FF13 trilogy relay - review

OK, this is going to be a bit of a wall of text. I'll make this pastebin public also so people can read this if they're interested in seeing how I thought things went. Please, feel free to comment and disagree with anything I say, my opinion is not law, and I'm happy to accept criticism on anything that can make an event better.

Overall, the FF13 Trilogy relay was a sucess. We managed to hold a decent amount of people throughout the event (averaging 600 during 13, to around 350 during LR), and while viewership is not important, I still feel like the people watching enjoyed what was going on. The comments in the document are going towards making the Full FF series relay (currently in planning) a better event overall, as well as possibly improving the setup for additional FF13 community events in the future.

Section 1: Tech
 Overall the tech setup went well. Using the RTMP server for restreaming took the pressure off from anyone needing to keep a stable connection. Game transitions however were not ideal. The first transition occured during the very end of my run, and as such I made some slight errors which had me scrambling to fix them a bit. For a longer event, or even a similar event, I would like to have at least one person able to connect to the server using Teamviewer at all times, so that any issues can be fixed ASAP, and allow the tech to be handled by someone who is not currently running a game.
 The timer program that I created worked better than I had originally anticipated, although I was confident it would work ok, I was not sure how the teamviewer lag would affect the timer controls, and also the switching between tabs didn't break anything, which was nice. For the full series relay, I'm working on extending this program considerably, so that hopefully we can give each runner a client that tells them when to start the run, and they can then split and end the runs accordingly under their own control, just to take some of the pressure off from the tech crew.
 Game switching was ok when I wasn't running, although use of XSplits live preview editor would have helped. Unfortunately I didn't give myself enough time to look into how to use this, and so game transitions were not as smooth as they could have been, but they were overall ok. Again, by splitting the duties onto multiple people, this issue would have been avoided.

Section 2: Stream & Runs
 Video quality and layout were very good overall. While some runners had internet issues during their runs (me included), overall the stream quality seemed to be good, and there were no direct complaints about the layout that I saw. Audio however had some balancing issues at multiple times, but this could have been fixed by checking the audio levels better on peoples streams before adding them to the layout.
 Commentary for 13 and 13-2 was overall strong, but it was sometimes lacking for LR. Now part of this is due to the fact that lewd was asked to commentate for everything (sorry for putting that pressure on you man), but we can't realistically expect someone to commentate and to run for 12 hours straight, and also there is a higher concentration of dead time in the LR speedrun. For future FF13 events, I think this means that we should be sure to have extra commentators that aren't running, or prioritise commentary for slightly slower runners (e.g. flicky said if it happened again, he'd rather commentate than run, and given his commentary at the end of the stream, I'm inclined to think that this would be a good idea). As for the full series relay, this should be less of an issue, since we would have seperate groups of people for commentary and running mostly, so every game transition will allow people to come in with new energy. We should try to make sure that people aren't being asked to do things for multiple games in a row, or if they are, make sure that there are other people to back them up as needed.
 Time estimates for games were mostly good, with a couple of exceptions. However, this is the kind of thing that will happen in an event like this. Perhaps having 3 pieces of information (PB, Average run, High estimate) will help for scheduling a bit better. As for scheduling when it comes to the full series relay, it will be important for us to have schedule document somewhere, that not only shows predicted start times based on all of this information, but is updated as the event goes on (similar to marathon schedules being updated as runs finish).


Section 3: Full relay ideas
 Building on what I've said before, I think its important for us to set up a team of people for tech, and possibly rotate on 8 or 6 hour shifts throughout the event. Each of these people would know how the stream is setup, and how to switch between games, and change the information shown on stream (most likely through the program I've written).
 I'll start working on relay layouts and stuff at some point soon, but I have exams to deal with first. Also we should probably open up date selection for the event. Ideally it would run from Friday afternoon to Monday afternoon, on any weekend from August onwards. Maybe the UK Bank holiday weekend? idk. We should at least setup something on the doc so people can indicate when they would be free.
 We would ideally want runners to show up one hour before they need to start, maybe 30 minutes at the least so that we can run tech setup for their stream (e.g. flicky's stream had audio issues before starting, and we only got it fixed about a minute before he had to run).
 As for game order, I'm still a fan of 1,7,2,8|3,9,4,10|5,12,6,13| Since each set of 4 games is roughly a 24 hour period, and it splits up the games so that people can watch more (since people are usually more interested in the 2d or the 3d games). Also there's less overalap with commentary this way for the most part (except 10->5 RIP cereth), but I am open to other suggestions.
 For channel, I think we should ask RPGlimitbreak again, once we have a date. I'm fairly sure they'd be happy to let us use it, assuming nothing else is going on with the channel on the dates we want.

Please contact me if you have any feedback about the relay that you think I haven't mentioned. I'm interested in hearing how people thought it went.

Again, thanks to everyone who made the 13 trilogy relay happen, and hopefully the full series relay is even more of a success!