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title = 'Howis OFFZONE 2024'
date = 2024-08-25
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Hi, I was at OFFZONE 2024, It was fun. <!--more-->

Overall, I enjoyed event thou I had problems with events/contests and my free time:
 - Too many people, hard to win
 - Too many contests that you want to get into
 - Tasks on the contests are solved too long to fully participate in at least 3 in 2 days. I'm not even talking about getting to the reports.
 - There is no list of contests in a conveniently readable form, otherwise you go around all the stands and I got depressed from not understanding what to spend your attention on. 
 - It is not very intuitive where to go to get to the right event/auditorium (which especially hits with a large number of contests)
 - Little space to sit down with a laptop to take part in the contest
 - Obvious problem to spend offcoins - everything I wanted to buy was taken away, long queue and the fact that it was impossible to buy some things for offcoins on the first day.


My suggestions:
 - To make the conference a little more local / split it (split it into several parts, let's say the contest part and the part purely with reports / workshops and socialization), (reduce the number of tickets) OR extend the conference, from 2 days to 4, even if there will be no reports.   
I can give an example of the past Standoff Talks, as an example of a local convention. It was the most comfy conference in my life, especially the first day, it would be cool if the second day there were contests (because second day was a little dull).
 - Limit contests by duration, say an hour. Then you to take 10 random hackers, let them solve the contest, note how much time is spent, calculate the average time.
 - Make a separate web list with activities and their description, so that it is possible to divide by type and by tags (say: complexity, windows/linux/reverse/web/etc, whether you need your own laptop, whether it can be done at the booth) and how many offcoins

I didn't like the fact that I wasn't really talkative with strangers and I need to change 


