Fangame Marathon 2016 Wrap-Up/Future Considerations

[tehjman1993]

Hello aiwanna community,

We have finally concluded this year's Fangame Marathon. We hope you enjoyed the crazy events and runs we had during the marathon! Some runs left us in complete awe, such as Nader's Sunpossible Churatch clear or the 3-second difference in the Uhuhu 2 race!

The channel was viewed by both veteran players and new players alike - we received over 1,000 new follows over the course of the marathon with a large amount of new players asking questions such as, "What are these games?", "Where do I download them?", and "How many of these type of games are there?" Our community was extremely responsive to new players, and I congratulate you for that. The schedule itself went very well - despite a slight rocky start, we were largely on-schedule (no more than 15 minutes off at any given point) when transitioning between runs. This marathon was simply fantastic, thank you!

What was your favorite part of the marathon? Let us know in the comments below!

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Regarding some questions that have been asked frequently:

When is the next Fangame Marathon? Is this a yearly thing?

While it seems as if Fangame Marathon has indeed turned into a yearly thing, I cannot say with certainty what will become of this event. Therefore, the next Marathon event is unannounced. This does not mean there will be no future events!

I missed a run! Do you have the VODs up anywhere?

The VODs for the marathon will be up on Fangame Marathon's twitch page in the very near future. In addition to this, the VODs will be uploaded to YouTube and put into a playlist for easy viewing! There is also the development of a highlight reel for this marathon, which will include your favorite events - from awe-inspiring to downright hilarious. This will also be available on YouTube in the near future.

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Some considerations for future events (relating to last year's event, and looking forward):

Self-Promotions: This went way better than last year's event. We did not have anyone go overboard with advertising for their own channel. In fact, some runners did not plug their own channel at all! Overall I am very impressed with the improvement from last year. Halfway through the marathon, FFZ enabled a button to follow the runner directly from the marathon's twitch page, so we hope this helped bring exposure to your channel.

Time Estimates: Excellent estimates, hands-down. No more discussion is needed here.

Variety of Games: Also excellent. There were little (or no) complaints regarding the variety of games shown on the marathon. We believe the extra events and other non-speedrun events (such as Pat's Fangame Demonstration) really helped with this over last year's event. Great job! We hope that future events would emulate the style of diversity in games that this year's event did.

Spam and memes: Overall, very contained and appropriate. Towards the end of the marathon we had a few inappropriate copy-pastas started up, but these were quickly squelched and not started again. The moderation did a fantastic job, and the community was very respectful towards the runners. We are very proud of this, great job!

Professional Attitudes: Fantastic attitudes displayed by both our runners and our community viewing the event. I have zero examples to point out of someone going too far with a comment, excessively cursing, etc. We hope that future events would emulate the attitudes displayed during this event.

The RTMP server: Let's face it - the marathon set off on the wrong foot. We had to delay the starting time and pan out server issues. However, for the rest of the marathon, this server was fine for all other broadcasters. We are not entirely sure what happened in the beginning with the server issues. Despite this, the server held up very well for the rest of the marathon, and I would encourage use of this style of broadcasting in future events. I believe Twitch was also undergoing a few connection issues over the weekend (read: E3), so this is largely out of our control.

New Players/Viewers: We had a large amount of new viewers for this marathon, as stated above. I am extremely impressed by the community's willingness to open their arms to new players and invite them into the community. In fact, I received quite a few comments throughout the marathon stating that they are "very happy" the chat didn't belittle them because they asked a "new player" question. We hope that some of these new players find their way to these forums, as well as our twitch team. Thank you, community!

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Did I miss anything? Let us know what you want to talk about in the comments below. We ask that you do not directly tie any names to any consideration listed above, nor to any consideration you may want to talk about. Please feel free to type anything on your mind regarding the marathon, we want as much feedback as possible to make future events even better. Last year's comments really helped us shape this event into a better one!

Thanks again, community. We are very proud.
-TJ&Klazen

[3-headed monkey]

I thoroughly enjoyed the marathon, big thanks to all the organisers and streamers, great job. Can't wait for the next one, would love to see it become six-monthly but maybe that's asking too much!

[Thenader2]

I'm really proud of the community, everyone did an amazing job. Really looking forward into future events b

[lawatson]

There is also the development of a highlight reel for this marathon, which will include your favorite events - from awe-inspiring to downright hilarious. This will also be available on YouTube in the near future.

down right UP hilarious

Anyways, thanks for hosting this cool event! I had a fun time playing a stupid hard game and watching others do the same. It was a pretty damn enjoyable event. I do look forward to the next year.

[Fireball7d7]

I think people in the community, especially on the Twitch team should not be streaming during the marathon and hosting it to show their support.  I was extremely agitated to find people on the team streaming during the marathon, not in relation to it whatsoever. 

[infern0man1]

This wasn't really much of a marathon, more of a one big event. A marathon would be the event completed without any bans, failed memes or spamming. I have to give it that this is impressive, but it's not a good marathon.

