#but if theyre not cool with that ill adjust the wording

[atthebell-moved]

i think it's also super unfortunate bc for a lot of people this is their first con, and it's hard to convey just how poorly run it was.

they had one of the biggest convention centers in the country at their disposal, that has for the last ~5 years hosted 130,000+ people, and still fucked up space logistics.

they had the stats and feedback from their OWN PRIOR CONVENTION in amsterdam and still railroaded dsmp events and fucked up meet n greets along with fucking up security for huge ccs.

they (should) have enough staff who know how to run a convention of this size, including everything from queue mechanics to accessibility concerns.

they should have the basic pr understanding that it looks bad to have disabled people getting crushed against walls bc of crowding and under-staffed line management.

they should understand how bad it looks to place the one, singular panel about female streamers in a ballroom that max fits 200 people, misgender and use the wrong pronouns for several of the ccs, then mistake one of the streamers for another in an instagram post and only correct that mistake ~4 hours after posting it.

gonna put the rest of this below a cut bc its just rambling and everything i personally saw as an attendee. this post is LONG viewers beware you're in for a scare

huge thing off the bat: they should be poaching staff from vidcon, comic con, etc. i'm confident that in the next 5-10 years sdcc is going to be bleeding attendees and experienced con staff will want to go somewhere new. steal those employees. offer them better pay. get their experience instead of having random twitch employees plan an event for like 40k people (can't find the numbers rn, it's prbably closer to 50k).

another thing: they should be poaching from or at least learning from theme parks. queueing mechanics are no joke-- disneyland has spent decades figuring out the best way to set up lines & maintain a good experience for park attendees. defunctland has some great videos on this, but suffice to say, nothing twitchcon did this time worked.

i think a lot of it's been obfuscated by people who weren't at the con or folks who didn't see each separate meet n greet, but here's how those were set up & why exactly they went horribly.

first thing: all meet n greet lines started as one big line. you walked into the second floor area, you got into a huge line, and then at the start of the actual meet n greet area they directed you to each line. for the first two days this entailed just. letting people through whenever there was space in people's lines. so rather than setting up long queues for each streamer, there was one huge line. this fucking sucked for people trying to see smaller ccs, because they were stuck in this huge line full of people trying to get into already-full lines. at one point we saw michael mcchill's line with like three people in it and there were probably three hundred people in the one huge line. there were probably michael mcchill viewers in there! but they were getting shafted by the giant fucking line.

lumen and i went to the first meet n greet at 9:30 on friday, which worked differently than all the others (and saturday's were spectacularly worse for other reasons). we figured karl, sapnap, gnf, and ranboo would fill up before we got there, so we were ready to hop in smajor's line. i'll note that con staff at this point clearly had no fucking idea what they were getting into, and there was not nearly enough of them.

the way they were doing lines at that session was that they had already filled up the aforementioned four ccs' lines, so they were opening the front of the ropes to just corral people into the other ccs' lines. someone opened it for us to hop in scott's line and that's what we did, but other folks thought they could still get into the other lines and got stuck waiting in front. we found out later that what they did was take a bunch of people into overflow queues to the side of the meet n greet area, where they were left to rot, because staff forgot about them or there wasn't enough time. later they (kind of) fixed this problem, but not the larger problem that the meet n greet lines were not big enough and were set up poorly from the start.

here is the entire second floor; i've circled the meet n greet area

i would estimate that the entire area for the meet n greets took up the size of like. a small soccer field. like max 1500 sq ft. probably smaller honestly but everythings becoming a blur.

this is the meet n greets including the entire room they were in, bc they shared space with the food court and artist alley (which was, btw, way too fucking small also)

meet n greets should have had their entire own floor. even for non-mcyt folks there were enormous lines and probably really frustrated people.

