Let's start with the good stuff:
+ REALLY awesome "Paws on Fire" event with some huge benefits:
> Constant good lightning, more focus on the dancers performance and not everything covered in smoke or dark light. I love it.
> Really good concept with the "quick" version of jury feedback
> Totally love the battle aspect of this event
> No queue or waiting time
+ The second dance aka "Rave party"
> I don't liked the music in the first moment but I loved how nerdy the whole concept was. So I fell in love with it. Sadly it was only at one day!
> Good lighting (people gave their best to make it film-able for me. Huge thanks to them! It saved the con video in the end.
> I just can't wait to see such a dance again, maybe even with other "special interest" music genres such as Nightcore or DnB
+ All the decoration
> Such an improvement everywhere when it comes to huge banners, decoration elements and comfortable areas!
> The whole hotel felt way more comfortable and the con-related areas more professional
+ Probably a lot more but I spend most of the time with video editing
o Enter the Arena had a strange Playtime-to-Queuetime ratio. Getting more dancers would be cool
o I still hope that the "3 blocks only" rule is either a joke, or there is a story behind it that I just haven't discovered yet. Did anyone got hurt by that? o.O
- The event plan was a little bit hard to understand for me and my friends.
>Fursuit parade during the Dealers-Den opening?
>Fursuit gameshow during Paws on Fire?
>Fursuit group foto while Enter the Arena is still going on?
>Probably more but I forgot.
- THE MAIN STAGE VOLUME
> I HAD A TINITUS SEVERAL TIMES JUST FROM ATTENDING NORMAL EVENTS, NOT DANCES. YOU DON'T EXPECT TO BRING EAR PROTECTION THERE. AUDIO WAS CLIPPING SO HARD.
> I WRITE THIS IN CAPS SO THAT YOU GET AN IDEA HOW IT FELT TO SIT THERE WHILE NO ONE IT PUTTING THE VOLUME LEVER DOWN
> No but seriously, so many complains about it and nobody was able to fix it. It is a bit hard to understand how this was not possible to change.
- It is forbidden to cover your real name on your badge with removeable duct-tape (that you can remove at any time when someone needs to "control" your badge!).
Please, how does my real name help someone at an entrance to check if my badge is valid? Do they need to learn all the names of the attendees?
There was a guy who looked at my name for like half a minute after I had to remove my tape from it. Seriously, why? If someone wants to report me,
he can just take my reg number or my nickname!
PLEASE find a solution so that people don't have to run around at cons, showing everyone their real name, if they don't want to.
- The Main Stage Lighting
> I seriously loved the main stage each year, starting from EF18. This year, I came with more than double the light intense camera setup to film there than on previous years.
This being said, I was deeply shocked to see that filming the dances was not possible at all. Not even at ISO12800 (I used ISO640 all the years before).
> Enter the Arena had *a bit* too much smoke to see the dancers anymore at some point
> I see that this years light-setup was extremely complicated installed and it looked good at the first point. It just wasn't good on the second view (in my opinion).
Actually, I've talked with some of the light-controllers. There was barely anything he was able to do to make the stage brighter, despite mixing in normal "daylight" which
is obviously not a good solution. So most of the time, everyone in the hall was just completely dark.
They tried hard to improve it somehow and there was a small dance-stage in the end with some normal "daylight" that allowed to get at least some shots, but compared to the awesome light
setup all the years before it was just not as good as it could've been and I had to film with very high ISO anyway. Also it wasn't colorful and interesting.
So I went to the smaller neon dance and filmed there all the time - end of story.
--> There is a "lite" solution to this, if you aim to make everyone happy (including the film-people) while you think that most people want to dance in the dark so that no one can see them:
--> Just make a bright, filmable dance stage which is large enaugh for several people to dance on it
--> Please don't block it with a DJ-House that may looks cool, but blocks the stage and interaction for fursuiters with the DJ
--> Talk with someone who knows what colors and lighting looks good on a camera, e.g. me
--> You will end up with a stage that is as cool as - or cooler than - on EF22
--> Another good solution was to have those light-trees in the dance corners such as at EF21, so that you can simply film around them.
--> Probably the best is to have less-focused light beams on the main stage at the dances like the years before. It is also less annoying to get them in the face then
However, it was totally cool to have those "lasers" at the rave dance as everything was smaller there and they only added light, but it wasn't the only light source.
- Dance Music overall
> I write this mostly for my friends who came with me to eurofurence. Music choice surely isn't something that can please anyone, but we agreed on this point.
Also I personally don't listen to the music which got played all the years before on dances, but it was "EF music" and it was good for me.
> This year, it was hard to hear a single song that people know and can interact to. It was absolutely strange for us. All the years before, it was "the same" well-known music over and over
again and it honestly was good because people knew the songs, they had a good time, it surely was mainstream stuff but it was easy to like it. You can't sing to a song if you don't know it.
This year, it felt like someone said "Let's play only songs that we never played before". This is probably not true, but so was our feeling about it.
--> If all the DJs suddenly had an idea to improve the music choice by playing less-mainstream-stuff or whatever: We didn't enjoyed it.
It's really hard for me to give feedback this year, as I only attended some events and mostly of them only to film there. Which is why my feedback is - and should be - understood out of the view of someone who goes to the dance to film there, not to dance, which is definitely not the main intention behind a dance! I understand this, but I still want to give feedback. You don't need to listen to me to actually change something, but I wanted to write it down (as I really would love to see improvement at those points to make Eurofurence better)