running an event, my perspective

[Kyro]

so, as many of you will know, me and 2 of my friends recently ran our first event, RoboShowdown.

now this event was always meant to be a much more relaxed and less strict day of robot combat.

we ended up with 70-80 robots on the day (i dont have solid figures) which turned out to be the perfect amount for our first event.

we started the day off with 2v2's that was non destructive...
it went well and things ran as smoothly as i could have hoped... we finished the 2v2's within 5 mins of the time we predicted it would take (although we had an extra 20 minutes leaway incase we were very wrong with our predictions)

after the 2v2's we had an open arena for people to mess around/test for about 20 minutes or so while we prepared for the 1v1's...

now before the 1v1's we ran tech checks which consisted of making sure the bots looked and felt antweight, and ensuring that every spinner failsafed (we were very lax with size and weight but strict on safety) fortunately, every robot looked and felt very antweight and every spinner failsafed so that went about as well as it could have.

now the 1v1's went very well... only a few teams ended up facing themselves and we chose to let the team pick a bot to go through.

about half way through we took a break for lunch.

during lunch, we tested drizzle with its hdpe disk specially made for our event against some empty cans... this went great until the hdpe managed to rip a hole through the floor if the arena... a quick macgyver by me got the arena usable again... a big thanks to Tom for bringing drizzle along and making a custom disk per our request.

after lunch and my arena fix we continued with the 1v1 event... this eventually finished a good 20 mins earlier than we predicted... i believe this was down to the fact that the longest fight of the day was 1 minute and 52 seconds...

we had decided on mob rule for judging but other than asking if we should restart a fight or 2 or give a builder a chance to get a bot working properly, the mob weren't really needed.

after the 1v1's we had a small event for any bot that had 0 wins in the 1v1's for a chance to win something, 3 rumbles with the 2 best from each having a final rumble to crown a winner, this was followed by whiteboards, spinner firing squad, spinner rumble and bossfights... we had 2 bosses to face 10 ants each, we had drizzle with hdpe disk and we had rev 4 with a polycarbonate bar (for safety) both times the ants did better than expected... although one poor ant briefly became a part of drizzle...

then as we had a spare few minutes left, we had a beetleweight fight.... in an antweight arena...

this went.... well....

overall the nerves i was feeling approaching the event were totally not needed... the day went better than i imagined and there was no stress or times i felt I had to rush...

between myself, Ben (who worked on the software side of things) and Eli (who announced next fights and came up with many of the side events) the day was a good one from our perspective.

everyone who gave us feedback were all happy with how the day went although a few suggested a few arena modifications which we thought would be the case...

after security deposit has been returned for the hall, and with the donations we received, the day cost us a lot less than we thought it would (providing security deposit is returned which shouldn't be a problem) we were expecting to be a couple hundred out of pocket at the end (which none of us were fussed about as we run this event because we enjoy this stuff and we would all be just as happy had that been the outcome) but alas, it was nothing even close to that.

arena repairs have not been factored into this yet so its still going to cost a little more but its still not a problem

so, a very different result to the last post regarding being an event organiser.

having less bots, and splitting the responsibilities between 3 is likely the reason for the huge difference in opinions.

however if we had dropped the 2v2's and had aws numbers we still didnt need to rush although there would have been a few less side events. but then, we had the hall until 7 so we weren't in such a rush.

so my final thought, if you are running an aws sized event, try and get the venue for an extra hour which relieves the rush, try and get a small team together to share responsibilities and im sure your day will be simmilar to how ours went.

i am now far more confident with running future events having run this and everything going as well as it did.

so keep an eye out for RoboShowdown 2 (we dont currently even have an idea of when it is likely to be)

we are going to try and run 3-4 of these events a year in (hopefully) the same hall

a huge thanks to everyone who came along and made the day as good as it was. myself and the rest of the MKBFC team really appreciate it.

and a second thanks to the people that helped with setting the hall up and helping clear it away.

event video's will be posted on both the MKBFC YouTube channel and also on Harry's (team panoramic) YouTube channel in the coming week or so.


Luke