to add to this, for every meet n greet they didnt have enough lines. not joking. they were combining streamers lines. so sneeg & boomer shared one line (insane, bc they were the two biggest mcyt guys at that meet n greet session and it was while everyone who didnt make it to the dsmp panel was gunning for something else to do), hannah & tapl shared a line, and im pretty sure karl, gnf, and sapnap shared a line. i dont remember what their deal actually was, and im positive this was partially by ccs' request (i think karlnap + gnf wanted to be together for meet n greets, and same with hannah & tapl, though i doubt boomer and sneeg have talked enough to have requested that).

to add to this, i have no doubt that part of the accessibility issues with the meet n greets was because of the lack of space. there was no clear exit at the start of the con, and even later it was unclear which direction to go.

the other unfortunate thing (that twitchcon staff should be planning for) is that ccs want to take their time with each person and chat, but if they do so they meet less people. this is how you get ranboo meeting ~1200 people for 4 hours at vidcon. not to say he sucks for that, but its not feasible for anyone to do that, and im sure he was completely dead on his feet from that.

lumen and i also went to hannah's meet n greet on saturday, which went marginally better in general bc we arrived an hour and ten minutes early. we still waited a long time, but we got to see her & tapl and it was cool. however they had the same problem as friday of way too many people and instead of letting people into specific lines they just. kept the huge line. towards the end of the line they started putting people in overflow, which again, is where they waited to rot.

today we went to eret's meet n greet as our final hoo-rah (lmao) of the event. we showed up probably an hour and twenty minutes early. we got to the front of eret's line maybe five minutes before the end of the session. they had put us in overflow, and at this point actually were asking who people were there to see and were keeping count to send people away, but some of those people had already waited in line for probably 30min or more. sunday was by far the best they managed but still not good at all.

other HUGE problem with the lines: they did not anticipate mcyt fans showing up in droves. apparently con staff thought people would disperse to various events rather than congregating at particular events and this is part of why they didn't place dsmp events in larger venues. second part of this issue of anticipation is that they didn't plan for how many people would wait in line, despite how big a space was. well over 2k people waited in line for the dsmp panel. twitchcon did not even account for any kind of line (friday was a complete shitshow, you dont even understand) and were left floundering.

something else to note is all twitch communications said lines were to start 30min before events. on friday people were lined up 3 hours before the dsmp panel. these two things do not compute, and they mean staff were not watching the lines and directing them properly from the start, which helps explain why they lost control entirely.

so yes the mobbing that happened on friday is quite honestly unsurprising.

for sat and sunday, they realized they needed to get their shit together, so first thing is that they made a little area for disabled & priority people to sit to get into the glitch theater before everyone else, and there were way more staff present alongside security. they also had signs and staff throughout the line making sure people understood where things started and ended, how far into the hallway they were allowed to be, and when they had no hope of getting into the event. some level of improvement, but there was also some ridiculous shit they were pulling.

during several events yesterday they had like ten staff members holding pieces of rope together, like kindergartners, and were using them to bodily block line movement and crossing. so for a bit they would open a path into the theater for people waiting in line, then they would stop that line and allow cross traffic, because again, this was a full fucking hallway where people needed to walk. this was by far the stupidest thing ive ever seen and ive worked for colleges where organizers didnt remember students need to eat food.

not about lines anymore, but to address the foam pit, im gonna clarify a few things because people seem confused.

firstly, there were actually two foam pits on the con floor (and a ball pit by the entrance, but its irrelevant here). one was at the wendys booth, where people were hitting each other with foam french toast sticks over a foam pit. this pit was higher than the lenovo one but still a little iffy. they did not shut it down after adriana was injured at the other booth.

the booth that was a genuine problem was the lenovo booth, where they had a foam pit that i would say reached maybe 3/4 up my calf. i would generously call it a foot and a half high including the foam bits. people were similarly handed sticks to hit each other with and loud announcers said a bunch of shit into microphones. anyway. i took a photo of the foam pit today when it was not being used (although the booth was still open! people were still using the lenovo products to play little games three feet from where adriana broke her back!)

it's hard to see but it is not deep at all, and whats underneath is just the con floor, which is concrete and maybe a single layer of carpet. at most some of those foam bits reach a foot and a half, maybe two feet.

