The Meet & Greet, as I'd been calling it, was scheduled for 3-6 PM. At 8:30 PM we had dinner reservations at Old Ebbitt.
As it pushed to 3 PM we waited by the doors to our meeting room - which was labeled with someone else's name. At 3 we asked about it, they had to find a maintenance guy, and while it was never labeled properly we got it going.
I put out the food - they didn't have anywhere good to put it, but we figured it out. I'd hoped to have some tunes going during it by hooking my iPod Shuffle to a pair of MadKatz speakers that I'd gotten at E3 in 2005. Unfortunately, I didn't test those speakers, and the batteries I'd left in them had corroded the contacts. Oh well - we didn't need it.
People started filtering in, drinks starting flowing, many a ham biscuit and empanada were eaten.
At 6 PM we cleaned up and moved up to the room I'd gotten for the weekend. More people continually showed up, and a group of us headed out a bit early to make sure we got to Old Ebbitt in time. Unfortunately, most of the group hadn't gotten their Metro cards yet, and the train was just arriving when we got there - so two of us went ahead.
Old Ebbitt was waiting and eager for us when we showed up, and even ready to do individual checks for each person. Again, I cannot emphasize how great they were.
The only bad part was that we were separated into two tables - but with 20 people, it's hard to have one big table. Still, we could move around, enjoy the scenery, and best off, have some darn good food (I love the oysters there) and have a few more drinks.
From there, a number of people headed out for night tourism of the monuments here in DC. (A potentially dangerous activity, honestly, given some of the muggings that have happened around here.) As it was midnight, others headed back to the hotel for more drinks - I got off a couple of stops early and hit the sack.
Sorry for the delays between posts; real life has been kicking my butt.
When we last left our intrepid guild-fest organizer, he was busy waiting.
The room block was reserved in the November-December time frame; people had until early March to sign up for a late March event.
Listen to the crickets...
That leads to another lesson. People will only sign up basically at the last possible moment.
Until then there's nothing you can do but wait and stress and remind.
And plan - what are people going to do the whole time that they're in the area?
Well, you don't want to over-organize. I set up a "meet & greet" (in the meeting room) for the first day, then dinner at an iconic local restaurant, the Old Ebbitt Grill. We could Metro there; I got 10 $5 Metro cards to help out for people showing up on Friday for it.
(A note on Old Ebbitt, one of my favorite restaurants in the DC area - they were a delight to work with. Completely the opposite of Marriott. From now on if I have to do any kind of large dinner I'll not hesitate to call up Old Ebbitt. And if you haven't eaten there, it's good stuff - I highly recommend it.)
Since I still wasn't certain how many people were coming until the very last minute, I did most of my preparations under "how much per person". "How much food?" "How many drinks?" Etc.
I asked people if there were any food allergies, vegetarians, etc.
For the Saturday we planned out that people would want to play tourist. I thought I'd have time to hang out a bit (I was wrong) but we did plan on a party that night complete with food.
Sunday nothing was planned.
As the day approached the final numbers finally coalesced; it took quite a bit of following up to make sure of it. A week or so ahead of time I went and bought the non-perishable items, such as paper napkins, plastic cups, etc., that I'd need and scouted out what I'd get in terms of food.
The Wednesday before I'd already coordinate picking up some growlers for beer which ended up not being necessary - thanks to the fact that Old Dominion Brewpub hadn't opened. I also put in an order for some empanadas from Julia's in DC.
Thursday I picked up one visitor from the airport, went to Old Dominion (no dice!), checked into the hotel, and went to dinner with the visitor plus a friend who was attending from my old hometown, plus with the planner that the second guy was friends with and had introduced me to who was helping us out (whew, that's an awkward sentence). Then I raced home to finish planning what I needed and make sure I had the coolers I needed (which meant buying one of them).
Friday dawned early and I did a big run to the grocery store for the "meet & greet" supplies (couple of hundred dollars there, including stuff that'd be used the next day), had to get everything over to the hotel, pick up the empanadas, got the Metro cards (or, rather, delegated someone to get the cards), and then had to find a maintenance man to actually let us into the meeting room.
Figuring out who all will be coming is an intrinsic part of making a deal with a hotel. At the same time, it's hard to see who is coming until you can pick out a weekend and a room block rate with the hotel - so it can be a bit of a Catch 22.
I am not a professional event planner. I bummed some help off of one that I know in exchange for dinner a night or two, but she doesn't know our group, so she could only really give more generalized help.
But you've got:
* People who will definitely come
* People who are coming, but staying elsewhere for whatever reason
* People who are coming, but something comes up that prohibits them from showing
* People who are coming, but just never...sign...up...for a room...or say anything...
* People who are coming, but don't tell you.
Etcetera, etcetera.
What I did was call a few hotels first, after we'd nailed down a weekend within our group. It ends up that the timeframe in question is a big one for school trips to DC; that caused a few issues. It came down to two hotels - one, a Holiday Inn in Ballston, which I felt was the superior location, and the other a Courtyard Marriott that primarily caters to businesspeople just outside the Beltway, but right next to a Metro station and with much better rates. I took the latter.
I should've had an inherent advantage in these discussions - my brother, with whom I live, is a lawyer (criminal defense and civil law, mostly). Another one of my good friends is a contract attorney. Plus, as I mentioned, I had an event planner who was helping me "on the side".
But I screwed it up.
I took a count of everyone who said "yes" or "maybe" to come to the 'fest. I took 75% of the yes-s, and 25% of the maybe-s. I then talked to the hotel about getting a block of rooms. This was the same hotel that my friend Roy had used for his wedding guests, and it'd been a simple ten room block.
