+++ title = 'Howis OFFZONE 2024' date = 2024-08-25 +++ Hi, I was at OFFZONE 2024, It was fun. 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