And will? I’m sorry, where has this been the case given this literally has not been implemented. Such inflammatory statements are not helping. People whine already about projects, people already pick projects apart relentlessly; none of that has anything to do with fee3 and everything to do with inflated egos. It’s fine to disagree but this response feels dishonest/trying to stoke flames.
I’m really sorry if my comments came off as inflammatory. I don’t mean to spread paranoia or stoke flames, and I can promise my intention is not to engage in bad faith.
Regardless, I do think that’s it important to consider the environmental changes that would come with limiting access to FEE3. If you only allow so many people in, how might creators react to being denied entry? How might this change perspective on the projects that did get in? How much better is the Nth best project than the (N+1)th best project, and is that fair?
I think questions like this need to be answered before a major change like this is even considered.
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I think the “bad feelings” would only come up if the selection process is arbitrary / not clear. if there isn’t a clear answer as to “why was this project picked?”, it’ll lead to complaints.
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Having limited slots puts projects into competition for them. Unless it’s a lottery draw then it becomes a criteria based contest. That’s not really disputable.
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i can’t say much since i’ve never partecipated in the previous FEE3s( at least not directly, as i just did a couple of banners for the event schedule out of good will ), but from what i’ve seen before there’s probably more interest towards trailers and short demos( let’s say around 5 minutes ) rather than 30+ minutes LPs, simply because most people tend to lose attention after a while if they’re not fully invested into something.
do mind that i’m not saying this with any prejudice nor hostility toward anyone, far from it actually, but i agree with the concept of “quality over quantity”.
the fact is that regardless of being in the position of the event organizer, the hack creator or the viewer, when you have X amount of project material to show and only Y amount can be considered “professional”, it’s bound to eventually make someone not interested or even unhappy whatever the position they’re in, whatever the reasons they have.
that happens simply because not everyone has the same criteria of judgement and quality standards, wich is usually what falls upon the event organizer shoulders.
being a heavy burden indeed, the burnout that usually follows shouldn’t be a surprise at all, if we consider all the other work required to run the whole thing.
in the end, i believe that it all boils down to what has to be done, and how it should be done in order to make a proper event.
even though it might sound bad for some people, in my opinion if someone is willing to put his time and efforts into running the show, then by all means they should be free to decide how they want to organize it.
with all that said, i’d rather prefer to have it run in a different format instead of not having it at all, even if it means changing some rules and criteria for projects entries. that’s just me though.
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I think a lot of it would come down to framing/communication and building a submission format that won’t overburden either creators or event hosts.
If everyone has the right to be in, then I’d like to know what ‘in’ means? What form does it take? What’s the maximum and minimum showcase time you feel you’re appropriately entitled to if you wanted to enter FEE3 again?
I wanted to revisit the idea of FEE3 being biannual (bienniel is a nice word btw but damn are they easy to mix up), since it got dropped quickly. While I wouldn’t say I personally like the idea, it has some merits in that two separate organizers (with possibly a somewhat separate pool of volunteers) could take on the mantle each time, potentially mitigating organizer burnout. It might even be funny to have one “quantity” FEE3 and one “quality” FEE3, similar to a regular season and a post-season. As has already been pointed out, people already whine about projects and pick each other apart; this would at least formalize the process into something akin to a sporting event, making it more socially acceptable while still allowing smaller and potentially less refined hacks to be shown off.
Personally, on the subject of quantity vs quality, I believe that (assuming the workload is not prohibitive, which Relic seemed to indicate is less of an issue using the FEE3 2022 format) quantity is of greater value.
My assessment is that going for quantity has the following downsides:
- Greater organizer workload
- Potentially lessened exposure for high quality, smaller projects
There are some things which I do not believe to be real issues. Viewer opportunity cost, for example, I would consider a non-issue. If people don’t want to watch an hour-long chapter play-through, well, the timestamp is right there. The audio quality, tone, and investment of the creator/LPer should be apparent relatively early in the video. At worst, people will just not watch videos meeting certain criteria, which could lead to my second point above, but the damage to the viewer is relatively minimal. FEE3 as it is currently already showcases almost everything; nobody should have the expectation a sudden quality increase.
Going for quantity has the following downside:
- People not making it in
Assuming workload to be manageable, the discussion would be whether or not cutting off projects based on some objective criteria would be worth the additional highlight to projects that meet those criteria.
