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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2261535" data-attributes="member: 10201">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.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.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).</blockquote>

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