 They write down when you pre-reg, you're now number 100, and then they gotta find badge 100, which takes a bunch of time. No, no, no, don't write any number. And then when the guy shows up, give them the next badge, give them the order in which they show up to Magfest. Now there are, they do one thing that is kind of nice, I don't know how I feel about it, right? Which is if you decide to pay more money, you can get a better badge, right? Those are real nice badges. They're really nice. You can get these big acrylic badges and they also had these plastic ones. I saw one guy with a wood one. I don't know if he made it or if he was. I don't know, but I think you pay more money, you get a better badge. But the better badge, what was different about it was it doesn't get you anything except the better badge. It's like, look, I paid a bunch of money to support Magfest. Now, we're both way against like Comic Con style. We're like, if you pay more, you just get the line. It's like, pay more, you get to see Stan Lee no matter what, and you get a bunch of merch and you get a t-shirt and you get all this stuff. It's like, well, it's not really fair. Someone paid more money to get to cut the line. I mean, look at Pax, it's super underpriced because everyone's got time, not everyone has money. That's right, but with Magfest, the super supporters really don't seem to get much of anything except this badge. They don't get anything except a better badge. They had to stand in that same line. Yeah. But that is, the thing is, the reason it's relevant is because that's how they look you up to see if you're a super supporter, regular supporter, and those people actually have their names are already written on the badges pre-engraved, right? But I think the thing what they could do is- Well, have them check in like guests. Exactly, right? Or if you mailed them the badge. Also, just how do you, how did it take an hour for you to deal with 10 people? And because they didn't have any process for dealing with a problem. Like we get up there and we're not on the list. We're doing panels and they had no way to resolve that situation. They didn't have like, okay, if you have a problem, go over here to this one person who's only gonna deal with problems, nothing. Yep. All right, so that's most of what was bad at Magfest. Yeah, I have no other major complaints. Bad reg, bad BO, general level of unprofessionalism that needs to be professionalized at the top as the convention grows. Yep. Oh, one other thing that was bad was a panel. Scheduling, they didn't leave any gaps between panels. But Tim knows, they got the panels. He was like, yeah, we wanted to do that. Next year we're doing it. They know they're gonna fix it, but I got, you know, it was a problem this year. They had a panel that ended at three and a panel that started at three. They also didn't do explicit room clears. Cause a couple of panels- I did see sometimes rooms got cleared. No, they cleared them, but they didn't have any policy about it. So the people in the room were all pissed off now because they thought they were gonna see the next panel. And then they had the shuffle of trying to force everyone out, force everyone in. And that was a little problematic. I guess if we're gonna complain, the projector was a teeny bit dark. And the hotel- The tabletop library was meager. Not existent. But we brought it. We brought a library. We brought a better library than they had. I don't know. There weren't enough tables for tabletop gaming. But what are you gonna do in that venue? The hotel, this is kind of a weird aside. There is, I don't know how that hotel got away with it. The fire marshal, like fire code numbers in those rooms were bullshit. They were astronomical. It's like, I would go into a room and if you ask me, all right, I'm holding my hand over the numbers, right? Scott, tell me how many people the fire marshal would allow in this room. I'd be like what, 40 people? With no chairs and no tables. No chairs, no tables, wait. I'd be like 40 or 50, max. 95. 95. I was like, that is bullshit. If you were 95 people in here, we'd be dead. Either that hotel bribed someone a long time ago or Alexandria has way different laws from cities. Yeah, Alexandria, Virginia, I don't know what your fire marshal's up to, but he might be mad corrupt. Or that hotel is corrupt or something because that was not. I mean, the numbers were, not only were the numbers dangerous, but you could not fit that many people in the rooms. Yeah. Like physically, I don't know where, maybe they changed the walls. I think they have a sardine law. It's like, if you can, you know, close it with a little piece of metal and twist a lid on it, then it's safe. Now it's not a complaint against magfest. There's nothing they could do about that other than moving venues, which they should. That venue's terrible. They absolutely should, it was not good. I mean, the concert space is itty-bitty. We didn't even go to the concerts because there's no way. I can't comment on the quality of the concerts. I'm sure, you know, everyone who went to them was like super excited about the bands they saw and whatever, you know? So I'm sure that the music was excellent. But it was a tiny room. When I looked into that room, while it was being set up, it was a very small room. It was smaller than like some rooms were on panels. And they wouldn't let you bring a bag in there. So I was like, I'm not leaving