I think it’s easy to, when you’re on the outside looking in, say that the event would be better off with a bunch of shorter trailers and the like, but it misses a lot of key points. The first and most obvious is just how one would go about organizing such a thing on a community scale. The reality of how FEE3 is run is that things are in flux; people drop out, cancel on their commitments, submit work late or not at all, or otherwise fail to contribute for a variety of reasons. Often, this is just that something came up in their personal lives that’s more important, or they found that there were unforeseen complications with completing the work assigned to them.
One of the big ideas that was getting thrown around before the event started was the creation of trailers for each project, but the fact of the matter is that this would add a huge layer of volatility and overhead to the event. If any of the trailer creator steps off the project, that ends up being substantially more disruptive than if an LPer drops out. You can’t expect the project creators to all handle the trailer creation themselves, either; it’s a skillset completely different from hack creation that creates an artificial barrier for entry, and the goal of the event is to showcase as much of what the community is working on as possible, to encourage discussion about other people’s projects and to give players an avenue to discover new hacks.
The main reason I can see for making a switch to trailers would be if the entire event was overhauled to be about advertising romhacks to people that aren’t already in the scene; if you’re already in the scene, most trailers are honestly not going to be able to show off much that’s super eye catching unless the hack is very unique – animations from the repo that most romhack players have seen before and the promise of “good gameplay, good maps, good story” are ultimately no different than just reading the forum post pitch for a hack, but if you’re not already part of the scene they can be eye catching, easily digestible, and engaging. However, FEE3 isn’t really about converting FE fans into romhack fans, it’s about showcasing what the community is working on to the rest of the community, and there’s only so much a trailer can tell you about a hack in that context.
Something I’m curious about as well is whether or not people are really imagining the reality of what 80+ amateur community-outsourced trailers for games made in the same engine would actually be like to watch. Experientially, Romhack A will often play completely differently from Romhack B, and this can be seen pretty plainly in a gameplay showcase. But how different would trailers for those games be from each other? What about when you throw in Romhack C, D, E, and the rest of the alphabet, thrice over with change? Then the complaint would be that the showcases don’t feel distinct enough from each other, don’t give enough information, don’t match up with creator expectations (because, of course, unless creators themselves were heavily involved in the process every step of the way, we’d only have whatever guidelines we’re handed with which to create a trailer from.)
Ultimately, if the goal is to have FEE3 happen in the first place, the current framework is the one that ensures it can actually happen with minimal hair loss from the stress. Most of the changes I’ve seen recommended are, explicitly, extra work, extra manpower, and extra communication to accomplish, and all three of these are things that have caused issues in the past for the event.
Even this, which is probably the most reasonable recommendation I’ve seen for trying to address this problem, doesn’t really work 100% of the time. People would still complain about the length even if this was made a hard rule that we would enforce, but beyond that several LPers already do this. I know I, myself, tried during my showcases to offer some kind of summary of what was interesting with the projects I was aware of or that provided some kind of blurb I could riff off of, but a lot of games are submitted with no instructions beyond which chapter to play, with save files that don’t work, with bugs that have to be worked around to get the showcase to work (I know I had to go into builder and change some events around in one of my showcases to get a chapter to run properly, bc I was working off a dev build.) It’s just plain difficult to coordinate the hack creators and the FEE3 team, with no way to guarantee a timely response, cooperation, scheduling… one of my showcases was recorded on the deadline day due to how hard it was to find a time when we were both free to do the recording the way the creator wanted, and that was a creator who was very communicative and cooperative. If somebody just isn’t responding to your messages, what do you do? Cancel their showcase? Go on without their input?
Ultimately the event this year ran extremely smoothly, with very few problem showcases and, at least from where I was standing, very little organizational stress. Unless a dedicated team is set up to manage the event, rather than having it run on a volunteer basis, it’s going to be prohibitively difficult to try to expand the scale and effort of the presentation while still keeping things moving. If people want to change the entire concept of the event, change its target audience and its methodology, then they also need to be the ones to step up and commit to helping make those changes a reality, because for so long as we can’t guarantee the necessary level of commitment from volunteers to expand the event in that way, the course of action that actually ensures FEE3 runs is the one that makes the process of actually being a volunteer as simple as possible.