In all seriousness, I unfortunately had to miss pretty much all of it due to a family reunion, but from what I've heard it was pretty baller.

[TvPvZ]

Really enjoyable experience, can't wait for the next one, thanks to everyone that made this happen!

[Kyir]

I think people in the community, especially on the Twitch team should not be streaming during the marathon and hosting it to show their support.  I was extremely agitated to find people on the team streaming during the marathon, not in relation to it whatsoever.

You might have a point with people on the team not streaming, but saying that other people in the community shouldn't is sort of silly. It's assuming that both there's a mandate for people unrelated to the event to try and increase it's viewership, and that stream viewership is a zero-sum situation. There's not really a case to be made for either as far as I can tell.

Seems like things turned out pretty well despite other people streaming anyway.

[Denferok]

I wasn't the one who made the schedule but kamilia 1, 2 and 3 obviously had to get accepted. Those games are like the super metroid of AGDQ, too hype to pass up. I do know that they chose to not leave out any runners, everyone who submitted something got in which left little time for other stuff. So they decided to go with the more known stuff, is what I'm assuming.

[pieceofcheese87]

FGM was a blast, thank you everybody for organizing this event.

[Onynekyu]

First of all, thanks everyone for this AWESOME event !!! Specially ShadowsDieAway with his events for letting a new fangamer like me to participate at this marathon. I REALLY enjoyed watching every runs/races when i'm awake . I'm already looking forward the next one

The only issue i have is about the lack of donation tracking. Because i was expecting a donation tracking on the stream, and some announcements sometime beetween two runs. Otherwise, i have no other complains.

[BBF]

I think people in the community, especially on the Twitch team should not be streaming during the marathon and hosting it to show their support.  I was extremely agitated to find people on the team streaming during the marathon, not in relation to it whatsoever.

tfw not a single speedrunner is allowed to stream during GDQs or ESA.

(click to show/hide)

Great logic

I never speedrun off-stream, and I see no reason to change it because a marathon is running.

[patrickgh3]

After being a part of the tech crew, I have a lot more respect for organizing a live event and for what goes on when you see the "up next" screen. Even though it was stressful it was a lot of fun. I'm excited to help out with the next event, though in the future I'll be a lot more busy with RL commitments so we'll see.

Thank you for the summary TJ, I generally agree with every point. I especially think the variety of segments was great. There were a lot of non-normal-speedrun events and I think they all went great: blind race, fangame creation, draw my guy, david and goliath, churatch sunpossible, twitch does avoidance, needle maker, jump master, twitch plays guy games 2. And the rest of the normal speedrun events had a great variety within themselves.

[Fireball7d7]

The purpose of a team is to support each other and work together so by streaming, I see that as going against that.  I am not saying do not stream, I am saying that it would be more respectful of the people who put together the marathon to not stream for a 2-3 day period.

[tehjman1993]

I think people in the community, especially on the Twitch team should not be streaming during the marathon and hosting it to show their support.  I was extremely agitated to find people on the team streaming during the marathon, not in relation to it whatsoever.

What? Why would I be forced to quit streaming for a whole weekend just because I didnt want to watch most of the runs? Its not like any of us "rebels" stole viewers from the marathon, everyone from my chat for example were also watching FGM or told me they dont want to watch it.

I mostly heard and saw positive things about the marathon, so good job. My only question though is why some people get 4-10 hours of stream time and then runs like biotope from gludraq get rejected.

That's an oddly specific run to point out, but nonetheless I can answer your question.

We ask that runners give us a time slot of when they are available, such as Saturday 12:00-6:00 PM EDT and Sunday 8:00-10:00 AM EDT. They also submit up to 5 runs that they are comfortable doing in this marathon. As you could probably guess, it gets very hairy trying to schedule runs in someone's available time block. Any runs that were rejected were 100% due to time constraints, not the content of the game. We, at no point in this marathon, scheduled a run to start outside of any runner's preferred time. The one goal we had for this marathon was to allow every runner to get at least 1 of their runs in, no matter how many they submitted. We achieved this goal. This is why runs such as Biotope, unfortunately, did not make the cut. I personally think Biotope is a fine game to have in a marathon, but time is on no one's side here! This is also why many events of the marathon were moved to a "bonus" stream -- we simply did not have enough time.

For those that received more time than others, your comment seems to allude to some underlying tone of favoritism, which was most certainly not done when organizing this schedule. I don't even think we looked at the names most of the time when putting people in time slots. Generally, those that received more air time than others did two things: 1.) Gave us an extremely large time window to schedule them in, and 2.) Submitted a large amount of games. Fulfilling both of this criteria is almost certain to result in more time for the runner.

I hope this answers your question.

Regarding the whole "don't stream during marathon" topic going on in here - this is not related to Fangame Marathon directly. The purpose of this thread is to receive feedback directly related to the marathon itself, from planning to organization to execution. Please try to keep it as such. Thanks!