Note that I am not considering user base salt to be a downside for going for quality. We’re salty about everything already, even without an admission barrier. Heck, people were mad just because WarPath (one of the few people that has actually volunteered to organize, btw) commented “fire emblem the last promise 4” or whatever. Stated metrics for what will be accepted will only redirect existing salt rather than generate new salt, and thus I believe user dissatisfaction to be an acceptable risk if pursuing quality control standards.
Thus, in my view, the question is reduced down to: is it ideal to trim off lower quality projects to give more potential viewership to projects which meet X objective criteria that are themselves new? Note that I am omitting viewership for established projects in this discussion, as I can’t believe anyone who was already planning to watch, for example, a SALVAGED animation showcase would decide not to watch just because there were some long, dry let’s plays the same day or even a few days before.
My personal belief is that it’s better to risk a lowered exposure for higher quality presentations to allow lower quality ones, organizer workload permitting. For starters, it is not necessarily the case that a higher quality FEE3 presentation presents a higher quality project. I believe agency should be left for the viewer to potentially watch a shitty LP and decide “hey, I’m falling asleep, but the actual hack looks good.”
Now, what if there are quality controls on both the presentation and the source material? To that, I would say that hacks of higher perceived quality already have an advantage in word-of-mouthability. People on FEU will already promote stuff they like, bring it up when people ask for recs, etc. In contrast, a hack that FEU on average perceives as lower quality will tend to go relatively undiscussed unless people go out of their way to throw shade.
One school of thought would be that this is the ideal state: we would want to connect higher quality hacks with viewers. However, I believe that, simply put, people have variable tastes. There could be people that look at some thrown-together hack and go “wow, the lack of polish makes me physically ill, but wait, the gameplay actually sick af tho”. This unknown demographic, basically lurkers, is also the demographic most impacted (relatively) by FEE3. People in discord or on the forum already know what they want to look out for; the people who are trying to watch random stuff are going to be the ones that don’t necessarily seek recommendations proactively. I have a friend in real life who apparently permalurks and when I saw him at a store a while back he was like “hey didn’t I hear your voice on an FEE3 video” and I was like “hurk powerlevel outed how has this happened”, and what I gathered from that is that there may be a sizeable demographic of FEE3 watchers that does not actively engage with FEU and FEU powerusers and, more to the point, may have different priorities than those demographics.
anyway tl;dr presentation good != hack good and what I or anyone thinks is good != what rando youtube lurkers think is good
edit: btw i’m down to help record again so whoever takes up the mantle hmu
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I’ve been reading this and wanted to leave my thoughts. I wouldn’t be especially interested in producing a short trailer for the showcase because it’s already doable to put together a teaser trailer within the FEGBA engine. My hack, Deity Device, comes with a patch that contains an early build of the first two chapters of the sequel and the third chapter is an auto-playing event that functions as a trailer for the sequel. The current release of the sequel is playable through chapter 11 and chapter 12 is a trailer for what’s coming in future releases.
I viewed my FEE3 submissions as more of an opportunity to talk about the process of making the games and the thought process behind the stories. These were longer gameplay videos, but the gameplay was mostly background for the conversations about the games I was having with Xilirite. It was also fun to write unique in-game dialogue for the presentation where the characters are aware that they’re putting on a show and explain the games’ unique mechanics.
If FEE3 moves to an all trailer format, I won’t complain because that’s up to the organizers, but I don’t think limiting the presentations to a single format would improve the overall quality of FEE3. While hacks are certainly not all the same, I think 20 or so videos of GBA FE assets edited into trailers with battles and bits of cutscenes would run together if shown back-to-back.
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Submission categories with different amounts of slots. Slot amount may be subject to change with amount of manpower available to review.
Self produced:
-Trailers - caps out at 6 minutes, max slots huge since most people won’t want to produce a trailer anyway
-tech/resource showcases - caps out at 12 minutes, max slots 10 or something
-Creator hack showcase, max 10 minutes; the creator of a hack plays through highlights of arbitrary parts of the game. Essentially this is a let’s play but the creator edits cuts and voiceover onto it. The slots cap out at 25.
