Winter Holiday Festival Expo- success or failure?

Was the Winter Holiday Festival Expo a success or a failure?
I had fun building and visiting the holiday sculptures for the Winter Holiday Festival Expo, but this thread only got a handful of comments, much of them complaints about lag.
I only encountered lag when events were running. Otherwise I liked the chance to "show off" in a high traffic area (my little build there generated more feedback and compliments than anything else I've ever made). And I had a great time checking out all the fantastic towers, sculptures and creatures.
How do you think it went over? Fun? Boring? Ineresting? Frustrating?
Any suggestions or ideas on how to improve future expos?

I would also be interested to know how people felt about the Winter Expo. I never took the time to attend, so if you have an experience that was particularly good or bad, or if you have suggestions about how future expos could improve, please tell us!

Also, does anyone have any Expo ideas that they would like to share with the erst of us?

Champie

There was some really beautiful stuff made for the winter expo, really superb sculptures especially. But the lag killed me as well. I could hardly walk around never mind participate in the snowball throwing thing they had with the lindens.

Lag ruins our SL lives.

I would have loved to see the Winter Expo, but when I tp'd in, almost immediately crashed. I tried five times and game up, so I missed it. Any photographs?

Alexa

I think it was great...I saw it as an extension of Burning LIfe which was awesome.

There were some very creative builds, ranging from the homey winter cabin scenes to images of a Gigeresque frost. As a creative outlet, I'd judge it a success.

I only had about 1 hour to sluggishly fly around and view builds though, because the lag was so bad I eventually had to relog at Home location just to get away from it. Couldn't fly, couldn't teleport. It was awful. As a use of resources, I'd say it was an abysmal failure.

I never had any of those lag issues at Burning Life, so I'm not sure what exactly the difference was, but whatever it was, they should weigh them before doing another festival and plan accordingly.

Here's some snapshots from my blog:
More Winter Wonders
Winter Gran Guignol
Frozen Goods

Tanaquil Karuna a good selection of pics on her blog too:
Winter Expo

Enjoy!

Olympia, thank you so much for posting the photographs, I thought they were all outstanding.

Alexa

Burning life was confined to 4 sims and x amount of people were picked via lottery.....the winter festival had many more people( anyone that wanted in could build ) and unlimited prims basically. I think those 2 facts made it much more sluggish.

wow, those pictures look great. I wish I hadn't missed it. Thanks Olympia

I liked all the builds and had fun with mine, but I thought the layout of the plots was not very good.
It was hard to just wander around looking at builds.

The layout could have been better. I think someone brought this up after the fact and one of the Lindens responded that they'd take layout into consideration for future events.

One solution may be to have the exhibits spread farther apart, each with a temporary teleport to send the visitor to the previous or next version.

I have enjoyed the photography, Olympia. Thanks for sharing -- and of course, I was also at Tana's blog.

Did anyone else notice a certain parcel in the vicinity of Zermatt with a prim multipler bonus of, say, 28? I'm quite certain I saw something like this but I didn't take photographs so I now shrug *shrugs*

I enjoyed the art shown... it was, of course, quite laggy. But I am willing to suffer for the beautiful art that my fellow avatars create in here.

Lag or not, I would like to see more community activities like this. Even more so that basic account holders were included with premium accounts. This truly made it a full community event.

I also enjoyed the snowball fight. It was pure chaos and it didn't bother me we crashed the system. I had a great time, and so did everyone in attendance. Andrew Linden was prolly a bigger target then Phillip as it was just after the update from hell that caused so much trouble for everyone.

Through out the two weeks, I would go out and take in the various art and meet a lot of interesting and new members of SL.

I agree about the layout...there was enough space on the lake to allow more spread between displays and maybe a few less prim. A "walking path" would have been nice as well as lot markers to correspond to a notecard "program" of who's build was who. Yes, I know we could get that from mousing over, but a directory of participants would have been convienient later when referencing against screen shots for blogs, etc.

-Taylor

All the parcels ahd a serious prim limit... I had a 512 m2 plot that had 3000 prims available I only used 126 I think.

I agree 100% Taylor.

Any ideas?

I am interested in finding/forming an Event/Expo group to sponsor such things...

What would you like to see next?

Champie

I'd really like to see an Historical-Builds theme. Viking Villages. Medieval Hamlets. Feudal Japanese.. (not sure what their neighborhoods are called Al Badiyan Tent Cities. Mongol Camps. Etc etc... Blacksmith shops, apothicaries, courtly mansions, Communal longhouses..

I think it would be great to see what people choose and what kind of research and details they can incorperate.

(Unedited for typos.)

How about "architecture and objects that you would never see in real life because, after all, it's Second Life?"

I'm serious.

Olympia, I enjoyed your 1st & 2nd days of Christmas display very much. I'd been wondering how many days into the song you might go.
Great job!

I posted my Winter Expo comments and pics here.

Shucks, thanks

In retrospect I sould have at least tossed in 5 golden ring prims.