One of the things I can hold my head high on is that we as a team always want to be as transparent and up-front as we can with our community. Personally I feel as though that single sort of “core value” is chief among reasons why we’ve been able to be stable and grow for over 20 years. During our closing announcements and raffle I had mentioned that we go over every survey and try to address as many comments, concerns, and suggestions every event. This time around, we decided to peel back the curtain a bit and share some of our thoughts and concerns from our last survey.
Tournaments
2026 Winter: 3.9
2026 Summer: 3.8
Change: -.1
This was probably our worst metric of the event. We (mostly me if I’m being honest) forgot to make sure we had adequate coverage for our tournaments. We struggled to get people to volunteer for tournaments, and instead focused on making sure that we had the tournaments listed that people had asked for. The tournaments ran fine once they started, but that took some doing. This next event if we don’t have someone to run a tournament WELL before the event, we’ll either find someone, replace it, or remove it. We also will try to have what the format for tournaments are going to be well in advance, unless the point is to keep it a secret
Minigames
2026 Winter: 4.4
2026 Summer: 4.3
Change: -.1
While this overall metric is down, the number itself is still really good. Most of the comments we got were super positive. We do want to have more of these, and some new ones, and bring back some old ones (we saw too many requests for Nightcrawlers to not at least talk about it). The difficult part with minigames is making them as accessible as possible. “Roll a ball at a target” is WAY more accessible than say, the chair race. Usually simplicity invites participation, so that’s what we try to do.
Open Play
2026 Winter: 4.5
2026 Summer: 4.5
Change: n/a
Shout-out to DynamicMeme here, he did a TON of open play. We really like where this is, but DM did far too much on his own. We’ll keep this going, but hopefully get more people involved
Food/Concessions
2026 Winter: 3.6
2026 Summer: 3.2
Change: -.4
Oof… so when I said Tournaments were our worst metric, I meant ones that we could control. This is largely outside of our control. MOST of the negative comments about the event at large were about concessions. We largely have no control over this aside from passing along the comments. This year I did a fairly large write-up and included some actual quotes from your responses. We’re hoping that will improve things down the line.
“Why don’t you get a food truck?”
We get this asked every event… and the bottom line is we have zero flexibility when it comes to food and drink. We had to fight to allow our attendees to bring their own food in at all. The fairgrounds does not allow us to sell food or drink, or to bring it outside food sources (unless they are free and signed off by the concession stand). The concessions people are self-owned, and pay to be the provider of that space. Our hands are tied here, keep the comments coming in, and we’ll keep relaying them. The crew is super nice, we just need to give them our honest opinions
Communication
2026 Winter: 4.3
2026 Summer: 4.0
Change: -.3
Honestly, we’re probably not going to change much here. No matter what we do seems to make a lot difference. Some people want us to go back to the microphone (which we changed because a lot of people hated it). Some people are mad that we’re using “AI” for the voice… which we’re not. We’re using an open-source tool that runs on a local linux installation that uses a trained model. We could train our own voices, but we used one that came with it. The benefits of using a text-to-speech tool is that we can also send text with our audio links, and we can normalize the process, delivery, and audio levels. We do have some ideas to make it easier and more consistent, but we’re going to stick with the text to speech.
Website/LAN Site
2026 Winter: 4.3
2026 Summer: 4.3
Change: n/a
I have a lot of updates planned that will make things easier and more intuitive. We like where our site is and where it’s headed
Staff/Helper Interaction
2026 Winter: 4.7
2026 Summer: 4.9
Change: +.2
This is my favorite thing to see. I am very thankful for the team we’ve put together
Prizes
2026 Winter: 4.5
2026 Summer: 4.7
Change: +.2
Summer prizes are typically better than winter prizes. It’s because vendors/sponsors usually send new stuff after the first of the year, after our January event… which is our larger event by attendance. LANFest has been great to us and always delivers the best they can
Other Attendees
2026 Winter: 4.4
2026 Summer: 4.5
Change: +.1
Again, this speaks to the community and how glad I am to be a part of it
Internal Network/Internet Access
2026 Winter: 4.8/4.9
2026 Summer: 4.8/4.9
Change: n/a
The network team really brings it each event. We continue to invest into our network first and it it’s good for that money and effort to be validated. Great work here.
Overall
2026 Winter: 4.6
2026 Summer: 4.7
Change: +.1
Thank you to everyone again and we want to get to a 5 for everyone.
As promised, here’s the timelapse:
