My mixed review of LTX 2023

[BeefSupreme]

DISCLAIMER: Despite my ramblings below, I really did have a good time. These are just me and my girlfriend’s thoughts about things that could be improved for future expos.

 

My girlfriend and I flew out from Arizona to attend LTX for the first time this year. Super excited, we went to the convention center on Friday to make sure we had our badges in advance. Fast forward to Saturday morning, and we walk up to the entrance only to be told by security that whether we had a badge already or not, everyone had to be in the same line (it wrapped almost entirely around the convention center). So we got in the enormous line, waited for about 20 minutes, and then someone came through saying that if we already had a badge we were supposed to just go in. Obviously there was some sort of miscommunication between LTT and security, but it was a really frustrating way to start the weekend.

 

Now we’re inside, excited to look at the booths, but wait there’s almost nowhere to walk? It feels like they either oversold Saturday tickets or underestimated how much space 6000 people take up.. Obviously some areas were more crowded than others, but navigating around was definitely a hassle. This was exacerbated by the lack of line control, but they seemed to figure that out on Saturday and it was definitely better on Sunday (I also think there were less people there on Sunday). That being said, some of the lines were so absurdly long that we didn’t even bother trying. 

 

All the lines are super long, and we need to pickup our LTX sticker passport anyways, so we went to get our pre-ordered merch. Long line, but that’s to be expected. When we go to pickup our merch, we’re told they don’t even have all of it.. I specifically did not pack a hoodie on this trip because I knew I’d be picking up the one I preordered over 2 months ago. They didn’t have it. Not gonna lie, this one pissed me off more than anything else. A little communication goes a long way, and I could have packed my jacket if I knew it wouldn’t be at LTX. They did offer to ship the missing items to me for free, which is good, but the whole interaction honestly just left a bad taste in my mouth. It doesn’t seem that hard to send out some warning emails if your merch won’t actually be available for pickup. 

 

There were so many giveaways/raffles it was kinda hard to keep up with. They had an overhead PA, I honestly don’t know why they didn’t use it to call out raffle numbers. Nearly all of the raffles required you to be at the booth as they called it, so it caused huge crowds to pile up in walkways.

 

They KICKED A TON OF PEOPLE OUT OF THE WAN SHOW!! I am honestly so glad we managed to grab seats when we saw some people leaving, but about 2 minutes after we sat down, we saw security pushing everyone who wasn’t in a seat out. I feel really bad for the people who just wanted to stand and enjoy the WAN show but got kicked out.. I know this one isn’t specifically LTT’s fault (convention center rules I would imagine), but they started the WAN show really late (per usual). I feel like they should have taken this into account, but clearly no one did. Tagging on here that we showed up for the Troubleshooting Speedrun w/Linus only to find out he dropped out

 

My last gripe with LTX was how they handled the closing ceremony giveaways. We got there early to grab seats towards the front, thinking it might increase our odds of getting something. Let me be clear: I was not EXPECTING to win anything, but it turns out if you weren’t sitting on an aisle seat or standing near the front, you probably didn’t get anything. It was super obvious that they knew they had a ton of stuff to giveaway and not a single person thought of how they’d do it, leaving Linus to scramble and try to fix it on the fly. I do not blame Linus for this at all, as clearly he was cleaning up someone else’s mess, but like….c’mon, really? Everyone in attendance had a badge, you could have added badge numbers and given stuff away like that. There was Midway Mania which everyone got a ticket for; I suspect a large number of attendees were in that raffle, and the raffle prizes were a total of 3 Google Pixel phones. Wouldn’t that have been the perfect way to give away everything at the end? You had email addresses, phone numbers, and full names..

 

Overall, even though I just aired out a laundry list of complaints, I had a really good time. All of the staff members were super nice, there were some really fun and interesting booths. My girlfriend had never built a PC before, and she had a really great time at the PC Building booth (side note: one of the sponsors was PC Building Sim 2, how did they not get any branding on that booth? ). The case toss was fun even though I’m a weakling, the retro gaming area was awesome, I loved seeing the custom PCs at certain booths (shoutout to SignalRGB), and the Midway games were a blast (and super creative, whoever came up with those deserves major kudos).

 

Because this was a whole international trip for us, I don’t think we will come back for LTX ‘24 unless some of my aforementioned issues are seriously addressed. I don’t regret coming at all, and I had a blast, but thinking of the logistics and cost it took me to get here, I’m not sure it’d be worth it again. That being said, a huge thank you to the entire LTT team for putting this on at all. The best part of the expo for me was just meeting some random people around the convention center and really connecting with this awesome community that you’ve cultivated over the years.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

The weirdest thing about the final give away was they we're seeming 'improvising' the random selection with a list on a phone and trying to 'spin it to win it' but it was so slow, before they moved up to 'Desperately toss stuff out cause 6pm is coming fast'.

A simple enough hack would have been to just randomly generate a selection of Whale/Weekend/Sunday First name, Last Initial, Partially Censored Email and had that as a 'list'.  Then run through that list, top to bottom, or till you ran out of prizes.  Since the list was already random, there's no harm in going through it in order.  This would have also allowed for pre-generated slides to be setup for the screen showing the winner names and such, so you'd have both an auditory and visual notification simultaneously.  Random, fast, no trying to spin through a list on a phone with your finger, and could have been generated some 24hrs in advance.

