Doubts about Freedomware Gamefest 2008

I'll just say it. I am not entirely sure I want to be the one organizing Freedomware Gamefest 2008. On one hand it is a bit tempting because I'll have the experience from the 2007 and learn from mistakes made. On the other hand it is so huge and often time consuming while I really have a lot of other interesting things I want to be doing in this network.

I didn't decide anything yet, but I have my doubts.. So if it does happen that I decide not to be the main organizer of the 2008 fest I will still remain available for helping with a lot of things, such as promotion, web site hosting and maintenance etc. Basically, I'd be looking for someone else to be the main organizer and I would be just a co-organizer (at best).

It's been an interesting, but also a frustrating experience so far.. and what's starting to really spill my glass over is a skirmish I just had with one of the tremulous clans who apparently doesn't like the rules, the groups we made... bla bla bla.. It is true I don't know the teams, I don't know the games that good and I relied on the community for everything. But when communities are as divided as they are (tremulous between no-camping and yes-camping, armagetron on high-rubber vs low-rubber, to just state a few cases) and you get a lot of feedback from one side and less feedback from another - it's risky business..

I can shout all I want that "if you wanted something done differently you could've just contributed more feedback", but a response I'm getting from that is "well we would tell you if you asked"... So either I should ignore such an observation or I failed to really clearly communicate with people. I would think that numerous emails I sent, including those inviting people to post feedback, don't count as communicating.. I am being a bit sarcastic now, but I suppose I had to come to each and every player in person and wrote them a nice plea for help; "would you please, pretty please, come and say something on these rules"..

And still at the end of the day, I can't please anyone..

But it's just a tip of an iceberg.. The whole slowness of scheduling matches, issues with availability across timezones, essentially bad timing of the fest as a whole (last exams and then the freaking end of year), the amount of deliberation we had to go through just to come up with SOME rules that still don't appear to be as clear as we may want them to be.. meh.. I said it before and I'll say it again.. when I first started planning this event, if I knew it was going to be this complex I would seriously re-evaluate the worth of all of the time-cost and perhaps just moved on to the next best idea..

Maybe I'm not the right person to organize such ambitious things.. or maybe it simply comes down to that simple mere fact: if you never done it before and on top of that it deals with a field you don't have experience with - it's better left to someone else.

Comment if you wish. Maybe there are some of you who can weigh in on what's wrong here and perhaps even suggest someone (or yourself) as the next organizer.

Cheers

Well, that's a good point to keep in mind. I have my doubts, but I don't want to prematurely say or decide anything. I am somehow hoping that, once this fest is over, even if it ends up finished in January (universe forbid later) 2008, we can look back and finally feel like we accomplished something big.. But in the process to coming to that keeping motivated is proving to be a challenge..

Well we're chugging along anyway. I suppose one of the things to learn from this is that I shouldn't be too sensitive to occasional complaints and problems that arise... When thinking of it cool-headedly, it's practically impossible for something like this to go 100% smooth. A gaming event organized by a non-gamer..

How did you know I might not like the idea?

Well.. it's a nice idea actually, but the thing is, another tournament means a whole other set of groupings and scheduling not to mention servers with those specific settings. So perhaps it's better to just go with the rules we're going with and if someone doesn't want to play because of that so be it, but of course they should determine so before things are starting up. In this case only ones who have a chance to back out are AA gamers, as AA is still in that dreadful "preparation stage". Yah.. I'm getting to it.

You may have, but it's hard to complain when at the same time you helped so much.. hence only ways I could complain was through subtle signs. I'd say it wasn't just so much that you made it seem more complex as much that you showed me just how complex this could get and gave me some solutions to work with in such cases... I guess I'm just not sure where the former ends and latter begins though, not that it matters much.

Solid ideas, though it's more difficult to change when things already got going. I don't see many more people posting their availability on these topics so putting up a list and a wiki page may simply be converting the existing data to a perhaps a bit more readable form, but I would still probably have to do what I'm doing now.. communicate potential times of matches via IRC, email and forums.

So I guess we can try something like this, at least a wiki thing linked from the site, but in the midst of the game as it currently stands I'm not sure how much would it help. I'm already putting up some set and considered schedules on tournament pages, like for example tremulous page.

Yes.. that's definitely a benefit..

And what you said further on makes sense; the next tournament will have a good foundation to build on. That's really the best thing that's going for it and best reason to attempt it. I guess the reasoning is, if we could do it once, no matter how imperfect it was, we can do it better again.

Well.. we'll see.. when the time comes. Now I just want to pull this one through.