-Intermission reel of all submitted hacks where the creator did not produce a video that follows YouTube/FEU guidelines that is essentially a slideshow of the forum posts
-Event is capped off with concurrent livestream relays of blind chapter let’s plays. Anyone can just hop in and play via their own channel or some sort of offshoot channels while the FEU channel hosts a “main event” stream, with links to the other channel(s).
idk, this might be too much of a format shakeup. Though in any case, if the problem is the amount of labor involved, the goal should probably be to increase the amount of people active in the community, so cultivating a reputation as being helpful and responsive and less judgmental or something might help.
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Winston Churchill once said: “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now”.
I would encourage showcasers to keep the content in pace with the length. If those who watch are glazing over at minute 45, how many are being warded away from watching in the first place? A bit more effort to cut here and there would go a long way, if we aren’t sunsetting the LP format.
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I feel like videos should be 30 - 40 minutes max, to reduce viewer fatigue. Imo the last year model of self service was fine.
I had the opportunity to run FEE3 a couple of years ago, and I’ll echo what’s already been said in that it’s quite a bit of work for the primary organizer. I would personally prefer to see the event still remain open to all who want to participate assuming that submissions meet some agreed-upon basic standards.
But ultimately, I know this event takes a lot of work, and whoever puts in the actual work to organize it should get to decide what the event actually looks like, again subject to some basic standards such as avoiding things that are overtly offensive/hurtful or damaging to the community and its reputation. There are a lot of formats out there, both more permissive and more selective, that have potential, and whoever wants to put in the work to give it a shot should have the final say. All this talk can be good and constructive, but the doing is the hard part.
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I’ve volunteered to run the event in a similar capacity to Relic in 2022. Several people already expressed interest in helping, some of whom helped out in previous years, but we could always use more volunteers to help review videos and create thumbnails. If you’re interested in helping out, please contact me here or on discord (bpat#2348).
While I fully understand concerns that the FEE3 has more focus on quantity than quality, the community is much larger than in the early days of FEE3 and drawing a line determining which projects are good enough to show and which aren’t isn’t something I want us to do, thus the current plan is to run the event in a similar fashion to last year’s. The self-serve model is here to stay, as having official volunteer LPers isn’t sustainable with the event’s size. Aside from this, I am open to suggestions for how we can improve presentation quality and provide submitters with the resources they need to create a good presentation. I’ll put out a bigger announcement in the near future once we finalize the details.
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I’m not sure if someone already gave the idea but I have one. It could be impossible as I don’t know how FEE3 works behind the curtains but here it is.
We could have a sort of honorable mention thread where we put all other trailers so for example all of the ones accepted into FEE3 will be processed as normal but all of the others will be posted on the creators own channel and simply puts the link on the thread or maybe I could volunteer to use my own channel or make a new spin off channel for it to post the videos once people send them to me. It will essentially be the showcase stands on the side but aren’t a part of the main event.
It’s definitely a flawed idea in it’s own rights but maybe it could be the middle ground we need. I’m open to the idea of discussing how to we could do it and running the thread if needed.
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If a line needs to be drawn, then I think the line should just be:
- How new the project is (does it even have a patch)
- How new the user is
At least back in my day, this would help reduce the number of hacks that might never be finished. If anything, such hacks should just all be in one montage video. If this would mean even my current hack couldn’t be at this or last year’s FEE3, then I’d accept that under these rules.
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So self serve model means we’re basically just making our own trailers? Understandable, given the volume, but I did like the volunteer LPers, as I don’t feel I have much charisma of my own for that sort of thing and it’s actually pretty nice to see blind reactions.
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Volunteer LPers will likely still offer their services, as they did last FEE3. It’s just that they’ll be unaffiliated with the official FEE3 planning, so you’ll have to seek them out on your own initiative.
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Ah, I see. If that’s the case I’d possibly be up for an LP swap if there’s other people who feel similarly to me (though I do reiterate my charimsa for stuff like LPs tends not to be good).
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This is the plan, having LPers be officially part of FEE3’s organization led to some issues in the past so we no longer match submitters with LPers. Several people have already offered to volunteer in this fashion, and if anyone reading this is interested in recoding LPs for FEE3, please contact me and I’ll make sure you’re listed as a volunteer LPer.
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Hopefully this will suffice. I’m more than happy to LP or showcase hacks, as usual.
I’m open to DMs here, but I’m most reliably contacted via Discord @Epholo8#5358 
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