THANK YOU!
First off, thank you to everyone who took the time to write a review or speak to a staff member individually regarding the positive and negative aspects of our 150 man event this past weekend!

We do read each and every review, discuss the content in our staff forum and strongly consider the points when planning our next event.  So your PoV can help to mold FITES!

I would however, like this opportunity to answer some of the items listed in the reviews to either explain why things were done a certain way, or to apologize for things that we fully admit were not done the best possible way.

INTERNET
Firstly, the internet.  This seems to be the biggest complaint for the event.  While we can completely understand the complaints regarding this, we should have made it clear why we handled the internet as we did.  We were using the hotel internet in the room... unfortunately, the total speed allotted to us was a poor 1.5 MB with 768K upload speed.  We knew that this was going to be the case prior to the event, and that is why we chose to limit the internet to a few key mail websites and to staff.  There simply just wasn't enough bandwidth to support 150 gamers, had we opened it, everyone would have had 9600 modem like speed which would have completed defeated the purpose of having it enabled to begin with.  So hopefully now everyone may realize why we limited access.  It had nothing to do with our desire to keep you off of IM or Internet...

GAME SERVERS
Next regarding the Servers.  It seems that the major sticking points seem to be BF2 servers, CS:S servers, and the lack of free play servers.  I would like to address these concerns.  First up BF2, we fully admit that we were unprepared for the first BF2 tourney.  The Command Console for BF2 was beyond buggy, and it didn't show up until we actually had multiple gamers trying to use it.  We accept full responsibility for that.  So during the night, we manually scripted the servers, which dramatically improved the semi and finals on day 2.

CS:S Server was sort of along the same route.  We had a DNS problem getting our core CS:S server to be seen via your CS:S clients.  We did not identify that this was a problem until Saturday morning, by that time, it was too late to rebuild the server, so we tried to limp along the best we could.

FREE PLAY SERVERS
As for free play servers... I actually thought we did this very well.  At any given time, we had approximately 6-8 free play servers running various games.  We also made every effort to announce any non-official game servers that people wanted to start up.  We did also provide 1 GB network ports to anyone who checked with us prior to the event about bringing their own servers.  We had 3 people do just that... bring their own servers, which we allowed them to manage.

DC++
Next on the list is DC++.  We are still unsure exactly what happened... but it seems that we had several issues... one being that when everyone crashed around 2 AM, everyone kicked off an insane leechfest.  This caused problems with the first tourney on day 2, causing major lag for the tourney, so we killed the service.  This happened again during the 2nd tourney, so at that time we decided to completely disable it altogether.  We will investigate the problem and try to iron out exactly what caused it.

LACK OF TOURNEY SERVERS
Next on the list is the lack of Tournament servers available during the actualy tourney.  We apologize for this and will work to make sure there are more servers dedicated to the tournaments.

PRIZES
Next up is prizes.  Unfortunately, because we do not make any sort of profit (in fact we took a significant loss on this event) we can only provide prizes that sponsors send.  We are still not big enough to nail down the HUGE sponsorships, but as we grow, the prizes will get better.  For the record, we did contact over 200 sponsors, but with Quakecon being around the same time, we found that a lot of sponsors had already blown their sponsorship fund on QC.

CONTESTS??
The 2 mentions of running contensts during tourneys has me a little confused.  To my knowledge we did not run any contests during tourneys... so I would love to hear exactly what is meant by that portion of the feedback.

EVENT TIMING
This was our first 36 hour event, and we FULLY agree that the hours to start and end the event were incorrect.  This was an oversight on my part, and we have already brainstormed how to fix this for the next event!

EMPTY SEATS
The empty seats has us questioning it too!  We are unsure why 26 people paid but did not attend the event.  119 people walked through the door, which is roughly 40 more than our february event.

TOURNEY ORGANIZATION
Tournament organization is already being worked on as well... we would like to incorporate some new rules, and we already have a long list of items we plan on changing for the next event.  A lot of what was said in the reviews are things we are DEFINITELY planning on changing!  So great feedback there!

H4X
Regarding the CS:S tournament that is being called into question regarding "H4X".  The staff was informed of a possible problem, we investigated strongly, reviewed console logs, server logs, etc... and we found NO FAULT with anyone involved!  In fact, one of the members of the losing team was one of the team members reviewing the logs, and even he could not find fault with the winning team!  The CS:S tournament results are NOT in question!  This is the problem with some people who are not properly informed or chose not to ask!

AWARD CEREMONY
As for the completely lacking of quality regarding the Award Ceremony... I, personally, accept full responsibility for it.  And I am making the evaluation and modification of it a major priority for our next event.  I also accept responsibility for the screw up regarding the door prize ticket mishap.

LACK OF TRUE LANPARTY SPIRIT
The last, but certainly not least thing that I would like to talk about is the fact that we noticed a large "problem" during the event.  We noticed that a lot of people came to the event looking to play 1 game, and 1 game only.. whether it be CS:S or BF2.  We had a large group of CS players leave after they were eliminated from the CS tournament.  Unfortunately FITES has no control over this type of "take my ball and go home" mentality of some gamers.  We try to provide fun throughout the event, and hope that individuals or teams who cannot find anything to do other than the 1 tourney they came for, we feel bad for those individuals, because they are missing out on a big part of a LANParty... the social aspect!

Overall, we did have a lot of things just not work, and we fully admit that.  In the staff meeting after the event, a lot of what was mentioned in the reviews was discussed and agreed upon to be major issues that will take priority to fix for the next event.  

Again, we thank you for the feedback that many of you provided!  We also hope that some of your concerns may have been explained in this post.   Hopefully we'll see ya next time!