=N1GP Meetup 2018 Feedback & Postmortem=
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Wow. What an incredible event this was.  17 people from our community got together to hang out, grill, get Japanese food, and play some good ol' fashioned Battle Network this past weekend.   During the meetup, I asked most (I don't want to say "all" because I'm fairly sure I missed a few people) attendees what they liked about the event and what they think could be improved upon a bit more.  This feedback list will include my thoughts and the general consensus surrounding the feedback point as well as what steps we'll take in the future. The feedback bulletpoints are...paraphrased.

After the feedback, I'm just going to go ham on thanks because this wasn't a sole effort on my part. We all worked together to make this happen and hopefully continue to happen for years to come.
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1. Stream Quality - "The quality was fairly bad," "lol 480p," "audio balancing when?"
I've talked about it a little bit but I have a dashboard that operates the OBS scenes and stream features (tips, scores, round, player names, and more) in tandem with a custom OBS plugin. The OBS plugin broke when I attempted to rework some of the Dashboard, creating a pretty big mess. We were operating on my Surface Pro i5 which did not have sufficient firepower to support a 720 stream, browser window for chat, video capture, and the dashboard software.

2. Commentary - "...commentary was unecessary, distracting, etc..."
This one is a difficult one to specifically act on but I'll speak to it because we do take all feedback - good and bad.  My goal with N1GP events is to have one "hype" commentator and one informational commentator. With the last several events, that hasn't necessarily been possible, specifically because those who we currently have on deck for commentators are fairly busy and despite advance notice, we can't commit commentators for every event.  Regarding the meetup specifically, we did not have anyone dedicated to commentary.  Going forward starting in 2019, we will be hosting volunteer signups for commentary, stream operation, and station management (setup, teardown).

While I cannot commit to completely removing commentary - I am willing to commit to more quality commentary.

3. Idle time - " People who weren't playing events didn't have anything to do"
Participants were more than welcome to (and did) play other things off to the side while tournaments were ongoing. We had a room dedicated to the MegaMan NT Warrior TCG but the people who already actively play were interested and only a few people partook.  Going forward, I would welcome suggestions for things for attendees to do on the side, bearing in mind that the budget for these events is incredibly tight.  Up until now, casual setups and netbattles have been going on to the side but something...else is likely going to be necessary if the event attendance continues to grow.

4. Scheduling - "dinner was closed when we left," "stream was cut when everyone went to dinner," "BN6 was cut,"
Despite setting up on-time (Early, actually!) we ended up being about 2 to 3 hours behind schedule. BN3 was the only Double-Elimination event and we cut BN6 as we had originally planned 3, 5, and 6.  It was pretty universal that everyone wanted to do BN4, so we added a bracket for that before starting the stream.  We didn't account for such a wide delay and this falls to me for not having a contingency plan in place for this occuring. Our dinner was a mess (and pushed back farther) because the places we had lined up closed by the time we walked there.  This could theoretically also be solved by adding another day, but this presents another set of challenges (venue-related) that I don't think myself or those who help with the venue security are quite prepared to tackle yet.  We will do better with scheduling next year.

I said this on stream, but we cut BN6 because we can play BN6 and EXE6 at pretty much any time on the N1 Grand Prix discord.  We don't have opporunities to play legacy BN titles to the degree that we can in a meetup setting. Going forward, this can be prevented with appropriate planning and scheduling and I apologize profusely to those who spent time preparing for and those who were looking forward to seeing BN6 showcased at the meetup.




==TL;DR==
Just like with the N1GP events, we will take the lessons learned from this meetup to improve 2019's meetup.  Thank you for your feedback!




==Special Thanks==
Tofu - Thank you for everything you've done for the meetup. Without your help, we quite literally couldn't do it.
Adell - Happy birthday man.  Thank you for being a champion of the TCG, helping with the grocieries on the cookout, and just being a great guy.
Twilight - Thank you for piloting the Stream Station and updating the brackets. I promise next year will be a lot easier to do this if you're interested in doing it again.
Eurasia - I really wish you could have been at the event more often.  For some reason, Netbattler Q kept coming and going, now that I'm thinking about it..........
SoulXCross - You're on commentary for Season 3. I declare it.
Lex & Jumi - Thank you for your help with the TCG! Y'all are great.
Midnite - For piloting the N1 Grand Prix twitter and taking photos of the event
All attendees - it was a joy to see some of you again and to meet others. I hope to see you in 2019!