Fantastic event, much more enjoyable than last year - better use of the available space (including making even more room by booting the Pathfinder games....)
The sheer volume of noise at the 2016 event, caused by crunched seven-man tables, made it harder (less fun!) to play, and gave me a headache by the end of each day.
Conversely, the 2017 Epics ran extremely smoothly. It was a great idea to
i) run only a few (10+!) tables at a time
ii) to have two Epics
One of my Epic DMs had his significant other work as a "statistician". That was fantastic, allowed him to focus on the tactics, rather than the maths. An idea with legs, methinks....!
Fai Chen was a minor bump,
easily fixable IMO.
A bigger issue is the registration process.
I would recommend Baldman look at both OwlCon, and the much smaller Role Play Rally, for inspiration for how to improve their events.
OwlCon has a wonderful "what's available" system, and it can be both slot-limited and timelocked.
If Baldman adopted a similar model, they could minimize the initial tsunami, and also avoid the terrible situation of a few people getting everything, and the rest of us plebs - who pay the same, or more! - getting the scraps that are left.
Give DMs and volunteers priority. (Ideally give them priority at a
future year's event. "If you DM / Volunteer at four slots in 2018, we will give you priority in 2019).
I spent $210 on entry and event tickets to WF2017.
Role Play Rally in Austin has a "premium" service that helps them offset costs. It's not rich man takes all, more of a win-win approach.
So if that model was applied to W2018, I think I would have been prepared to spend $250 to get:
1 x Baldman quad-length special
2 x Epics
1 x AO event
4 regular slots of my choosing
Lower priority on the remaining four slots
(Something like that, maths TBD....)
Just to repeat - I had a great time at WF2017, I consider it money well-spent. But after my suboptimal experience at WF 2016, I wasn't confident of that going in....