my bag anywhere. So I can't go in there. So. But the reason I bring up the fire code stuff is that magfest is used to this because they're in Alexandria for whatever reason it has this weird fire marshal La La Land. KatsuCon and all the other concerts we've been to in DC, they don't have that luxury of just ignoring fire safety. Apparently the fire, I heard the story. The fire marshal was there on Thursday or Friday and Thursday. It was weird that we never saw him though. I mean, Connecticut even. I see the fire marshal every day like poking his head in every single room and counting numbers. Yeah, so. New York City, same way. KatsuCon, Virginia, I don't know. Alexandria. I don't know. I hope magfest never burns down. Yeah, that'd be very bad. So all that aside, magfest was super crazy awesome. Well, it was super crazy awesome. All right, so it was pretty good. It was the most fun I've had at a non-PACS convention in a long time. Right, but were those funds that you had, how much of those funds were magfest's fall or your own fall? Well, the trouble. Because if you can't attribute it to magfest if it's something that you could have done say just if you got a hotel room on your own. The trouble with that though is that some of the things I could do on my own but what magfest provided was not the con or anything the con did but the fact that a bunch of like-minded people all showed up in the same place. Had there been no con and all the same people showed up then yeah, I could have done almost all these things. But magfest and PACS are kind of polar opposites of the kind of cons we like. PACS is definitely the, if you go to this con there is stuff to do that the con is giving you things like these epic stadium concerts and this giant tabletop library. Magfest is not that kind of con. Magfest is a room party, hang out with your friends, meet new people con. If you're not going to a concert or playing in the arcade or going to a panel. You really don't need a badge. Pretty much everything, well not only do you not need a badge but you're not gonna be able, the con has nothing else to offer you except to make your own fun. There are nerds here at the same time as you make your own fun. Have a room party, get your own gaming going on and tabletop, do something on your own with these people to have fun. I mean people stop to watch the football game, because if you're very close to Baltimore to all the Ravens fans lined up for the game which they lost. How many people would have walked out of packs to go to bars and watch a football game? If it was Seahawks Playoffs game, they would have. Even then, if it's an important game, how many people would leave packs for that versus people who were just chilling in Magfest? Well the difference was if packs was a hotel con and if the game was on in the hotel lobby in packs and you could have watched it with all these packs while you're playing games and drinking. Right. Because we spent most of our con in either tabletop or in the lobby of the hotel. Playing Jungle Speed mostly but also many other tabletop games and because it was a four-day con we actually had a lot of time to play tabletop RPGs. We played a surprising number of like, we played a whole free market but so the con is laid out. We don't really do this about other cons we go to because everyone knows how they're all laid out if you've been listening to Geeknice or going to these cons. Not a lot of you have been to Magfest. It's kind of small. People aren't flying from Seattle so I think it's worth it to talk about the layout. There's not much there. They had an artist alley vending area that. That was sort of mixed with the arcade. Everything was sort of, the area where all the vendors and the games and all that stuff was all sort of squished into one space. Sort of, with some doors in between, right? Yeah. So they had a panel area like this long hallway and at the end were three tiny little panel rooms. Tiny, bitty, bitty. But also the jam space, the Magfest famous jam space was down there which was sort of annoying because you could hear it in the adjacent panel rooms. It was a little annoying but it was also kind of this like background groove. Well, it's like it was like, okay, they put it over there because they wanted to keep it out of the way of everything else, which is what you should do because the jam space makes a lot of noise. Now what they should have done, remember in the hotel, right next to Magfest was this gigantic like open bar area that they probably could have rented out or used that they didn't. Yeah, that was in the retreat area. That should have been jam space. They should have put it in the retreat area but I guess they just didn't think. In fact, had they had all the bands doing their jam space there and then paid the hotel to open that bar that would have been a rocking room. They could have made some awesome down there. Apparently there were multiple parties that started in that room. Like suddenly there'd be a party in that room and the hotel kept shutting them down. I think part of the problem though is that room is so close to hotel rooms that it would disturb hotel guests. However, this hotel for the venue that it was, if Magfest were going to stay in this venue they would have to get a contract with the hotel that basically literally rents out the entire hotel. There were non-Magfest people, yet Magfest sold out and anyone who was not Magfest