[Boydean]

The Good
- The venue. The walk from the pits to the dome was obviously a lot closer. I got to see the pits this year because of this! Not much more to say.

- 2 fields in dome, 2 fields in pits. Some said this was awful, some people really liked it. I really liked it. I think it mixes it up, and gives the pits a warner feel with the game announcer in the background. Not to mention that the pit fields clearly had a queuing advantage over the dome pits.

- The concert was a fantastic addition to the event. It made up for the lack of fireworks during the finale, not to mention giving out the Chairmans award during it was amazing. Could have lived with not having the Willow Smith performance though ("Where's my 21th century girls!!", sorry I had to say it).

- FIRSTies during the finale was amazing. Enjoyed every minute of it. Thanks AndyMark!

- Volunteers were spoiled, like they should be. The food was amazing (aside from the lack of vegetarian friendly food as Kara pointed out earlier, and the finale food), they were giving volunteers free massages, and a room full of bean bags for resting.

- The number of good hotels that were seconds from the dome by foot. I stayed in the Missouri Athletic Club which was 2 blocks (5 minute walk) from the dome. It was a nice hotel, great price, and they gave me free parking for the entire weekend (versus $10 a night like their site says). Not to mention they have a basketball court on the 5th floor.

The Bad
- The very clear lack of knowledge of the facility staff. Multiple times I had to ask facility staff how to get to things and they would look at me with a blank face. One staff member didn't know what I meant when I said "FIRST Robotics Competition pit area". This could be solved with a simple, short staff meeting before the event.

- The lack of directional signs throughout the venue. Several times I got absolutely lost when I thought I was following the signs.

- The lack of food around the venue was awful. I know there were places to eat, but the problem was...they were all out of food Friday. I walked into Subway, Quiznos, and Atlanta Bread; all of them some way or another were out of food. After that I called a chick-fil-a that was a bit down the road from where I was - they were just closing up because they ran out of food.

Notes
Some people complained about the safety of crowd surfing. Crowd surfing is extremely dangerous, but it is unavoidable. I've worked in events about the size as the BEP one, you can discourage it, stop it, and even throw people out for doing it, but people are still going to do it. I do wish, though, that people in FIRST would understand the dangers of it and not do it.

I wish they would have explained more of what the Chairmans team did. Either at the concert or at the award ceremony.

Lack of music on Einstein made the entire thing kinda...well, boring. Although, if it was for the documentary I can deal with that.

The speeches on Einstein were longer then usually. But FIRST really only has two times in a year to make that kind of show - the kickoff, and the championships.