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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GodDelusion" data-source="post: 5151010" data-attributes="member: 73412">I would like to chime in and share my frustrations with the registration process.  This is my third consecutive year attending Gen Con, and the perception I have is that the registration process is worse now than ever before.  Sure they slapped a new UI on the process and admittedly provided some much overdue search features.  However, the engine that drives the registration process, the underlying data access, is as shoddy as ever.  It took me nearly 25 minutes to register for 3 RPG events and 1 Board Game event.  I spent more time reloading dropped pages than I did actually registering for events.  At the worst, I would enter an event id and the page would begin querying the database to find the matching event, and then the page would expire (failed to receive a response from the server before timing out).  When I reloaded the page, I would be pushed out to the main page again and would have to navigate back to the event registration page. Typically this would not be an issue, however, it was a crap-shoot trying to get back to the event registration page due to the load on the server.  Four times, when returned to the main page, I would not have the nicely laid out UI with the graphics and visual components.  Instead, I was presented with a page completely missing graphics or layout.  All of the text and links were left-justified and rendered in a top-down hierarchy.  I was particularly emotional this year because my kids (twins and neighbor's son) were finally old enough to participate (13 years old) and I was very eager to get the family registered for the desired RPG events.  Regrettably, due to the extremely ill-equipped server, I failed to get two of the desired RPG events.  Knowing that I had similar issues during the previous two years, I had two alternate events for each desired event and was able to salvage the weekend.  Had I not been able to get into the events I wanted, due to poor IT, I would have requested a refund for the cost of the badges I purchased for my family (5 in total).  In the end, it is extremely frustrating that the brain-trust of Gen Con, knowing there would be a mad-dash for events at the opening of registration, did not have the foresight to beef up their infrastructure to support the server load.  And if they claim they did not expect the server load, then shame on them.  Given the history with issues linked to previous year's registrations, they should have been better prepared.</blockquote>

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