As we go in to 2024, we felt like changing things up a little with our arena layout, nothing major, but we wanted to keep the technical team on their toes and give them something extra to do at the event. 

Read on to find out what we're doing and why. 

We love being back at KLV but we've always felt that the whole approach in to the event looks a little...sports hall. And we know that's exactly what it is but we wanted to improve our whole first impression in to the event. 

Similarly, there's always some mixed feedback about those seats closer to the stage and volume levels while playing. 

So from EPIC41, you'll enter from the first door in to the event hall, and you'll immediately see our event shop, partner area and stage, hopefully getting more people to see the stage as they come and go from the event. Once you go in to the main hall you'll follow the staff area around to get to the BYOC LAN section. 

We're going to use this bigger welcome area before getting in to the LAN section to improve the initial bag checks on entering the event for the initial rush (bringing the queue further in to the building to avoid people waiting outside) and will then scale back to a single checking area once most people are in later in the evening. We'll also be taking on feedback of having an "express lane" during checkin for those only bringing small bags in to be checked faster. 

Once in, you'll be able to use the usual doors in the centre of the hall to cross between the LAN hall and Lakeside for the bar and all the usual bathrooms will be available but we'll be improving the look of all these areas to feel a bit more like a gaming event. 

The overall capacity hasn't changed, we've just shuffled everything around. Oh and we've also reworked all the row numbering to make a load more sense as you walk in as everyone will be reading the row numbers from the same direction. 

It'll make sense when you get there, unless you've never been before, in which case, just go with the flow.