according to some folks the safe depth for foam pits without soft landing pads is like 6-8 feet deep (possibly meant to include the soft landing pads, im not a gymnastics person) which means it was a fraction of how safe it should have been. also i cannot get over the fact that they kept the booth open after someone BROKE THEIR FUCKING BACK and that wendys kept their pit running what the fuck is wrong with these people.

anyway the big thing i want to stress is that twitchcon is absolutely liable, at least morally, for this, but lenovo is absolutely on the hook for it as well. im not sure exactly how convention safety works for this, but i would guess its mostly on the exhibitors to provide proper safety. would not be shocked if the convention center is also liable, but again, im not a lawyer. i havent seen many people talking about lenovo being at fault so i want people to know thats part of it as well.

i also wanna address some of the more stupid/baseless rumors i've seen. the stuff about drink spiking seems to be because of advice some folks were giving out about not taking drinks from strangers because of the possibility of having your drink spiked, not the reality, but people took that out of hand and spread it like it had happened, and other folks used tweets from 2019 twitchcon where that did actually happen and it became a huge rumor. i have not heard a single cc or attendee from this year say their drinks were spiked.

second thing: sykkuno was not kicked out of twitchcon, he was asked to leave artist alley bc there was a huge crowd forming around him. this is a small thing but its bugging me that its being spread. it sucks that he couldnt hang out there but he's way too big of a streamer to be wandering the con without security, this is why they're supposed to let ccs on the con floor & into artist alley before/after everyone else is gone. that's what they did at vidcon at least.

third thing that's REALLY been bugging me: there is absolutely no confirmation that that person stole gnf's water bottle. they took a pic touching it on the table and then a pic of them holding an aquafina water bottle, which is the water they were selling throughout the con. if they actually stole it i suspect there would be a video. regardless, even if they did, they definitely did it as a reference to the smplive confession (which is itself a reference to a kpop stan copypasta. no one stole cooper's water bottle.) and not to be creepy, and they doubled down to get twitter clout. the smplive situation is also just entirely different, i know y'all think the serious stream jokes are funny but mcyt stans were just starting to exist and thats why that stream happened. all these streamers now think stans are fine so that would never happen. go watch lumenvale's video essay for the love of g-d.

another thing: most people were wearing their masks. i don't know where the idea came from that people weren't but i guarantee you 99% of mcyt fans were wearing masks the entire time, and most other people were as well. they made you verify your vaccination status or turn in covid tests also; i keep seeing straight up lies that they weren't checking for this but they absolutely were.

"unaccompanied minors" is also a meaningless thing to say; 14+ minors did not need to have an adult, and teenagers are perfectly capable of going to a con by themselves. sometimes they will be annoying or weird but that does not mean they need to be followed everywhere by a parent. i can also guarantee that a solid number of the freaks stalking ccs outside hotels and outside the partner lounge (no one's talking about that but i saw that personally and it was def happening, fucking creepy!) were fully grown adults.

also this is just a little thing but they had an affiliate kiosk with a little gift bag (that included shoelaces lmao) and they also had a pronouns bin at it that had literally like three she/her pins. lumen and i dug through it for several minutes to find a single one and i saw women digging all three days bc they apparently just. didnt buy enough she/her pins. which is a bad look already and then combined with the issues with one block at a time is just heinous.

random note at the end bc i just remembered it but they also had a huge line outside to get into the convention center and then a huge line for badge pickup and a huge line to get onto the floor, which only opened at 9 despite the building opening at 8. anyone who wanted to get to morning meet n greets early got kind of fucked by this and i dont understand why they had so many lines outside and then sucked at the lines inside. fucking nuts.

#twitchcon sd #bell at twitchcon sd #banger posts #this is so rambly im just trying to convey how fucking bad it was #if i think of anything else ill rb with additions #also i said the one block at a time panel was about female streamers bc in the past aimsey has said theyre cool being described as such #but if theyre not cool with that ill adjust the wording