Overview
The rough ideas that I had before were for a short marathon from December 27 to 30, from 5 PM to 10 PM EST as opposed to the 2 to 10 runs from before. We can use the extra three hours for bonus streams beforehand if so desired, taking donations again for those (as they were the number one donation driver last time), and still have after-hours streams if people donate and request them. We need to be careful in our game choices if we want these streams to be a regular occurrence, being sure not to wear out our options: good choices would be games that we didn't run last time, games that were extremely popular with viewers and will always be, and games that weren't viewed much because of scheduling mishaps (e.g., Ristar and NiGHTS caught some viewers off-guard by starting at 1 PM instead of 2 PM).
We should be able to put this together without the eight months of planning the other marathon needed, as we already know who's capable of streaming and nobody can use the excuse "well I didn't think it would actually happen!" to screw up the planning.
Driving Donations
As stated, the most donations last year were for bonus streams. We could try planning them beforehand and putting them and their required donation totals on the schedule. We also had people ask about donation-based raffles for prizes, which is something I'm open to. I think that digital prizes would work best (gifting games via Virtual Console, for example), but if anybody wants to handle shipping physical prizes, that can be done too. A few people asked about art as prizes such as at SDA's marathons, but I think that is more up to TSC's artists than myself: I only know of Quartz, PPA, and sonikku as good artists, and I think sonikku will be wrapped up making pictures for SDA.
We can have people split up their donations for different things via the comments section in ChipIn, e.g., somebody donates $25 and puts $3 of it towards a game raffle, $12 towards an art raffle, and the remainder towards a bonus stream. We need to keep in touch with donators about what they want, as some donations appeared late last year.
Games
This year's only new game will be Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, and given how well the prequel's stream went, I consider that a definite must. That was followed by Puyo, which had a big crowd but messy organization; I'm okay doing this again only if we can get it organized better and only if the interest is shown beforehand instead of on the day of the event. Tails' Skypatrol was popular last year and is probably a must for the lulz, but Mr. Skypatrol Guy has said that he probably won't be participating in this marathon. A bunch of us have begun playing Sonic Robo Blast 2 online again (myself, RPG, sonikku, Werey, Hyper, and sometimes flying fox), and between the vanilla game and the two biggest fan mods, we can probably find some content here.
Other games that should be played are more obvious (Genesis Sonic games, Adventure series, etc.).
Setting Up the Streams
We had hiccups last year when it came time to actually stream. I'll again be asking for a quality test from everybody that I haven't seen consistently stream well. I ask that self-advertising be contained to the start and end of a person's segments, as we had to see a lot of self-promoting stream borders last time. Any border or marquee or the like should be plugging the charity more than plugging oneself. I'm okay with a picture or two surrounding the stream, but keep it Sonic-related and clean.
Picking a Charity
We had some complaints that Child's Play was about comforting the ill rather than fixing problems. I personally see no issue with this, but if anybody has a charity that means something to them, please speak up.
Please contribute your own thoughts. I'll be leaving for a shift at work, and will check on things after I return if I get back early enough, or tomorrow if not.
