We recently hosted a feedback stream with Jon Winkle (Managing Director), Terry Mills (Event Operations Manager) and Sam Bell-Wood (Marketing Assistant) here at EPIC.LAN to review recent feedback from our EPIC46 event and our overall 2025 annual survey.
Hosting the stream in itself was a suggestion made in the feedback to help people understand some of the requests made, what we've changed and in some cases what we won't change and explaining why.
Here's a key summary of some of the recent feedback and improvements we'll be making.
Bar Stock - The venue do their best to manage stock levels based on previous order patterns but also can't hold lots of draught stock in particular if there are no other upcoming events as it's not a permanently open bar. We don't know what happened in October though, you lot drunk them dry.
Hot Food Later - There's an official closing of around 22:30 for catering, especially as they've been open since 08:00, but if the demand and stock is there they will keep going a little later while it's busy. Plus, don't forget, unlike other similar events, you're allowed to bring your own food in to EPIC.LAN including takeaways, so you're never stuck with no options available to you.
Bar Prices - It's always going to be more expensive than a local pub because it's not a full time bar selling the daily turnover of a traditional bar, but compared to other event prices like football stadiums, theatres, other event venues, the pricing is still very reasonable (around £6 per pint). Prices are always going to be subjective to where you've travelled from too.
Food Quality - We share feedback with the caterers every event and make adjustments to the guest caterers as needed. But if you have specific issues at the event, do raise it with the caterers or us at the time, it's much easier for us to correct it and pass on live feedback than reading it a few weeks after in a survey.
Queues at the Bar - We only implement this when the bar gets really busy and will continue to do so. On Saturday nights in particular the 'traditional' way of piling up at the bar makes it really difficult for people to get in and out of the Lakeside hall so we put the queue in place to manage that access safely.
No Ales? - Yes there were! Local beers and ciders are something we've had at the event for many years and continue to have, they're usually on the back of the bar (but we are looking at moving to bottles to minimise waste for the venue), but they haven't gone anyway. If you're not sure, just ask the staff.
More Shop Range - Similarly on our shop we have to manage stock levels as it's only used 3x a year so we have to order safely and not have loads left to take back with us to the warehouse otherwise we have to throw it away.
Sell Toilet Roll Upgrades - If other events can upgrade to your own toilet, I'm sure we can look in to a toilet roll DLC on the shop.
Recycling - More gets recycled than you may realise, hence the clear bags in the bins, but sometimes it's just easier to collect it all together at an event like this and separate it after, just getting people to use the bins is a challenge a lot of the time.
Pub Quiz - Didn't Realise I Had to Book - You Don't. Some tables are put up in advance to book, but others are left to turn up on the day, we had 2 tables left when we started last event, so we didn't sell out. Yes we had to clear people out last time before the quiz started so we could safely rearrange furniture to maximise seating, but we have to do this sometimes to manage movements safely and not risk people getting injured, or worse, knocking your drinks over.
Discord Channels - Create More vs Too Many - We're still working out the balance here and will probably never get it right for everyone. We get as many people asking for a smaller number of event channels as we do more channels for specifics.
More Photos of Players - We have a small team of volunteer content team members who do their best to cover as much of the event as possible, but we don't promise photos of everyone. If you want to guarantee your own photos then you should bring along your own photographer or speak to a member of the team, but it's impossible to capture every person when there's nearly 1000 people there. Also, we published some quick highlights albums during the last event, some people thought that was it and didn't check back later.
Timing & Scheduling of Community Activities - We don't ever plan to run things late, but it is a live event. Sometimes things (both people or technical related) cause delays and we have to do our best to keep on top of things. We're one of the few events with a dedicated team there to put on community activities in this way, where other similar events just leave you to your own devices, but with the way people play games together these days, sometimes it's really tough to get the variety of activities to suit a few hundred people and to round people up to play. Ultimately though, anything we put on for the community is for fun.
PA Announcements - Again, we get both ends of the scale here, some people want them, some people get annoyed by them, that's why we've moved more towards Discord pings as that gives you a choice to enable or disable notifications on your chosen device. Even if we did announcements, they'd have to be so loud that they interrupt people over increasingly better headsets and if we overdo them, then really important announcements would potentially be missed as people tune out of the noise.
Takeaways at LUX / Tabletop - You can only eat these in the gaming hall or your hotel room, not any of the public areas of the hotel, their venue, their rules!
Longer Karaoke - OK!
WiFi Signal - We don't manage the physical WiFi infrastructure at the venue, we just stick our SSID on to the existing network, we know the venue wants to improve it and update many of the access points as a few are getting older now but it's a cost investment for them. It's one of the reasons we don't charge for this service and have it as a 'best effort'. Appreciate it doesn't help with 4/5G signal is rubbish in the big metal box of a building.
Shuttle Bus - We're trying! But we're also not bus/taxi operators and I think that's the expectation from people. For EPIC47 we'll be adding a tracker on to the bus that people can use to see where it is currently and see if that helps.
Temperature - The venue is not air conditioned in the main hall, so when people ask us to switch the AC on...we can't! It's air handling so relies on whatever the external air temperature is to cool things down. Once we hit a certain temperature the only thing we can do is open external doors/shutters which makes it cold for the people sat next to them and opens up a security hole in to the event. We'll be proactively managing this with scheduled openings when we can move security around and hopefully prevent it reaching those higher temperatures next event.
Website Design - We know, it's happening! We already completed the move to Stripe payments ready for EPIC47 which has massively helped modernise the booking process and open up more payment options, now we're working on a completely new design.
Group / Student / Under 18 Discounts - We won't be doing this I'm afraid, we run the events on a breakeven basis so any discounts we offer mean everyone's price has to go up to still bring in the same level of income which we don't feel is fair on everyone else.
Announce Activities Earlier - We agree and hope you noticed the change for EPIC47 where we had our whole community and stage timetables out there much earlier and we'll continue to do this.
Have the events in term time to make it cheaper - We have to plan our events around other UK events and venue availability, sometimes they land in school holidays, sometimes they don't. As Kettering isn't necessarily a tourist destination (I know, I was shocked too) then the hotel prices are more often determined by peaks in corporate use rather than holidays. Term time can make it harder for some people to attend too.
More Rentals - We're a BYOC event first and PCs are pretty expensive (even more so right now, thanks AI). Any investment in PCs needs to have a guaranteed business case for us to use them all year round, not 3x a year at our LAN events otherwise we'd have to charge a crazy amount per event to make sure they're paid off in 1-2 years.
Multiple Rooms - We pay for the amount of space we use and adjust that throughout the year, but sometimes we just don't have the numbers to justify the additional rooms, e.g. February. We'd love to have separate casual/loud/esports spaces every event, but also have to keep everything affordable.
More game nights / community activities / meetups - We've announced a whole schedule of activities for 2026 including theme park trips, theatre meetups and a minimum of monthly game nights, make sure you're in our EPIC.LAN Discord and signed up to the events to hear more.
Icebreaker Games - We'll look in to doing more day 1 icebreaker games in person from EPIC48 to help people meet the community.
Communicate Ticket Sales Better - They're openly available on the home page of the website and booking pages, plus as they start to run out we make regular Discord and social media posts.
