GDQ, LLC is a good thing for the community

I’m not sure where to even begin giving you feedback. I went in to the process for AGDQ not expecting much and I was still extremely let down. The only positives I experienced about the entire AGDQ process were from people not on GDQ staff.
First of points, the game selection. This year’s was a debacle, plain and simple. You missed several dates and deadlines (often by weeks), screwing over a large number of people who needed to make travel plans. Fortunately, I was not one of these people as I knew beforehand that I would definitely be attending, but several dozen people had their travel plans increase in cost because of late booking for plane flights directly because of your combination of incompetence and laziness. There’s zero excuse for how events proceeded this year, and the token apology of free registration for runners was nice, but honestly something that should have been done directly from the start. I won’t delve too much into that point as Duke_Bilgewater has worded that argument more eloquently than I could ever have, but if you’re going to treat incompetent staff as paid employees (some of who maybe work for GDQ LLC or whatever you’ve named your organization 2 weeks out of the year) and runners (the vast majority whom spend month preparing for this event) as unpaid volunteers, you have your priorities skewed.
Another point is lack of communication. When one of your runners is banned from SDA forums (over something trivial) and he has to liaison another runner to contact you, you’ve messed up. I don’t understand how you can fail to communicate important deadlines effectively when you have a paid person on staff whose only job is to make people aware of those dates through social media. There is no reason to use the GDQ Monitor Twitter to convey important information and no excuse for how you’ve mishandled several longtime community members’ attendance questions.
On a tangent of communication is transparency. When community members such as Naegleria directly ask important questions about funds and donations, they are either ignored or silenced, but attendees asking for publicly available information are responded to almost instantly. I briefly described what I know about the money flow of this event to my parents over a dinner and they had a hard time believing you weren’t running a scam, an opinion I share. You’ve been incredibly unforthcoming about several key details to the point where it looks like you are hiding some skeletons in some closets. I’ll leave questions to people better qualified to ask them, but it’s not that hard to be transparent to a degree where you don’t anger several runners.
There are several other events I could bring up that paint you all as incompetent buffoons but I’m going to refrain from delving into that particularly large garbage pile. I’ll leave that to someone else.
1 week before AGDQ even started, Kollin7, a runner who has ran in your events before, was banned from the event. The reason? An out-of-context threat directed at friends reported by someone who has a vendetta against him and who himself is banned from GDQ events for severe threats at specific individuals. The people rooming with him sat down with Vulajin in Discord (bless his heart for even bothering to give us an ear) and explained why the situation was blown way out of proportion, and he was sympathetic to our plight. All of it was for nothing, and your ban stayed in place. This severely screwed over at least 5 people (the three people rooming with Kollin7, and two people I was bringing to the event). With the help of hotel staff I was able to change the room reservation in time and still managed to go to AGDQ, but your insistence on enforcing a zero-tolerance policy nearly resulted in several people being unable to attend. Again, you enforce this when it applies to longtime community members but ignore when a member of your own staff threatened to shiv someone in the neck.
Now for the event itself.
I spent 10 hours driving up from Atlanta with 2 passengers, and as soon as I got to the hotel I dropped them off to get another (Cyberdemon531) from the D.C. area. After 13 hours on the road, I was looking forward to getting my badge and room and lying down. Check-in with the hotel was a little odd but again we were in an odd situation from Kollin7 being banned. Next came the registration check-in. Cyberdemon and I tried to get our badges, and there was a severe delay with them being handed to us. They said that they needed a senior staff to come over and look at something and talk to the two of us, so I spent 20 minutes or so just hanging outside the stream room. Eventually, the senior staff comes over and talks to me and then Cyberdemon.
I’m not entirely sure who it was who talked to me (or rather, talked down to me) but I was later told it was Cool Matty. Again, I’m not positive who it was but they were surrounded by 2 other staff members. Anyways, this blanket intimidation started off with you saying that I was on zero tolerance: do anything that the staff doesn’t like, offend anyone, and I was gone. You then stated that I had been doing things you hadn’t liked for a while, and I acknowledged that I had been irate with some staff over Twitter and SDA forums in the past, but you then started saying that I had been making death threats over social media, which I have never done. I said, “No I haven’t. Here’s my Twitter,” as I pulled out my phone. The head honcho of the group responded, “This isn’t up for discussion.” So yes, less than an hour at your event and instead of being excited about doing a run, I was terrified of being banned because some staff members didn’t like me. I’m still appalled that this was how you decided to treat one of your runners. It’s petty bullying. I later learned that Yashichi had gotten a similar warning, though his was much terser, maybe because he played kiss-up with staff over Twitter beforehand.
So I went back to my car to get my PC and set it up in the practice room. Shoutouts to the guys from World 9 Gaming for being huge helps and assisting me in bringing my setup and getting me a spot in the practice room. They were awesome to talk to and definitely one of my highlights from the event.
Breakfast at the hotel was serviceable. It sucked that every food option was so far away from the hotel but I had a car so it wasn’t a big deal to me personally.
My run went alright. I was pretty nervous but I stayed a good little boy like staff wanted and avoided getting provocative with my commentary, but the quality of the run definitely suffered.
Food trucks were overpriced but decent. They were welcome but not a real solution for lack of food.
Maybe now that you failed to break the previous year’s SGDQ total you’ll take a long hard look at the current situation, but I doubt it. Even though it’s pretty clear that raising money for a charity that gets blown out of the water by comparable foundations is your primary goal, it doesn’t look like you all care enough to fix anything. You’re too busy intimidating the runners who make your events possible and playing favorites, all while ignoring people who do drugs, have sex with minors, destroy marriages, sexually harass others, or are publicly drunk. Maybe I should say they made bomb threats to get you to take them seriously.
Needless to say, I won’t be attending one of these again. You treated me like trash and while seeing my friends and meeting new people was great, I can do it in places where I’m not threatened by head staff members and where I don’t have to support a parasitic organization sucking the community dry.
Also, I never got my AGDQ2016 shirt I ordered. You guys were too busy intimidating me and Cyberdemon to give one to me.