This was my first Kumoricon, and I have to say as a whole it's really great. Nearly all the staff was friendly and helpful, and the overall environment is awesome. However, the only real problems my fiancee and I experienced both involved the gaming room. First off, the tournaments. The overall organziation seemed to be lacking, along with them running long. I entered the Tekken 5 tournament, and while I sat there with the other players waiting and getting in fights for fun, we noticed the DDR tournament kept going, and going, and going. After investigating, turns out that there wasn't a tournament going on anymore, but instead they were just playing to play, which was really unfair to the 15-20 of us that were sitting there waiting for well over an hour.
The next day was the Mario Kart DD tournament, where in the person running it really didn't seem to know what she was doing. She continually changed the rules. At first it was stated to be a team tournament, so my fiancee and I signed up as a team, as did several other people. Then she decided that she would just randomly assign teams, since several people signed up by themselves. The folks that signed up as teams got upset, so she relented and only assigned people that didn't have a team. Next, the rules stated it was to be random characters and random carts, so we went first against another team. We won, but with a not so hot score, but we figured it was random select, it can't be helped. Of course AFTER we go, she decides people can pick teams, just not a certain car and certain teams. The team we played quit right there, and we stuck it out for another round, but noticed our scores were far too low to continue after the mediocre first round.
Lastly, Sunday night we were looking for our roomates since we had forgotten our key. My fiancee had left her badge in the room as well, so first we hit the dance, and after talking with the staff working, they let us go in and look for them. They weren't there, so we tried the game room, explaining what was going on. One particular staffer there got huffy and said "Without a badge you can NOT go in" so she said "Fine whatever you go in and look" and left. The staffer then had the nerve to shout "no you STOP and come BACK HERE" to her, which made absolutely NO sense to me. If my fiancee is leaving because she can't go look, what right does a person have to yell at her to stop?
I hate to make it sound like we had nothing but problems, because we will gladly come next year and overall we had a blast. This stuff is really just isolated events of suck amongst tons of awesome. Hanging out with the Bakazoku guys we got to talk to the head of this whole shebang, and he rocks, as well as being an awesome Legolas.
