Why are we changing Lakeside, and other community topics

Why are we changing Lakeside, and other community topics

Reech recently announced some changes to how we were going to run the Lakeside hall from EPIC38 and naturally they stirred up quite a mixed reaction, and even though we made these changes based on feedback, unfortunately it was seen by some as a sign that we're trying to "kill off the community side of EPIC.LAN", don't worry, we're just turning the music down a bit in reality!

So I felt it was important to explain a little about the process we go through when making decisions like that and even share some of the feedback we receive. 

We recently held an open forum for people to come and discuss feedback with us in Discord, unfortunately it was only attended by around 20 or so people, of which the majority was the LAN crew and only 3 or so members of the casual community spoke up at that event. It is quite disheartening for us when we see comments about not caring about the community activities or ignoring feedback to then not have much input when we create those chances to talk to us directly (and there was still a text chat for those who couldnt make it on the night). 

Lakeside

That said, one of the points I was trying to explain in that session is that there is perhaps a perception that casual community at EPIC.LAN = Lakeside. My point was that nearly 1/3 of EPIC37 participants did not enter any esports titles and yet Lakeside only had under 60 people sat in there. So there's 100+ people attending the events for the casual side of things and choosing not to be in that space (and many of those are not active in Discord either, they attend events within their own groups). When we look in to the reasons for that, we're finding more and more that while people want the activities we put on for the casual community, they don't necessarily want the noise levels any more. Maybe this is as people attending get older, or we see more families coming to the events. But what was becoming very clear was that Lakeside was becoming quite a "Marmite" space for many and a number of groups were no longer attending the event because there wasnt a space that worked for them. So as painful as it was, we have to take a call based on the majority of the feedback we're getting from people attending and, importantly, those who no longer attend for those reasons. 

Community Activities, Priorities & Staffing

Not that long ago, the "community team" at LAN was just Reech, we had a wider event team that used to get involved across the whole event from working on the shop, to check in, to tech support. Since then we've split things up as the team has grown and now our dedicated community team for EPIC38 is 6 people, purely focussed on running activities for our community. So it's hard for us to hear that people think we're reducing our interest in that side of the event, from our side we're growing it, but what we haven't necessarily been getting right is making sure we're delivering the activities we've promised on time, prepared, installed, technically tested etc. 

Unfortunately, since coming back to events post-pandemic, we have struggled at a number of events with people having to drop out at short notice and the community team seems to have taken more than its fair share of those, but that's something we need to make sure is covered within the rest of the team when that does happen. 

Around community stage involvement, we've just announced a load of changes there for EPIC38 which will continue to evolve for the rest of the year.

Around Fun Tournaments & Prizes

We've always tried to get prizes for fun tournaments, but we can't always, we're relying on the generosity of sponsors and partners in a really competitive world. Sometimes we can't get prizes at all for fun tournaments and sometimes we can only get 1st place prizes or have to see what we can rustle up ourselves. 

At the same time, we also get feedback saying that the fun tournaments are sometimes too competitive (because there are prizes) and it puts people off taking part in them. 

I'm not sure what the balance is here yet, but we have to keep the emphasis on the word fun! For me I feel that means the prizing part should be secondary to actually taking part and enjoying the tournament for bragging rights. 

Should we perhaps just go back to things like medals and swag to take the seriousness out again? 

EPIC37 Coverage

We know we didnt get the balance right here, no arguments! We've discussed with our content team already for next event to make sure we get the balance better and show off the whole picture of what goes on at LAN, that will also include using some of the live stage segments to show what's going on in some of the more casual activities like big games (but with a few secret twists).