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I’m going to preface this by saying that I really enjoyed Runefest, it was great meeting everyone and I think Jagex did a good job with the event itself. I don't want to put a downer on the weekend but this needs to be talked about.
Jagex really needs to never host Runefest in Farnborough again. As with last year the town simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to cope with the number of attendees. Let me go through the issues.
On both Friday and Saturday it was extremely difficult to get back to the town from the venue. The walk from the venue to town is a 30 minute walk down poorly lit streets so while it's possible it really isn't ideal. Uber and other taxi apps have a very low number of drivers in Farnborough so they're pretty much not an option, either showing ridiculous surges or just “no cars available”.
This means the only real choice is calling a local taxi company. We did this on Friday immediately after the Golden Gnomes finished and was quoted a 30 minute wait. I said fine, we can go back inside the venue and wait, I knew this would be the case after the same thing happened last year but I don’t mind waiting.
After 40 minutes without hearing from the taxi company I called them and they said the taxi had been and gone, and that they wouldn’t be sending anymore taxis to the venue because they'd already sent a bunch and nobody was getting in them. I think what was happening is that everyone was ordering taxis from the same one taxi company, nobody could tell which was theirs and as a result the drivers were getting frustrated and driving off. So after wasting 40 minutes of the night waiting for a taxi that we never had a chance to get into we ended up having to walk anyway.
While I was speaking to the taxi drivers to figure out what was going on I met a woman in a wheelchair who was also unable to get a taxi despite calling one. This was super concerning because she didn't have the option to just give up and walk like many others, hopefully she managed to get to where she was going safely.
On the Saturday evening we got talking to some other attendees who had travelled from the US and this highlighted another problem with the taxi situation. Since people from the US and Canada generally won't have European roaming covered on their phone plans they were left not being able to call or use data and relying only on WiFi. The guys we spoke to were relying on the very few Uber drivers in the area and waiting a really long time to get a taxi since they weren't able to call the local ones.
In London you can guarantee you'll be able to find an Uber/Bolt/Kapten pretty quickly at pretty much any time of the night. And even in the worse case scenario you can always hail a black cab to get you home.
When we were travelling back home to London on Sunday there were no trains running from Farnborough to London meaning we had to get a rail replacement bus to Woking and catch a train from there. I'm not sure if the rail service disruption was publicised before the event, if not then I guess we can't really blame Jagex for this but it's still something that wouldn't have been an issue if Runefest was held in London. Mod Roq tweeted about this.
The taxi situation and partly the trains along with almost everywhere in Farnborough closing at midnight/1AM led to a fair amount of frustration and I think it would be better for everyone (especially people visiting from overseas) if it was held in a more accessible and well supported location like London or even the Birmingham NEC.
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