My somewhat harsh review of the EVE Vegas 2015 Experience.
Personal History:
This is my 2nd EVE Vegas. I attended 2013 at the Rio Resort. Side note: I attend 5 to 6 conventions each year, on one nerdy topic or another. Its kind of my thing.
I go to so many, they seem to blend together. I think I'm semi qualified to provide a quality review, just because of how many I attend. Using the other conventions as a baseline, here's my review.
High points
Swag for sale: I like that they had T-shirts, mugs, models, pins, stickers, you name it for sale. The prices were fairly reasonable too. I bought a couple shirts, one of them a really nice polo for $20. During EVE Vegas 2013, there wasn't hardly anything for sale, maybe some keyboards/head sets but that was about it. Great to be able to pick up some swag and not get raked across coals doing it.
The hotel to convention layout: I go to many conventions that have the venue across the street from the hotel, or in the case of the EVE Vegas 2013 Rio, a fucking mile walk through the casino from your room to the convention site. This year, you walk 40 feet from your room, get on the elevator hang a left and you're there. You don't have a bunch of bull shit walking if you want drop off your jacket in your room or something.
The hotel shopping: Lets be real, its Vegas, and stuff just costs more because of it. $10 for 4 cookies just comes with the town. The good thing about this particular hotel was how easy it was to get to a verity of different food outlets, stores, both fast food and fine dining. This worked for me because my wife wanted a nice night out with me, away from all the nerd-gasiuming. We had all you can eat sushi on Friday and a nice $100 meal at a semi fine dinning restaurant.
The exclusive party: Meeting everyone in a relaxed party-ish venue was fucking awesome. Watching Mittens make the same D-bag duck face, from selfie to selfie is something that you can truly appreciate and has a way of being magical. Top shelf booze; that if the bartender is properly motivated, (slipped him a 5) will give you a double no ice bourbon. Cheers!.
The EVE sing along with Guard was great, he is by far my most favorite Dev. Guard doesn't know shit about advanced EVE game play, but god damn it if he isn't friendlier than a wet dog. o7 Love you Guard!
Low points:
The hotel: The Planet Hollywood simply doesn't give a shit. This imo is the best way to describe my logging experience.
My wife and I stayed in our room from Friday to Monday. The bathtub was never cleaned by housekeeping. Now we aren't filthy people, but when you notice on Monday the long black hairs in the tub and neither of you have long black hair, either the maids been bathing in there, or the shit just didn't get clean. My wife commented on the contact lens she found floating in the tub, and the shave ring around, when she was about to shave her legs. :P
The bed was fucking hard! I've had softer beds in Mexico that were essentially a cement block build into the floor with foam on top. I made the unfortunate mistake of diving onto the bed right after my flight. RIP my shoulder. I woke up about 4 times each night with pain. Nothing like wanting to not sleep in during a vacation.
Then we went to the pool.
How much work is it to pick up beer cans from around the pool? Wet towels, beer cans, trash and just grossness all around the pool. I'm not sure why there were wet towels, but the pool wasn't close to heated, its mid October! Thats common for some places in Nevada, they assume that every day will be warm because its the desert. I get it. This doesn't excuse the 'warm tub' I should call it a "hot tub" but I think you can't call it that anymore if its colder than your body temperature. Since the pool was ice cold, the warm tub wasn't close to hot, all the pool goers who wanted to get wet in some way simply crowed into a single 500 gallon pool. The hot tub was forming bubbles on the top from all the people grease, piss and whatever else may have oozed off of the several hundred people who used it.
If a hotel can't bother picking up 10 beer cans from around the pool, you sure as shit could assume that the hot tub water NEVER gets changed. They can't be bothered to even check if the heat is on, I honestly think I was just sitting for 30 minutes in bubbling piss.
The surprise 100 dollar logging charge AFTER the trip. So Vegas and I mean most of Vegas thinks its such a privilege to go there, each hotel charges you an additional charge after the fact of 30 dollars a night. Because? Well because they can. We thought, that must be illegal, but turns out that its simply added to each visit in the fine print.
The EVE Vegas Convention as a whole:
Now, when I go to a convention, I want content. This is why I flew there after all. I want guest speakers, I want "How to's", I want signings, I want a jam packed 12 hour schedule of content. People paid a lot of money to fly and stay at your convention. Give them content!
This is what I got.
On Sat and Sunday, the speakers/whatever didn't start till 11am. Now I get that I might be hung over, sleeping in, whatever. But seriously, you have the presentation rooms for the entire weekend, how hard would it have been to simply start stuff off at 8am, or hell 9 am.
They also did this super retarded thing with schedule and overlapped content. Like at one point on Sunday, I had to make a choice between 3 different things going on in 3 different rooms. Would it have been so hard to simply open the doors early and spread those things out from 9am, instead of starting all 3 at 11am?
Giving a person like myself who wanted to see all 3 things a chance?
This wasn't just for one time slot, there was double, triple booking of time slots through out the 11 to 4 presentation windows. Seriously? How hard would it have been to start at 8 and end at 8. Triple the player presentations, throw massive amounts of content at me. Player presentations are essentially free, give me more!
Not only that, but 25 minutes to talk about something that I have done
for 5 years is a bit hard. I could have talked about wormhole hunting
for a week straight, let me come in super early like 7AM and give a
serious chat about wormhole hunting, with Q & A. I mean, its not
like they paid for the rooms by the hour, who cares if no body shows up,
at least if someone wanted to see it or be a part of it, it could have
happened. Instead the room stayed empty and people twittled their thumbs
in the hallway for 2 hours before 11am. Here's my presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ddR7W4LmR8
I paid thousands of dollars to fly across the country and stay in a hotel, for 5 hours of me wishing I could dopplegang myself across 3 different rooms. I spend the remainder of the time wondering what to do, other than the reasons I actually came there. Who made the call that the each day should only be 5 hours long? That is god damn retarded.
The Devs:
The dev Q & A's were lame too, if you wanted to ask a question, you
had to hold your hand up for 10 minutes, for a dev to play "Do I like
that guys face enough to call on him". Not only that but most weren't
mic'ed up, so it was just us trying our hardest to listen to them say
"Sorry I don't do that" or "your question is NDA".
The over all attitude of the Devs I talked to, seemed like they were just "tasked" to be there. Jet lag or whatever, aside from Falcon and Guard, they looked like they didn't want to be there, like it was just J.O.B. I've had the pleasure of meeting the devs in San Francisco and EVE Vegas 2013, this was a different vibe, way more defensive, less approachable, more snarky... Its had to describe, but the spirit just wasn't there.
The absence of live streaming this year, what the actual fuck?
Sure the hotel charges an arm and a leg for streaming, but who negotiated that contract for the venue to not include it in the price? Did you simply not think of it? It doesn't need to be a whole production, The Mittani dot com proved that with their live steam. You shouldn't have needed to rely on fan sites to pick up the slack for poor planing.
Will I go again?:
Nope. Overall the cost for me and my wife was about $3,000 after all was said and done. A quick google search and I could have bought her and I a all expense paid trip to Mexico for a week.
Come next Oct, lets get some EVE dudes to chill on a beach in Cancun for 4 more days, for half the cost.
See you all in EVE Cancun 2016 boys!