Well - we were looking at around 20 rooms. That's the magic number, it seems - it went from "sure, we can set that up for you" that he'd gotten to a forest of contracts and demands for me.
What got me were two things.
1. I was told things on the phone and they were different in the contracts. I felt I could handle this on my own, and did so - I ended up paying for it down the road. That was my own stupidity.
For instance, I was told "Yes, you can lower the number of rooms you have in your block if you're not going to use them." What they put into the contract was "But you still have to PAY for them if no one rents them."
I was told "The meeting room will be $250", and when I asked about other charges they said "Just tax" - especially as I didn't want any kind of set up or anything in there. Then, in the contract, they put in a 22% service charge - and never mentioned it, verbally, until after it was too late to cancel the meeting room.
2. They pressured me into signing "right away". I would typically get the documents by mid-afternoon and would be told I had to have them signed and returned by Close Of Business (COB) that day, or the deal would be null and void. That prevented me from showing them to my brother and pressured and intimidated me into reading them quickly to get them back, helping to lead to what was caused above.
Honestly, I was caught off guard by all of this; I hadn't expected a company with a corporate image such as Marriott's to be so slimy and underhanded. But they were, and when I pitched a fit about the service charge they had me take it off the contract.
Guess what? They charged it to me ANYWAYS.
But, at this point, we had the guest rooms, and we had a meeting room for a first day "meet & greet" situation. Now it was just time to wait...and wait...and wait for people to sign up.
I'm in what I consider to be a pretty great guild, the Hrafn Warband. We started in Midgard/Guinevere back in Dark Age of Camelot, and since then we've been represented in, let's see:
* Star Wars Galaxies
* City of Heroes/Villains
* PlanetSide
* World of Warcraft
* Auto Assault
* EVE Online
* Guild Wars
* Kingdom of Loathing
* Lord of the Rings Online
* Everquest 2
and probably some other games in a more minor capacity.
2006 was our five year anniversary - a pretty good one considering the nature of the guild. We're a completely democratic guild. All full members - thegns, as we call them - are equal in stature within the guild, no matter what, and anything that affects the guild as a whole requires a vote of usually 2/3rds majority, unless it's on a "dreng" who is being promoted to thegn, in which case it takes only two or more "no" votes to vote them down. In any single game, 3-5 members might make up a "Council" to handle guild leader responsibilities and other administrivia, but nothing more than that; they still have no more power than anyone else, unless you count the right to actually post a Thing for a vote.
(Surprisingly enough or not, that doesn't happen often, but I'll cover that more in a later post.)
What it also means is that it takes us forever to decide anything.
So, during 2006 we decided we should have a guild gathering in real life to celebrate.
We've met up in smaller, more informal gatherings a number of times before. A number of us go regularly to various conventions, such as Origins or DragonCon, quite a few live in close geographic proximity to each other in some parts of the country, and some of us, who travel a good bit for work or whatever, have met up with who they could.
But this would be different - a 'fest, a Hrafn-fest with nothing more specific than "Let's hang out with guildies."
Where to have it?
Ah, that's the question all the time, isn't? The West Coasters want it out there. The Texans want it there. The East Coasters want it there. Some even suggest Vegas.
So what do you do? You put it to a vote.
Vote once to narrow it down.
Vote again.
And again.
And even when Washington, DC, area wins out by a single solitary vote, you end up with another question - who is going to organize it?
Sigh.
I will.
I'm that stupid, masochistic person.
After all, it means *I* wouldn't have to travel anywhere. And that I'd get to pick what we do!
And I get to do all the work and shoulder the responsibilities.
How much is that?
I wouldn't know until much later, and, in fact, truly until it was over.
But until then it was endless discussions. When? What to do? How to keep non-gaming spouses amused? Where to stay? How to help poorer members?
We worked and worked on those questions. And soon we had a weekend, and a hotel.
Next time: The joys of working with a large chain hotel, and of trying to see how many people are actually coming.
You'll probably see this soon enough, but not necessarily right away. That's okay; we're just getting started here at GamersInfo.net in this category, and I've got a lot of stuff to say.
If you've followed the site at all so far - and, honestly, I hope you have - you've seen that while we primarily do game reviews and MMO blogs, we've occasionally had other things. We've had, for instance, editorials about things such as buying gold, interviews with developers, previews of upcoming games, descriptions of media events, etc. and etc.
As I'm not playing any MMORPGs right now, I will admit one thing: I wrote that editorial about buying gold. It came up after I'd started playing yet another MMORPG and was tired of always being broke, so I went ahead and went to IGE to buy some start-up funds. I never regretted and still don't; on the other hand, it definitely felt more necessary in that game than it did in other games.
I digress, a bit. My point is that there are a number of topics that come up in relation to gaming, be it with the more meta discussion of the games, or the communities of games, or even the industry itself, and hopefully these blogs will be our opportunity to share our thoughts on these subjects with all y'all out there on ye olde Internet, and you can always use e-mail, the forums, or even the comments to share your thoughts right back at us.
Isn't that nice?
We're not the big guys; we're small, we're informal, we're friendly, we're indie! Well, maybe not Indie Rock Pete...
So if you want to talk about something, you can tell us, too. Don't forget that we also take guest submissions, and that you're, like, important to us, and stuff.
(And you know what? If you're really nice, maybe I'll even talk about non-electronic gaming once in a while! Wouldn't you like to hear about my uber-awesome first attempt at a 40K Space Marine army? Or why I keep buying RPGs even though I never play them? Or my hopes that I'll get a continuing Settlers of Catan going soon? Probably not - heck, I wouldn't necessarily want to hear them. But I'm on this end of the connection! BWAHAHAHA!)