 

I imagine numbering each physical pass would have been a challenge since that would mean each pass is unique and that ups printing costs.

[Guest]

22 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

The weirdest thing about the final give away was they we're seeming 'improvising' the random selection with a list on a phone and trying to 'spin it to win it' but it was so slow, before they moved up to 'Desperately toss stuff out cause 6pm is coming fast'.

A simple enough hack would have been to just randomly generate a selection of Whale/Weekend/Sunday First name, Last Initial, Partially Censored Email and had that as a 'list'.  Then run through that list, top to bottom, or till you ran out of prizes.  Since the list was already random, there's no harm in going through it in order.  This would have also allowed for pre-generated slides to be setup for the screen showing the winner names and such, so you'd have both an auditory and visual notification simultaneously.  Random, fast, no trying to spin through a list on a phone with your finger, and could have been generated some 24hrs in advance.

 

I imagine numbering each physical pass would have been a challenge since that would mean each pass is unique and that ups printing costs.

truly a money-saving tactic of all time

[HenrySalayne]

On 7/31/2023 at 3:49 AM, BeefSupreme said:

They KICKED A TON OF PEOPLE OUT OF THE WAN SHOW!! I am honestly so glad we managed to grab seats when we saw some people leaving, but about 2 minutes after we sat down, we saw security pushing everyone who wasn’t in a seat out. I feel really bad for the people who just wanted to stand and enjoy the WAN show but got kicked out.. I know this one isn’t specifically LTT’s fault (convention center rules I would imagine), but they started the WAN show really late (per usual). I feel like they should have taken this into account, but clearly no one did.

From the perspective of a visitor at this event, I understand that it felt unnecessary and annoying to be thrown out of the WAN show. From the perspective of event safety, it was was most likely the right call. Overcrowded areas are a hazard. Even more so, than it might be apparent to those being part of the crowd.

 

[BeefSupreme]

9 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

From the perspective of a visitor at this event, I understand that it felt unnecessary and annoying to be thrown out of the WAN show. From the perspective of event safety, it was was most likely the right call. Overcrowded areas are a hazard. Even more so, than it might be apparent to those being part of the crowd.

 

I definitely agree. When I saw people sitting down in the aisles and blocking the exit ways, I remember thinking that a huge fire hazard was forming in real time. I understand the necessity of kicking people out at that point, I just figured more forethought would have gone into this. Surely they must have known that a live WAN show would be one of the most crowded events at the whole expo. It just goes back to communication, really. If people knew they had to show up early and secure seats or they'd be kicked out, there would be no reason to complain about it.

[HenrySalayne]

On 8/3/2023 at 10:31 PM, BeefSupreme said:

I definitely agree. When I saw people sitting down in the aisles and blocking the exit ways, I remember thinking that a huge fire hazard was forming in real time. I understand the necessity of kicking people out at that point, I just figured more forethought would have gone into this. Surely they must have known that a live WAN show would be one of the most crowded events at the whole expo. It just goes back to communication, really. If people knew they had to show up early and secure seats or they'd be kicked out, there would be no reason to complain about it.

Communication is key and it would have been good to talk about the limited capacity beforehand.

 

However, for an event like LTX you have like an X amount of floorspace. Dedicating a huge portion for one really crowded panel is not a good solution. From what I've seen (on videos, I wasn't attending), it looked like they had enough seats for anything else happening on that stage.

It's a very common compromise at conventions. There are always one or two panels completely overrun by people. You can take some of the pressure off by "streaming" it to a another area in the same venue, but I think that already happened at LTX and it's generally not very popular.

 

[RedEvoPro]

I was sitting on the right side front row, there were only about 5 of us dolphins/orcas, and we each (ONLY) got the MSI Lucky Brick "legos". Dennis literally was about to hand me an AIO then faked me out and continued to the back, lol! 

 

I was unaware that people in seats could stay for WAN Show, so I dipped around 30 minutes before 6 and walked around before I was asked to leave. I really enjoyed it and I do agree that there were a few kinks to work out for next year, but it seems like they are already on the revisions, to the meet and greet, signs and lines and labeling areas better, giveaways, etc. 

 

All in all, I enjoyed my week in Vancouver and hope things line up for me next year so I can make it out again. 

 

The only bad thing that happened to me was that my two custom screwdrivers where stolen in shipping with USPS, of which I spent a day driving down to Blaine to ship home to me. I did claim insurance so I wasn't entirely screwed. Hopefully next year there is a better solution to send custom drivers back, if that is they bring DYI screwdriver back. I would definitely do it again.

[Birblover12]

I can understand the "kicking out" part of the WAN show, it sucks from a viewing perspective, but if there was, for example, a fire, then all the exits would be blocked and it'd be a disaster. 

 

I do agree though that I think that they really could have planned the space better, like if they knew they had X amount of tickets and X number of feet in space then they could have known months ahead of time whether it was going to be an issue. Hopefully in the future the new CEO can advise better in that regard.

[nickwoodward]

Future improvements: Don't sell other people's shit