in that hotel was fucked. Fuck. Like badly. I can't imagine them having enjoyed themselves in whatever they were trying to do. But anyway, yeah. So the vending area, you know, it had a mix. It was just a bunch of tables all cramped up. A surprising number though, we're selling retro game stuff. Yeah, they were doing the hard sell. One guy was like, check this out, gold Zelda, gold Zelda, 10 bucks, 10 bucks. Come on, man. And I was like, you know, you want it. I was like, you know, it was kind of weird because on the one hand it was fun to walk around and look at all the stuff but I wasn't buying any of it. But if you were a collector of that sort of thing or an aspiring collector, then this was like the place for you because there was never, I don't think there's any place else in the U.S. that's gonna have that sort of collection of, you know, retro game stuff all in the same place for sale. And they were selling, like there was a dude who had a links in an unopened, still shrink-wrapped box. There was all sorts of crazy stuff like that. You know, if you could think of it, it was, if it wasn't ultra rare, you know, ultra, ultra rare, it was there. What was cool though, is that it was also kind of an artist alley and there were people selling the kind of stuff you see it like an animicon artist alley. And they were really good. I think the best guy was the one who had the like oil pixel paintings. Yeah, that guy was the best. We met him on the final day, Sunday, when we were just about to leave. He was a cool guy. What's weird is he was not the only one. There were a couple of these people that we talked to and obviously not a representative sample but enough to where I wonder, this anecdotal, they never really went to other cons. And we were like, man, if you went to an animicon and we explained like at Otacon is an order of magnitude bigger than this. The artist alley is bigger than all of Magfest. Multiple orders of magnitude bigger. And your stuff is better than most of what we've seen there. You could make money. You could make a money. And he's like, tell me more about these animic items. I don't know how much money you would make at the Magfest, but whatever. Yeah, but there was stuff there. I didn't buy anything, but I walked around. There was a trouble that the alleys, like the alley itself, it was like this narrow. You basically couldn't walk through it. But you could walk through it very slowly, but it was never extremely crowded. It wasn't like Otacon dealer's room where people are packed in because they really want some shit, right? It was cramped and space-wise, but not so many people in that area. It was a chill hangout. Like some of the guests were hanging out there. James Rolf, who we never actually talked to, was hanging out. Yeah, one person we really wanted to see at the con. We never saw. Oh, well. Well, because we were gonna go to his panel and I think we ordered Chinese food instead. Yeah. That happened a lot ordering food. But actually, food delivery worked really well unlike Connecticut. We got some slightly average, okay, Chinese food one night. We got some okay, pizza one night. Yeah, it was good. It was okay. Yeah, so right next to the dealer vending area was pretty much the core of Magfest, which is the arcade and also the console gaming room. So it's very rare that we will say this. Packs could learn a lot from how Magfest got their arcade set up. That's for sure. Packs has money and yet had the tiniest little arcade. Kotacon. Well, I mean the arcade, but the Packs free play console room was a little different, right? Because the way the Packs free play console is, they have all these consoles and you pick the game you want, right? Whereas the Magfest console was more the style of Otacon, where it's like these are the games that are set up, just go play. I think there should be a mix. I like the idea of having, I check out Kaboomum and I go play it with my friends, but also the common games, like a bunch of people are gonna want to play GameCube Smash Brothers, have a whole area dedicated to that in the corner. Yep, and just have a whole bunch of chairs lined up with the right controllers and people just lose their walks, keep going. It was more that, I don't think the logistics of the game room were better than Packs' game rooms or Otacon's game rooms or anything, the culture was better. Yeah, I mean, there were certain items that were missing, like there was no Rampart machine, which is, you know, personal- How much can we complain about that? Kotacon's the only con that's ever gotten us a Rampart machine. But in terms of- By request nonetheless, we were like, you guys get a Rampart machine and they got it. Yeah, but in terms of, you know, total quality of, you know, the whole collection of games there were to play in the arcade and the console, it was like A-plus, right? They had more arcade machines than Kotacon has ever had. And Kotacon had way more than Packs ever had. Of much better selection. Got plus? Yeah, got plus. They had- I didn't even know they had a crane that you could play. Yeah, they just had a crane game full of stuff. Now they bricked up the end. They're like, all right, you can't actually get the toys, but you can play this crane game for free and it was way fun. They had some pinballs, but they kept breaking, but they still had pinballs. And they kept fixing them. They kept fixing them as much as they could. They had-