Best Of

I would've loved to attend, and Vancouver is an awesome city.

But my wife only allows me one personal trip a year, and I already used it up for an onlyfans convention in September.

This is what happens when introverts gathers in one place. I'm the opposite, I'd really appreciate it if no one talks to me so I can conserve my social energy. Hahaha.

Cheers to you and your son, though. Hope you can still find enjoyment in the community. Despite a handful of oddballs, this community is really one of the best.

Then he should have tried to have a conversation tf?

No, it’s not. But here’s the flip side. The entire time I was there, whenever I reached out explicitly to chat with an attendee, they were friendly and engaging. When I stood passively and just watched people go by, exactly zero times did anyone come up to me cold to start a conversation. That’s just the reality of the situation. Someone has to be the one to make more than a token effort in these situations, and there’s no such thing as hoping someone gets a hint. Hints do not survive convention atmospheres.

Many if not most of my conversations (at the Fest) started with the person I was talking to grabbing someone else and saying “guess who this is.” Conventions and events are not a place to go for people to find you, unless you’re famous and I’m not that kind of famous. You go to be the finder, to reach out and grab people and say hi. And just to give you an idea of just how chaotic the interactions were there, I was there all day every day for the entire weekend, and I only found out today that Seatin was there. I don’t recall seeing him there or I would have definitely said hi. I probably walked passed him multiple times and didn’t notice. Seatin is probably one of the most recognizable people in the community, and he never caught my eye. Crazy.

I mean, I hear what you're saying, but the truth is that social interactions are highly subjective and everyone is in their own heads.

I just can't imagine not saying a single word at an event, not even a "hello," but then writing a thousand word essay about how every employee there was cold. That is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a way to cast blame on others for our own inability to socialize.

Also remember that many people have a very warped perspective of what is actually happening in the moment. Like someone might think they're giving a friendly smile or nod, but the people on the receiving end might be seeing a tense unwelcome grimace.

Not saying this is OP's situation, but just want people in this thread who might be young or shy or whatever to kind of not fall into this trap of both not putting themselves out there but then also expecting and blaming others for rejecting them. Because this mindset is a painful trap, and it basically prevents the person from ever connecting with others because of fear of rejection, which then creates resentment, as we see in this post.

Since I’m here already anyway, I’ll mention that while I’ve done active player estimates in the past, it should be obvious to anyone with a brain that there has to be more than 20,000 players in the game because there are more than 20,000 players that show up in the Gladiator Circuit alone.

There’s about a million active players in the game, depending on how you count “active players” which is a discussion not worth having here. The typical mobile game spending conversion rate hovers around 5% (this is easily Googleable) so the game has something on the order of 50,000 spenders, plus or minus. Collectively, they are spending north of $200m USD a year, which works out to about $4000 USD per player per year. Of course, most spend less, some spend massively more, but that’s a decent average.

(Note: we spend more as players than Netmarble reports, because they don’t get all of our spend. Apple and Google keep 30%, xSolla keeps about 8%).

Come on guys. This isn’t a serious line of discussion. This is not even a particularly good troll.

All OP wanted was to have a small conversation. It doesn't seem to be unrealistic to have that.

I was at the Fest for the entire weekend, and I’m sorry the OP had the experience he did. All I can do is give my own impressions, which are that there was so much happening so much of the time, I can understand if he felt like he was being ignored, because if you were not proactive in trying to engage with people they were not always going to do the same, simply from sheer overload.

I personally chatted with 40 or 50 people over the weekend, between the fest and the extracurricular activities. I had to initiate many if not most of those conversations because however well known anyone thinks I am, no one actually knows what I look like unless they’ve already met me, since I do not have a YouTube channel or other such visual presence. If you stood there and waited for them to approach you, likely most people - attendees and staff - would not specifically engage with you, probably thinking you were taking a break or something. Unless they already knew you.

I personally saw Dave and Mike stop and shake hands with many many many many people throughout the fest, basically anyone who stopped them and held out their hands and say hi. Not just content creators, but just every day players, as did many of the devs. In an event like this, there are bound to be interactions that don’t go smoothly. Sometimes I waited to talk to someone I specifically recognized but because they did not see me and were focused on someone else, they left before I could catch their attention. I’m pretty sure I eventually got to most of them, but in my opinion if anyone there thought they would not have to be the one to reach out and make the effort to connect first, and everyone else should be out looking for people who might want to chat, I think that’s asking for too much. The environment - like every convention I’ve ever been to - is just not conducive to that kind of thing.

Incidentally, those steps to and from the Brawl stage? Yeah when I was going up and down those I was focused on the steps. If anyone was trying to catch my eye while I was going up and down those, I almost certainly missed it, even if it might have appeared like my gaze passed in your direction. Between the lights and the music and the smoke machine and the conversations going on around and my desire to not tumble down the stadium seating like an idiot, combined with the fact I was generally operating on just a few hours of sleep at the time, I could have passed my wife going the other way and not noticed.

If I accidentally failed to chat with someone who was trying to get my attention, and I don’t know how that could happen because I was just an anonymous floppy hat in the crowd, I’m sorry for that. But I did my best, and I’m sure the staff there did as well. But in that kind of environment, you have to be proactive. Not just proactive, but persistent. At any moment in time the dev/attendee ratio was 30 to one or more, and most of them were running back and forth between tasks they had to do.

To the OP, if you’re still reading. I spent about half my time at the actual Fest just hanging out, especially Saturday. I was hanging out at the Beat the Boss area, I spent a little time at the Wheel, I was down by the Coloseum and Dazzler stations for a while. I was willing to talk to anyone who approached me. If you had tapped me on the shoulder and said hi, I would have chatted with you about anything you wanted for as long as you wanted. And then probably continued chatting long past the point you wanted. I’m sorry we didn’t specifically cross paths.