, or both, and most have been brought up already. The thumbnails this year looked pretty, but didn’t play nice with youtube’s timestamping; some additional crediting for the LPers when relevant would be nice; and like Mystic brought up, QC seemed to catch basically everything that was really out there but some things slipped through the cracks and, ideally, I wish we’d had a chance to communicate more with the hack creators themselves to sort out issues like that when they’d arise. Arranging for a different chapter to record, for instance, could help to avoid uploading videos with controversial content in them, but it also requires a degree of interaction between the organization team and the hackers which, in my experience, could be touch and go for a variety of factors (almost entirely scheduling / feasibility).
Overall I’m pretty pleased with the event. There was very little to disrupt the event both before and during its runtime, and on a more personal note it was good practice to record commentary for the showcases; it’s really nice to see people being so positive about the showcases I recorded, and it was fun to get out of my comfort zone for once and do something I wasn’t so experienced in. Definitely gonna try to participate again next year! ^.^
Just my personal opinion:
For me it was mostly a big case of too long, didn’t watch. Just like last year. We had so many projects, which is awesome, but the videos are just too long.
As a viewer I just want to know these things: Who is part of the project, who is showcasing it?
What’s special about your hack and is it completed/progress so far or how can people help you, if it’s not done yet? If a video doesn’t tell me that, I’m not interested.
So I’m not sure if the approach of showcasing one chapter with a Let’s Play is the best, especially because some Let’s Plays are a bit lackluster (bit boring, bad mic quality). I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, it’s just my personal preference.
I think its pretty awesome that we had so many projects, and it did feel higher quality like some other already mentioned. My main issue was mostly that the videos were just too long, i watched maybe 20% or so at most simply because of that, i did watch all the short trailers though. Ways to make it more interesting would obviously be to edit the videos but that would probably be way too much work with this many projects. What you could do it have a sort of hack pitch before the lets play starts, explain in max 2 minutes what is special about your hack, why i should play it, what the basic story premise is, aswell as how far into development it is and if help is needed. Doesn’t have to be a nice trailer, doesn’t even have to even have much video, maybe just show a Diashow of screenshots. As things are now i don’t really know what half the hacks are even about, and having a short introduction like that would help me decide if i wanna spend an hour to learn more details about the project. Just have devs prepare a short introduction text like that and have the lets players read it out. Alternatively just put it into the description.
Another thing i think would be pretty nice is to have the videos be Youtube premieres instead of just releasing, with the 6h window between uploads the videos wouldn’t overlap, and it would give people the ability to immediately comment on things in live chat. Currently it seemed like you might get a few comments here and there out of which many are essentially just a general “Hey this looked cool”, “Good work”, or “the last promise 2” which are nice to hear and all, but don’t really tell the hack maker what the viewers liked. I think a premiere would just mean people are more willing to immediately comment on things they like or dislike which would just mean more overall feedback.
Lastly, i think it would be a good idea to try and work together with bigger FE Youtubers to atleast announce FEE3, or have them record one of the projects, as things are now you probably won’t see the event even happening unless it gets mentioned to you, you regularly check the forum, or are subscribed to the Youtube channel. If this already is the case then i missed it or i guess I’m just not subbed to all that many, in that case ignore this last one.
Big thanks to all the participants and organizers for making it happen though!
This was a great showcase in my opinion, probably the best FEE3 to be my first, I think it was all organized in a good format, getting a good 3-4 hack videos every day for a week or two almost feels like it’s christmas!
Small complaints:
As said before, specify the LPer
let us know a little more frequently that things are moving along smoothly, just a quick ‘hey everything’s going well, we’re on schedule’ would be nice, just to know.
this is the most subjective area for improvement but show a little more showmanship, as said previously make the videos premieres, also, make a 4-5 second opening for each video that would make the videos feel more connected to each other.
overall, things were really well done this year! If things were done the same way next year I wouldn’t complain much.
Just wanted to make a quick comment on this. This was actually something we tried a couple of years ago, but there were a couple of issues with it:
Premieres are kinda bad for the YouTube algorithm and viewership suffered
More importantly, the chat during some premieres was highly negative and disparaging to certain projects.
1 is a minor issue overall, but 2 was pretty bad, and with the volume of projects, it’s not feasible to moderate the chat at all times. Thus, this practice has not been revisited.
just something to tie it all in, I guess it would make it feel more like they’re a part of a complete package rather than connected to each other, like how a lot of youtubers start their videos with an intro animation or something, it makes the videos fit together more, of course I’m not asking for a huge 10 second ultra polished animation to kick off every video, just something small like an fee3 logo and some music before cutting to the video
I feel like the unified thumbnail design already ties the videos together. I’d rather not watch the same intro animation or whatever 80 times, even if it’s short and well-made (it annoys me when Youtubers do this).
Was a good time, I’m particularly impressed with the new advancements in ASM, but a ton of the hacks looked super fun! Starlit Souls was particularly cool to watch, although I admit it felt like a hard hack to follow up . They even did a Blue Swallow ballista before me, so respect to that. Of course, a lot of the other hacks looked great too! Just a really fun time all around, thanks to the FEU team for the great showcase this year!
. They even did a Blue Swallow ballista before me, so respect to that. Of course, a lot of the other hacks looked great too! Just a really fun time all around, thanks to the FEU team for the great showcase this year!