For the past 5 years GS has held the Live Cam Tour during E3, and for the past 5 years Colin Carlisle has been the man behind Cam 1. Colin has always done a fantastic job and has even become somewhat famous for his work. The most common question in the chat when people show up is "Is Colin doing the Live Cam again this year?". People like him and his work and the amount of dedication he put into his tours. In past years Colin would walk the show floor for 6+ hours per day with few breaks just to make sure we the viewers get the most out of the Live Cam experience.
However, this year GS changed up the format by not only cutting his hours down to 3 hours per day, but also now giving him cohosts. And not just 1 cohost, but 3, changing every hour. This has Severely crippled the Live Cam experience due to having to Colin having to make his way back to the GS booth every hour on the hour and trying to locate his next cohost.
While most of the viewers can agree that cutting Colin's hours as to not work him to death is a positive in his favor, I believe we All agree that the cohost system is very annoying and unnecessary. We would love nothing more then to just have Colin on the floor by himself doing his own thing. Not only is the cohost swapping annoying, it takes much from the experience and completely disconnects the viewers.
In years past the viewers would send messages and questions to Colin within a question box directly above the chat. However, those questions went to emails he would receive and made it difficult for him to read and navigate through them because he would have to open each one to read them. I met Colin 2 years ago and he told me that during his first year those emails went directly to his personal email, and by the end of E3, he had 1600+ unread emails. This year GS finally took the much needed step to set him up with Twitter, making it Much easier to navigate. The only problem this presented was that not everyone had Twitter, but that is really an issue that the users/viewers need to fix themselves as Twitter is free and easy to set up an account.
Colin would normally spend his time in between booths checking those messages because he would have us tell him where WE wanted him to go or ask the questions WE wanted to know the answers to. That was the beauty of the Live Cam, it is an Experience for us at home who cannot attend to see and get the most out of the show floor, with Colin as our guide. But now with the many cohosts, he has been reduced to mostly being a camera man, and with his interaction of the cohosts throughout the floor, those messages are not being checked as frequently if at all at times.
Again, with all the switching back and forth of cohosts, we hardly got to see any of the show floor. In years past we got to see the vast majority of everything there was to see. And Colin landed many Amazing behind closed doors interviews that not even GS staff members were able to land.
The Live Cam Tour with Colin is a great Experience that many of us come back and look forward to year after year. Most of the people watching it are returning viewers from previous years. But many agree, the new format is tedious, boring and we feel disconnected. Please take into consideration when planning for next year that we the viewers would like something closer to that of previous years with Colin doing the Live Cam Solo.
If you've read this far, thank you very much for your time, and we hope you keep this feedback in mind for next E3.
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