We also ran into a bunch of people. Most of them were friends of my teammates, who I didn't know. But we did see Nikolai of Mastermind Hunts, who'd assembled a team from frequent Mastermindists.
Other teams were arguably essential: One puzzle required noticing something subtle. We weren't so good at noticing it: we'd sat down, spread out all of our stuff, and were looking through it frantically. A few other teams came up: they were all stuck on the same thing. We all ended up working on that puzzle together; thus, when we actually figured it out, a horde of a few dozen folks all descended upon that site's monitors.
This hunt helped to keep things fun for the monitors by requiring teams to do things: One puzzle's answer was COMPLIMENT, but to get credit for the puzzle, you had to pay the site monitor a compliment. To get credit for the LAUGH answer, you had to tell the site monitor a joke. This seemed like a good way to keep site monitors happy even if they weren't especially into puzzlehunting.
