[2019] My Outpost Discovery Feedback: some good, but overall disappointing

My friend and I attended the Outpost Discovery event in Orlando on Friday. We had one-day VIP tickets and were there when the doors opened. Let's start with the good stuff:

Pros:

• Amazing aesthetic and fantastic production value on the various sets and attractions.
• LOTS of Xbox One X consoles for playing 16-person LAN matches
• Plenty of Fireteam Raven arcade machines (more on FR in the cons section...)
• The Halo lasertag was INCREDIBLY well done and creative, very fun to play. (Congrats to Blue Team on being the winners of the very first official round! Sincerely, one salty Read Teamer 😜)
• The first three rooms in the Halo Ring experience were pretty cool (though the sound quality of the wireless headphones was bad due to lots of static), but the final room where you're inside the dome looking up at a projection of a Halo was totally immersive and very well done... even if a certain Spartan II soldier at the end looked like a string bean.
• Got to meet some 343 folks (Ske7ch and Bravo) and a couple of Halo YouTubers (LNG and Halo Canon) in passing, and everyone was friendly and laid back. Bummed I never ran into Grim, but that's okay.

Cons: (Unfortunately this list is a lot longer than the pros)

• The lines. Were. Ridiculous. My buddy and I were lucky enough to play the Halo lasertag with the very first group as soon as we entered, so there was no wait time, but for anyone who didn't get in really early or really late, I feel sorry for you. We got in line for the Halo Ring experience after lunch. We walked for several seconds after entering the beginning of the queue, so the line wasn't even as long as it could have been, and we had a 2 1/2 hour wait. This was not due to a technical glitch — that had happened early in the day and gotten resolved — this was just how long it took. My friend and I were so exhausted after this wait that we couldn't stand the idea of wasting most of our remaining time standing in line for one, maybe two, more attractions, so I still don't know what the 4v4 VR, the Pelican simulation, the Covenant escape room, or the target practice are like. VIP tickets, and we only got to enjoy 1/3 of the main attractions.
• I was very excited to play Fireteam Raven. Much to my surprise, signing in to my XBL account so I can get the achievements (a real badge of honor for such a niche experience like a Halo arcade game) was not working because they didn't hook up the machines to the Wi-Fi. Oh well, at least I can play... for less than 10 minutes? It wasn't even enough time to get started on the 2nd level, of which there were 6 or 7. I understand if there's not time to let everybody play through the entire thing, but the amount of play time should have been doubled. When there were lines for FR, they were extremely small, so they could have afforded to let people play for longer.
• The people running the consoles in the play area (not for the competitions, which were not advertised at all, I'm just talking about casual BTB games) were clueless. The guy who was overseeing our set of 16 consoles/monitors refused to let us play anything other than Team Slayer, even though every player there said they wanted a round of CTF. Not only that, but we basically had to argue and convince the guy to let us switch to BR starts and a 100 kill limit. Before that, everything was AR starts (on BTB for crying out loud!) and a 25 kill limit, which effectively made the games boring and way too short. 343, don't let people who have no clue about Halo run the play stations. I understand that you don't want some random kid concocting up some awful game type that no one wants to play, but allow for some reasonable flexibility for crying out loud.
• Merch ran out way too fast. Upon entering the event at the beginning of the day, attendees, even VIPs, essentially had to choose between getting in line for merch so that their cool item didn't run out or getting in line for an attraction to avoid the outrageous wait times. 343, you should have had a lot more in stock for the helmets and t-shirts. If you don't make these items available for purchase online after Outpost is all done, you will really be doing wrong by a lot of fans who want nothing more than to give you money.
• Communication was very poor. Neither I nor my friend were given an itinerary in our bags or when we entered, so we didn't know what time anything special was going on. You just had to keep an eye out and ask around to find things out. Plus, we only found out about the Outpost app by word of mouth, as it was advertised very poorly. About the app...
• I loved the concept of scanning the various exhibits with the Outpost app, but unfortunately, the app itself is very buggy and needs some work. Every time I switched apps or turned on my phone screen after idling for a few minutes, the app would restart, and it was a considerable load time. So 3/4 times, when you wanted to scan something, you'd have to stand and wait for the app to reload when it should have just been able to continue where you'd left off, like any other app does.
• Never once during my time there was I ever prompted to enter my gamertag anywhere (except Fireteam Raven, which didn't work anyway). Does that mean there's not going to be any sort of special nameplate in MCC for being an Outpost VIP, or even just an attendee? No Waypoint badge? With Outpost being such landmark event, I was really hoping I'd have some sort of "badge" to commemorate it in the online space of the Halo community.

Closing notes: This was the first day of the first stop of a huge event, so I was expecting some hiccups, but I honestly do not feel that this event was worth what I paid. Still, though I was a bit disappointed by what I got, I think 343 should still be proud of themselves for what they put together. I hope they address these issues so that the rest of the Outpost events can get even better. I want Outpost to go down as a great success, and I think it still can be if they make some improvements. Also, people need to stop complaining about food prices. Those are controlled by the convention center, not 343, and they weren't even that bad, barely more expensive than buying lunch out at work.