InsideQC Forums

... so, what are your thoughts

That it was great and it shoulda been 2 weeks

I had no time to participate, and don't even know what's been released...

I liked the "Day 2" YouTube video; although I wish *all* the booths had some type of acknowledgement through commentary.

Maybe next year, the booth owners can reply to template interview questions for background information and things to talk about.

Thanks for hosting this event!

I would be curious to see how much traffic Quake Expo got.

Time to start working on things for Qexpo 2012.

Overall it was great and there was a surprisingly high number of booths, possibly more than on any of the previous expos. Lots of cool and interesting projects and releases. I still haven't been able to actually play many of them unfortunately. Good events, too, though with limited participation (perhaps this was to be expected).
At any rate it showed there's still some juice in this old game (s).
Mod-wise CocoT and Asaki rule. Great maps by necros.

The drawbacks were in the technical details and presentation. The qx11 system was fairly awkward to use and it took a while (eventually too long) for the site to take on shape. At least at the beginning it may not have looked very inviting. In this sense, I think a major problem was that it was unclear how and when to add news posts (regardless of the ordering issue) - that should have been covered in the Help section - resulting in only few news items in relation to the number of booths.

QExpo was advertised on many community sites, but it seemed somewhat premature at that point, and the posts lacked vitial information. But it still worked out, and maybe expecting to see many new people from the outside taking an interest was out of question to begin with. Maybe some newbie sites like the Steam forums should have been targeted as well. But then again it was mentioned at Bluesnews, which is quite impressive I guess. Big FAIL at Planetquake for not covering it, though most people here probably couldn't care less.
There wasn't a lot of talk about the event and the booths overall. A bit in the irc channel, which unfortunately only few people visited, and not at all on the community forums, which is a real shame. With a central community site it would have been better, but the Quake scene doesn't have that.

It was also most unfortunate there wasn't someone to do additional news or summary posts and articles at the end of each day, a moderator in a way. And then the expo ended just like that, without a word, or a big post summing up all that's happened throughout the week. I know Chip said he's working on such an article, and that's good, but it's too late now. I think people have lost interest and moved on by now.

Anyway, while this all sounds quite negative, I think QExpo 2011 was a success after all, considering I didn't expect this much activity and this many booths registrations. BIG PROPS TO CHIP for making it happen and doing all the work. If you hadn't taken initiative, it might not have happened in the first place. Thanks for keeping it alive once more! And thanks to all participants!

Who knows if there will be another regular QExpo in 2013....

Negke:

We ran daily coverage of the event at tastyspleen.tv. The Happy Friar and Pappy-r from planet quake both contributed to it. In fact The Happy Friar had his own booth.

Your booth also got mentioned in the broadcast as well.

I will definitely agree that the week didn't go out with a bang like I had hoped. I was on Monster's newdm server all day and not enough people joined in. Lamers

As far as I know, the tastycast did not cover the last day either. We were both sick, so sorry about that.

Yes, I know about the Tastycasts and tried to listen to them as much as by bandwidth would allow. That was good. However, I meant something in written form that would have been more easily accessible and immediate to the site. It would have made for a smoother, more rounded-off overall experience especially for passerbys or retrospect visitors. Or so I believe.

negke wrote:Yes, I know about the Tastycasts and tried to listen to them as much as by bandwidth would allow. That was good. However, I meant something in written form that would have been more easily accessible and immediate to the site. It would have made for a smoother, more rounded-off overall experience especially for passerbys or retrospect visitors. Or so I believe.

In that case. 100% agreed. That should definitely be flushed out in the planning stages for the next one.

I totally agree with everything negke said. It was definitely a very good QExpo, with an impressive amount of interesting booths, but PR was lacking a little and the closing of the site came a little bit as a surprise (I know it was the official date, but Chip had hinted that it might stay opened longer).

I think the lesson for the next QExpo would be that it's important not to put the whole responsibility of site-running on the shoulders of one single person. Chip did an admirable job putting a working site together in such short amount of time, and it was unfair to expect from him to do things like all the news-posting on top of that. Next time, we should make sure to have at least 2 to 3 people committed to news-posting only. We should also make sure that these people stay on IRC as much as possible, so that news can be quickly pm'ed to them and so that they can quickly answer questions. Once again, we couldn't expect Chip to be on IRC 24/7 for the whole week, but I couldn't help but feel strange when I didn't see him on. Multiple site-managers and news-posters would fix that.

I guess that, when it comes to PQ, maybe we should have encouraged people to write their news to them directly?

CocoT wrote:lesson for the next QExpo

Absolutely. Though of course I didn't expect Chip to do the news on top it - in case my posts came across that way.

Submitting news to PQ might have worked, but that's not the way it's supposed to be, right? Originally the PQ crew used to check the common Quake sites regularly (including the Qexpo sites during the events) and post the news items from there on PQ.

It was good.

Should have been a bit longer.

Wish I had some more time to complete something.

yeah right as the expo started i was given a massive amount of hrs at work. i didn't have time to participate even though i really tried =/

CocoT wrote:I guess that, when it comes to PQ, maybe we should have encouraged people to write their news to them directly?

Yes. Please. It helps a lot. Even if not news for specific things, an e-mail with the bullet points of the day's happenings.

negke wrote:Submitting news to PQ might have worked, but that's not the way it's supposed to be, right? Originally the PQ crew used to check the common Quake sites regularly (including the Qexpo sites during the events) and post the news items from there on PQ.

Back when there were several paid people handling things: multiple news people, the site admin, tech support, etc. then yeah, they went everywhere. Don't forget that for years PQ's hosted sites made quite a bit of news too. Now there's two people, both work full time, have families, etc. About 1/2 of the stuff posted is e-mailed to Pappy or me, the other half I find while I'm looking around. We don't have much time to look around (I scour the net when I'm having "free time", which is, at most, two hours a day). One of the nice features of some sites that generate news is that they'll send a PR e-mail when something happens. QuakeCon does this, very handy.

So far, everything that has been e-mailed to me for news has been posted.

Am I happy with how I wasn't able to cover QExpo? No. There's four news posts on PQ's front page about it though. Moddb.com had nothing which means nobody bothered making a news post for them. Whenever something with Epic, Valve or Crytek happens, that's front page news there.

Quake events just need more PR. That's normally just fans who write things in. Trust me, if I was in college again I'd be all over everything as I spent as much time on the net a day then as I do in a week now. I didn't even get to update my booth.

Indeed, work kept us from making this event a planetary one.

Quake Expo 2011. An interesting experience for me, the first QExpo I've organized and the first QExpo to have a booth. An incomplete one, showcasing my tiny project. I did it because I cared. I did it because I love Quake. Not for exposure - I'm quite a shy person - not for advertisement.

Read the whole post on http://expo2011.quakewiki.net/.