Registration Experience (Good or bad?)

[woodelf]

Of course there is. You look over your business Internet needs and then get servers that are geared to cover the heaviest times, the peak periods, and double it. It's how you design a system that works. You then watch your growth and when you get near 150% of capacity, you increase your ability to handle even higher potential peaks.

That's not an alternative to the existing system; that's fixing the existing system. To match the parallel of umbrella-to-raingear, there'd need to be some way of registering for events at GenCon that bypassed the need for the existing registration system, while still leaving the existing registration in existence. IOW, two ways to get to roughly the same goal (keeping dry), one of which is minimal investiture but not always sufficient (umbrella--if nothing else, not a lot of help in very windy rains), and one of which takes more investiture/effort and is therefore only justified for more-extreme situations (head-to-toe waterproof sailors' raingear). And, since there *isn't* an alternative to the GenCon registration system (that is, the only way to get registered for events at GenCon is by going through the registration system), the parallel (of why the occasional insufficiency of umbrellas is acceptable) breaks down. This is in no way commentary, pro or con, on changing/fixing/upgrading the existing GenCon registration system.

[For the record, i do think it should be improved; i also, personally, don't particularly care because it doesn't inconvenience me appreciably; and i don't know enough about either the technology or the inner workings of GenCon LLC to make an accurate assessment of the feasability of changing things, though i'm more inclined to believe those who're saying it's a hard task, because i've dealt with the GenCon LLC crew enough to know that they're mostly nice folks, and i find it hard to believe that they'd be deliberately shooting themselves in the foot this badly, even through arrogance.]

 

[Mark]

[For the record, i do think it should be improved

Then we are agreed.

 

[woodelf]

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.

Yes. I guess the difference is that there's always been way more i want to do at Gencon than i could possibly do--i have to sleep at some point, and can only be in one place at a time. So having some events sold out has merely made my decisions easier: instead of trying to decide between 6 possibilities for any given hour, i only have to decide between the 3 that're not full. And i don't think there's ever been any one particular event that i just had to get to.

 

[woodelf]

We have GenCon's system (a couple thousand allegedly) and Ticketmaster (a few hundred thousand). What, there's nothing in between? I do wonder if they're using Andon's old system. Andon did this for GenCon the year or two before Hasbro/GenCon LLC.

I know nothing of preregistration (though, it still wasn't online at that point, was it?), but onsite registration under Andon was far worse than the worst it's ever been when run by GenCon LLC. You don't remember the 6+hr lines just to get in the door (never mind buying any tickets)?

I doubt they're using Andon's system, because it went from Andon to WotC and then to GenCon LLC.