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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1578699" data-attributes="member: 10201">Man, i miss those days! Nowadays, my conventions are pretty well planned out, with usually only a couple blocks of time actually free. That's the price of trying to get a game company off the ground, so i'm only sorta complaining. Honestly, if it weren't for running games there, i wouldn't bother to go anymore--i really hadn't thought it was well-run since WotC/Andon took over, and only continued to go because the expense was so minimal for me. When it moved to Indy, my expenses went up by an order of magnitude or more, and if i were going just to have fun, i wouldn't--if i were spending the kind of money it takes to attend a convention just for my own pleasure, i'd skip GenCon and go to Origins. Of course, we're doing our best to make GenCon fun, but i think it's been succeeding despite the management, not because of it.  The gaming has always been great, and so on, but the organization can be such a headache. That said, i see a light at the end of the tunnel for the first time since TSR collapsed--i actually believe that Adkison and his staff will do their best to improve the convention, and i think it'll be much better this year, rather than the two-steps-forward-one-step-back of improvement under the WotC/Andon/WotC era. While i wouldn't have gone to GenCon Indy last year if not for the trying-to-promote-a-company thing, i'm also glad that i did, because i thought it was so much better than when WotC/Andon ran it. (Apparently nobody else remembers the equally-long lines on Sat the first year Andon ran GenCon--'cept they never gave people any refunds. Or the fact that they wouldn't/couldn't change the bottleneck that plenty of people pointed out to them was the real problem, so the lines were almost as bad the 2nd year.) I really think the new management is making great strides (and, in fairness, a lot of them were there when WotC was in charge the last couple of years, at least--and i thought that the last year at MECCA was the best GenCon that WotC or Andon ever put on.I still probably wouldn't bother going if i couldn't justify it as a business expense, just because it's so expensive, relatively speaking (when it was in milwaukee, i could hop a bus for ~$20 round trip, stay with friends for free, and reasonably go for just one day if i really needed to save money (I've done GenCon on as little as $60, including a bit of shopping)--now it's Real Travel, hotel, eating out, and i can really only justify all the expense and hassle to myself if i go for the whole weekend--the per-day cost is even more ridiculous if i were to go for a shorter time). But i'm just not a big spender on vacations, and i have a really excellent FLGS or three in town. It's not so much the decreased fun-quotient as it is the increased expense. I might not be going just for fun even if it were as fun as the best of the TSR days of GenCon.</blockquote>

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