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If this actually happens I'll donate $100 to you guys if I can afford it at the time. Though in my opinion it's doomed to failure, I doubt many people would be up for shelling out close to a hundred bucks just to check out a few mods. I just spent around $500 going to a 4 day LAN that was only one city away from me, going to an event out of province/state/territory would cost about the same or more even if it was only a day long event.
This guy raises some valid points.Quote:
Originally Posted by n00b1n8R
The thing I hate to see more than anything else is people wasting time out of their lives for something which can only fail. If you want it to be successful, these are all very important questions that need some serious answers. If you can't answer them all well then I don't see the point.
I'd love to see this happen, but as it stands I don't see it ever working.
what LAN/convention experience do you guys even have? have any of you even volunteered at a LAN or have actually ran one before? are you aware of liabilities? are you aware of the economy and the fact most popular LAN/conventions are decreasing considerably in size because of it, despite immense support and funding? will you know what to do if the time comes that requires you to talk to a woman in real life? is this just a plot to assassinate the president? for these kinds of questions you wish you could dodge but cant and morestay tuned for next weeks episode of dragonballrefer to noob's gay pride post above^
Thing is, most of us are under the age of 18, so getting a plane ticket out there would be a bitch, also having computer, xbox and other parts would ALSO be a bitch to get through airport securty, not to mention it would be another bitch to rent a hotel for fucking, what 4, or 5 nights especially if you're underage, and even fucking then the cost of a booth would be a bitch.
E: and you also can't get a job for another year
Lesson being: It's going to be a bitch. I'd love to come out there and spend a few nights showing off my mod to people in real life, but in reality it's not going to happen with most mod teams.
PAX will be in Boston in 2010, along with Seattle of course.... Why not see if you can have a sub conference or a joint one.Quote:
Originally Posted by Inferno
Yeah, I'm in the Seattle area(ish(notreally)) and could easily make it to PAX daily, granted I need not have to pay for a booth.
I personally think we should donate to have a convention in a specific area, like, one in seattle, california, texas, NY, and stuff like that, all very small, hosted just by our community so that we can actually meet each other, show our shit off, and just mess around for a day or two.
If you wanted to do that, you could just organize getting a bunch of community members together and go to one of the larger events such as PAX, Comicon, etc as a group.Quote:
Originally Posted by FRain
You guys keep forgetting that this isn't going to be a convention for Modacity. This is a convention backed by Modacity. Your attendance is entirely optional, as they're hoping to draw in more than just our laughably-sized userbase for an audience.
This is still in its planning stages, too. They aren't going to just up and rent a convention center tomorrow, Bacon put a year-long deadline on this. That's more than enough time to scout around, grab supporters, an audience, sponsors, find a center, etc.
Is this cross-posted anywhere else? I'd like to see how other forums respond to the idea.
I'm not against the concept of this - if you guys put enough effort into this, well, anything could happen. Especially if you focus on advertising something locally. However, I think that at this point, you should step back a little bit and analyze what you are trying to do.
From what this sounds like, Modacon will at the very least be partially represented by Modacity. Modacity, with few exceptions, has produced little to no video game content for years. With the exception of CMT and the few poorly managed mapping teams that are still left, nothing comes out of Modacity except off topic banter and dumb-wannabee-4chan-posting. We're all guilty of it and I'm not saying that is bad necessarily. However, if you want to convince people that you are actually serious about modding, you might want to pick a better representative than Modacity.
This site has until very recently given little to no incentive for people to actually open up a copy of Blender or something and churn out a poorly made beginner map. I don't think this is because we are too harsh on rookies or because we're lazy or anything - I think its because Modacity isn't really a modding community anymore. We're a community still, but we're a joke of a modding community.
Add up all of the posts of the sections with games that have editors here and you get about 90,280 posts. Throw the Studio in and you get 105,199. Off-Topic alone accounts for 117,501 posts. This still isn't taking into account any of the posts in the numerous Conspiracy sections or the current Donor's section or all the other OT crap sections that probably existed at some point. Most of the bandwidth that goes through this site is probably spent downloading Jcap and InnerGoat's triple monitor screenshot threads and all of the SOS Brigade spam instead of downloading levels.
People on this site just don't do much modding - certainly not enough to justify a convention that few here will go to.
You could try and team up with someone big like ModDB, although I doubt that they'll even bother looking at a group as small as yours since they are so big. You could try going through all of the smaller modding forums or sites and seeing if any of them are interested in at least throwing their banner on your project. There are a lot of things you can do. Choosing Modacity as a main sponsor or representative of the modding community is probably a bad idea because no one will take us seriously.
Besides that, there is the issue of logistics. You really really really need to get your shit together if you want this done. Everything has to be set in stone months before you are ready. You will have to do rehearsals and will need to deal with things like getting food, tickets, everything that goes into a semi-major public event.
From personal experience, I can tell you that setting up something as small as a small school LAN party is difficult at best and impossible at worst. Each LAN requires weeks or even months of planning beforehand, a good deal of marketing and hours of practice beforehand to get everything running. We had to deal with getting food delivered and keeping it stocked. We had to make sure that everyone actually paid for a ticket and didn't just sneak in. We needed to make sure that people weren't messing with the consoles, which were more or less borrowed from the student population. On top of that, we had to make sure everyone had fun so that they would actually come back next time. We had it easy too; we didn't need to worry about renting out a building or convincing people to fly across the country. And we were only dealing with ~50-100 fairly supportive people.
In my experience, the biggest part of making those successful was getting our target audience figured out. People stopped lugging their computers in after CS:S stopped being popular around 2006 or 2007 at my school. Throughout 11th, the LAN part of the LAN Party was pretty much nothing more than the few Xbox 360s that were networked together. Nobody bothered playing the PC anymore. Instead, what brought people in were the consoles. Stereotypical as it is, we brought in more girls by substituting the PCs for Wii's than in any past year. Guys were far more interested in Halo and COD4 than they were for whatever Source based game was popular at the time. I made the mistake of lobbying for the PCs because I thought that there might be a possibility that people could become interested in them again. Never happened when I was around anyway.
I just don't think it's realistic with what I'm guessing is your level of experience with these types of things. Public events are a bitch. There are so many variables that you have to fill and so many bases you need to cover that its hard for such a small group to get this type of thing done. Maybe a small 50 person LAN is feasable. But nobody is going to cross the country for that. At best you'll have to settle with something local and build up a positive reputation. That could take years.
Bottom line:
You guys have a small but very talented team of people on your hands. You have at least two skilled web programmers, two or three decent artists and a lot of ideas. I think you guys should work with your strengths. I know that you could probably make a fairly decent web service on the scale of Synapse/Cerebrum out if you worked on it for a year. You won't have to worry about renting out a building this way, you won't have to worry about providing food or security. You won't have to deal with tickets and you won't have to deal with people flying in from across the country.
One thing that has bothered me about many modding sites like ModDB is that few of them offer tools that help mod teams manage themselves. There are things like Source Forge, but they will never be as good as something that is actually designed for modders. There's an open niche there. Hint Hint. Anything related to the modding world, you can probably find a niche for.
P.S.: Fuck you time zones in two weeks I'll be waking up now instead of going to sleep :<.
P.P.S.: Too tired to check grammar. Rarrrww.r