Gen Con Expands!

relief from overcrowding for sure. I'm happy about it!

 

[Alzrius]

It's positive, but I'm more concerned about hotel space than event space.

True this, after the complete debacle that was the housing registration for Gen Con 2015, I sincerely hope that they overhaul the system this time around...or at least go back to how it was in 2014 and earlier!

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

For those who are new to the Con experience (or are like me and have not been to Gen Con in nearly a decade), what do we need to know about the housing registration problems?

 

[Nylanfs]

Don't count on getting a hotel room through the registration system, have a backup hotel room already that you can cancel if necessary. Personally I just rented a house for the week back in July.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Anybody use AirBnB?

 

[Alzrius]

For those who are new to the Con experience (or are like me and have not been to Gen Con in nearly a decade), what do we need to know about the housing registration problems?

Essentially, it revolved around a change made to how the available housing was parceled out when the registration period opened.

Previously, the web-portal that did this operated on a "first come, first serve" basis. As soon as the site opened, there was a digital "rush through the doors" in order to register. This meant that not only were there web-traffic problems due to the sheer number of people logging in, but it also meant that if you weren't willing/able to be able to log in right at noon EDT on a Tuesday, your chances of getting a good hotel room (e.g. one within walking distance of the convention center) plummeted...though to be fair, I'd had good experiences with the wait lists in previous years when that happened to me.

For Gen Con 2015, they changed how it worked. Instead, when the housing portal went live, everyone who logged in now received a randomly-determined time for when they'd be allowed to register for a hotel room. Essentially, it made the opportunity to reserve a hotel room into a lottery. So you could have been there right when the system went live and been told to wait for three hours, or you could have gotten there an hour later and only had to wait a half-hour, etc. Of course, the good rooms were all the first to go either way, so if you had a wait time of more than thirty minutes or so, you pretty much had to resign yourself to not getting rooms that were close to the convention center.

(There was also a bug wherein people who preregistered for the convention right - a prerequisite for booking a room through the housing portal - just when the housing portal opened were automatically kicked to the front of the line, in terms of the housing lottery. But Gen Con admitted that was an error in the system.)

What I, and a lot of other people, didn't like about the new model was that it completely separated the effort you put into trying to get a good hotel room from the results you got. In years past, fighting your way to the front of the crowd right when the portal opened was difficult, but if you kept it up you'd usually have some room within walking distance to show for it. Now, it was completely luck-of-the-draw; what you put into the system no longer reflected what you got out of it.

For me and my group, we ended up renting a hotel room directly via the hotel, rather than the housing portal. That was much more expensive, however, as the housing portal automatically allows for the Gen Con discount on the rooms, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% off the usual prices.

So yeah, I'd rather use the other system than have another lottery. I much prefer a system that allows for equity of opportunity, rather than enforcing equality of results.

 

[Wolvercote]

How many more years are they locked in for Indy? Time to move to GENCon to Chicago or maybe Cleveland. NYC even better!

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Alzrius. I appreciate it.

 

[Alzrius]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Alzrius. I appreciate it.

Sure thing!

 

[hawknsparrow]

I saw Deep Purple jam there in 87!

 

[Von Ether]

So it seems like it won't be long before GenCon has to decide if it's going to go lottery-style via SDCC or take-over the city style like Dragon Con.