With the 1,500 Path of Exile (POE) fans at the venue in Auckland, New Zealand and another 300,000 tuning into the live-stream on Twitch on average, ExileCon was a high-octane event.
The conference was a celebration of all things Path of Exile, an online-only ARPG made by Grinding Gear Games (GGG), and included an exhilarating line-up centred on driving quality engagement with the POE fan base.
There was a unique challenge that came with hosting an event for gamers - there were high expectations for audience engagement. With that in mind, ExileCon gave the audience plenty of chances to interact with the game-makers through interviews, panel sessions and exclusive announcements.
The organisers needed a Q&A tool that allowed both physical and virtual attendees to ask questions in real-time. With 10 Q&A sessions to run, the platform also needed to be easy to set up, user-friendly for the audience, and able to handle the magnitude of attendees who will be signing in and interacting live.
To achieve this, ExileCon turned to Pigeonhole Live.
When Pigeonhole was enabled, the Q&A process and interaction with the attendees was stress-free and pretty instant.
When asked what drove their choice, Melissa Liao, Quality Assurance at Grinding Gear Games, pointed out Pigeonhole Live’s platform scalability and security as top reasons. When compared to other audience engagement platforms they had considered, Pigeonhole Live supported the largest number of attendees. They also found advanced security features like IP address whitelisting an added plus for an event that scale.
The design of the Q&A tool itself was fundamental to why the organisers loved using Pigeonhole Live. Since the Q&A sessions were the main audience engagement component of a majority of the event’s sessions, finding a tool that was straightforward and simple for both organisers and attendees was important. And the organisers found Pigeonhole Live’s Q&A easy to set up and manage throughout the event.
“We would definitely recommend Pigeonhole due to the ease of setting up each session. And being able to set up profiles for each speaker/moderator to showcase the talks was a plus. The ease of question filtering and accessing the session for attendees was great,” said Liao.
When asked about their favourite features, the organisers told us that Hide Question and Answered features was a hit among the moderators. Marking a question as Answered removes the question from the projector screen where top-voted questions are displayed, making room for new questions to surface. This feature helped moderators manage the incoming questions more effectively, especially during more active Q&A sessions.
Given the scale of the event, many ExileCon attendees appreciated the anonymity feature that allowed them to express themselves freely while retaining their privacy. The attendees also enjoyed the upvote feature that gave them the autonomy to boost questions they liked to the top, increasing their likelihood of being addressed by the speaker.
Overall, the organisers found that Pigeonhole Live’s Q&A tool made the audience engagement at ExileCon simple, stress-free and effective. “When Pigeonhole was enabled, the Q&A process and interaction with the attendees was stress-free and pretty instant”, said Liao.
Want to create a virtual conference like this? Read our guide on how to use Pigeonhole Live in your virtual events.