Registration Experience (Good or bad?)

[DonTadow]

perhaps someone might do an impromptu event or the company will have scheduled games posted at there booth. Sometimes some companies are late and some try to avoid a paperwork.

 

[devilish]

Worst Experience!

Argh! I've got nothing I wanted! I think the system this year is horrific!

Last year, you could search on-the-fly and get accurate counts as to whether
you could get into something.

Now, you have to put your schedule together (by guessing from an outdated Excel
spreadsheet whether there's an opening or not) then go to your shopping cart
and wait for it to tell you "sorry, no more openings."

How is this better than last year?! The servers may be less prone to lock up (didn't
have any problems last year past day one) but the system sucks!!

I HATE IT! I HATE IT! I HATE IT!!!!!

 

[Queen_Dopplepopolis]

How is this better than last year?!

It's not. Even with the crash last year - I was able to register by the evening that registration opened. My experience last year was MUCH better than this year.

 

[JesterPoet]

I, too, had a much better experience last year.

 

[IronWolf]

I had a better experience registering last year also, of course I registered in July at the last minute for the impromptu trip....

With that said, the registration this year was abysmal. Knowing that badge registration was also quite bad this year you would have thought they would have done something by the time event reg came around. I mean, really - upgrading the DB on the first night of registration? Seems to me something that should have been done and tested long before opening day...

 

[woodelf]

I share and understand your frustration. But know this, The first time I went to Gen Con, I didn't sign up for any games. I picked up Generic Tickets and got into games, I played and ran all night pick up games, I sat in on some seminars, and spent hours in the dealers room.
An amazing time can still be had without every game you try to pre-register for.

I'm not trying to downplay how brutal this registration has been, I'm just saying that you will be impressed once you get there.

I've been going to GenCon every year since...'92? '91?, and i've never once registered for a single event ahead of time. I've never lacked for things to do, have usually had the problem of too many choices at any given time, and have been able to get into the events i wanted with generics at least 2/3rds of the time. I really don't think not being able te pre-register for the exact events you want is that big of a deal. And if it's a game you just wanted to check out, you might even come out ahead: i've been able to experience 3 new games all at once even though all 3 were full, by sitting in on [watching] each of them for an hour. So, i got to find out what all of them were like, instead of the just one that i would've learned about had i gotten into one of them.

 

[woodelf]

I'm working on getting the "Add Events" page to load... not having much luck.

There has *got* to be a better way to do this. :\

Yeah, it's called lottery. Everybody who registers is randomly assigned a number, which is translated to a date/time within the registration period. You can't register before that date/time. Distributes the load quite effectively, and fairly. The distribution could be skewed by seniority, or badge-buying date, or different tiers of badges. And i suppose it'd be nice to keep track from one year to the next, so one person doesn't have the bad luck of being in the last 10% several years in a row. But then some of you'd be bitching because you couldn't register until next month.

Same old story with the GenCon website. Useless. They obviously didn't learn their lesson or just don't care.

This may seem terribly simple, but there are freeware programs to test the load on a server...why wasn't anything tested...again?

Or they learned their lesson and care and can't do anything about it. Maybe they did test the load. Maybe they can only afford hardware and hosting to accomodate 1000 people at a time--if y'all all insist on jumping in in the first 5min, it just ain't gonna work.

This pretty much sucks. I can understand 10-15 minutes, but an hour of non-response..? Sheesh.

Because, while being hammered by 50k pagehits every couple seconds, they should be able to magically materialize new hardware and software to solve the problem. "I'm gonna hold this firehose on you until you stand up."

----
You know, people, you're making the problem, not GenCon LLC. Or at least, contributing. Previous experience: the servers get swamped at the beginning of the registration process due to too much demand. Response: be sure and get in there right at the beginning of the registration process. And nobody sees a problem with this strategy? If the participants of this thread are any indication, we've got more people than ever jumping in at the same time, so of course the problem is as bad or worse. Heck, for all we know, they spent a bunch of money to accomodate last year's peak demand--and y'all just exceeded that with this year's demand. You're all complaining that GenCon LLC hasn't learned from the past and changed their behavior--why haven't you learned from the past and changed your behavior? Why not register next week?

And while increasing capacity is a reasonable solution at first, at some point it just doesn't make sense. Should they really be expected to pay thousands of dollars more to accomodate a peak load that only lasts a day or 3 out of the year? A peak load that might exceed their typical operating demands (such as during the convention) by a 100x or 1000x? At what point are they allowed to say "sorry, we just can't justify spending 10X on our hardware and internet service when 99.99% of the time we only use X"? It's simple cost-benefit, which just doesn't handle huge, short-term, spikes in demand. Same reason you sometimes have a long line at the store, even though much of the time they have cashiers standing around idle (i.e., they've planned for varying loads).

 

[woodelf]

After four years, you'd think they'd be smart enough to *expect* a crush of registrations over the first day. There are established patterns, and the appearance is that they've done nothing to prepare for a well-known phenomenon. They may have upgraded the system a great deal, but if it's still only "upgraded" to the point where it can effective deal with 100 users at a time (and we know there's WAY more trying to get on as we speak) a little faster than it did the year before, the real problem has not been addressed.

It's like living in Southern Florida, and just assuming that there won't be a hurricane. "Sure, there's been one EVERY YEAR, but this year, I bet we're due for peace." Absolutely asinine.

Or, it's like living in Southern Florida and building a house that's designed to withstand the hurricanes of the last 5 years, and then the mother of all hurricanes comes along and wipes out your house anyway. Unless someone actually knows otherwise, i think it's just as reasonable to assume that they're "fighting the last war": they really did upgrade things, but demand grew even more.

 

[der_kluge]

I only got hosed out of one event (Iron Lore, as I should have expected). I was also sad to see no Ars Magica, HARP, or Tekumel events being offered.

I'm planning on running a HARP pick-up game on Saturday. Check out the pick-up games thread for more info. Looks like your schedule may already be booked on Saturday, though...

 

[DonTadow]

I've been going to GenCon every year since...'92? '91?, and i've never once registered for a single event ahead of time. I've never lacked for things to do, have usually had the problem of too many choices at any given time, and have been able to get into the events i wanted with generics at least 2/3rds of the time. I really don't think not being able te pre-register for the exact events you want is that big of a deal. And if it's a game you just wanted to check out, you might even come out ahead: i've been able to experience 3 new games all at once even though all 3 were full, by sitting in on [watching] each of them for an hour. So, i got to find out what all of them were like, instead of the just one that i would've learned about had i gotten into one of them.

I'd have to completely disagree with you. There are certain things that get sold out every year and sure, you can find something to do, but isn't the point of a vacation to do waht you want to do as opposed to what you have to do.