(Send by PM, I have a bad habit of ignoring my e-mail on occasion.)
1. Started in March '04; highest job is WHM70.5 (almost exactly, haha - just barely over 17k/34k to 71).
2. I live in Oregon. I wouldn't mind going out of state, but, as usual, it's the whole "making sure I have vacation time" issue that keeps me from going.
3. I'd go with two live events a year - one for the West Coast around May or early June, and one for the East Coast around September. Four-day (well, 3 1/2) events, with registration on Wednesday and the event running Thursday morning through Sunday afternoon, would be preferable simply because they allow people with odd weekends to pop in for the first day or two.
On that note, if you do multi-day events, do separate pools of "full event" tickets and "single-day" tickets, and reserve some single-day tickets for people buying them at the door. For example, based off the most recent Fan Fest, single-day tickets would run $40 in advance and $50 at the door, and full-event tickets would run $125, with enough tickets available such that if a day were completely sold out, roughly 5,000 people would be present (~1500 full-event, ~2500 advance single-day, ~1000 single-day sold at the door would be my rough and thoroughly uneducated guess as to the breakdown).
4. I haven't yet attended any of the Fan Fests (due to a lack of vacation time). My opinion of this year's, however, is that it was sorely in need of either being longer or having more tickets available, or both, based on the sheer amount of complaining about how quickly the tickets sold out and how little there was overall in the way of total content.
5. Personally, I'd like to see at least one unrehearsed Q & A session with players. I understand that we may seem somewhat harsh in our assessments of things, but this is partly because we're all frustrated over how things seem to be getting dropped in translation. Just give a disclaimer that answers we get here may just be the dev team shooting their mouth off (and therefore nothing should be taken as actually official) prior to it. We like interesting semi-confirmed rumors (for example, "We might be able to give a useful hint towards <insert obscure and/or extremely hard to defeat NM here>", followed by something other than a video that makes little or no sense as to what we're even supposed to be looking at). We don't like massive ambiguity and apparent attempts to leave us entirely clueless. :-)