Today’s the big day for GenCon registration — make-or-break day for thousands of gamers looking forward to this August’s festivities.
Will registration be a better experience than it was last year? Peter Adkison, the owner of GenCon, says it will be — I hope he’s right.
While you sit in front of your computer, finger poised over the refresh key, let’s chat about the con. Are you running an event? Are there GMs you’re looking forward to gaming with again? GMing-related products you’re excited about?
And once the frenzy is over…how did your registration go?
Actually, given that this is the first-ever con that this 30-something is going to, I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed with options at the moment.
Hopefully no one will be throwing toast or hot dogs at me when I get there 🙂
Walt
Martin,
Do you have your bottle of Valium at the ready? I am going to be logging on right at 3pm, and I have to say, that I don’t have very high expectations for the site coming up. But I hope to be surprised.
It’s taken a few reloads, but it’s nothing like the previous years. They made buying a “bag o crap” at woot.com look like a walk in the park…
…and it appears I spoke too soon.
Going to check out, I’m hung.
It is still crap. I got screwed with the hotel reservations again this year (I don’t know where I am staying), and now I can’t check out to get my events. I’ll probably end up doing generic tickets and on site registration again.
Maybe I am biased because I work in the tech industry supporting an infrastructure myself. I used to run the international electronic trading network of our ASP division too. We have millions of real time transactions going across without a hitch, and compared to a simple web transaction system like a registration portal it is a much more complex system. Yet it works, and it works very well!
The guys at GenCon should just outsource their enitre online registration system to a third party with the infrastructure backbone to do this sort of thing. Every year I read about how their IT department has suggestions, made improvements, blah, blah, blah. They just don’t know how to deliver a good web service. They know how to run a con. Stick with what you know and pay someone to do what they know. In this case pay someone to handle your three online registration processes (hotel arrangements, badge, and events). There are companies out there that can handle something like GenCon’s online needs easily and their services woudn’t be very expensive.
Seriously, I would love to talk to their IT department and learn what they are using for this setup. The software looks like shit. The site isn’t anything to brag about. It just looks like amateur night tech work on a shoestring budget. Martin’s open letter had the solution – increase the price by $5 and use that money to build the right solution. But these guys shouldn’t do it themselves because their IT staff obviously doesn’t have what it takes if every year they keep hitting the same wall.
And don’t whine about “We can’t know what will happen until the launch date because it only happens once a year!” crap. You can measure what your network, systems, and database can handle beforehand and you have the metrics regarding how many people will be attending the con. Get off your asses and contract a system capable of handling those numbers.
I swear, I’m beginning to think GenCon isn’t worth the trouble anymore. I go to smaller cons and get the same satisfaction from playing games and meeting new people without the hassles of a difficult registration process. I’m only three hours from Indy and if I’m thinking the trip isn’t worth it I can’t see how others find it worth a flight to go to!
If it wasn’t for having a seminar and an event of my own to run, plus the opportunity to meet TT people face-to-face I would probably cancel the trip this year.
I’ve been trying to check out for an hour.
I’m so hung I can hear a bad rendition of “She Bangs” in my head.
(Walt C) I’m so hung I can hear a bad rendition of “She Bangs†in my head.
I’m tandem-registering with a friend, and this made us both laugh out loud. Thanks, Walt.
It took us 24 minutes to fill our carts (we need 4 tickets to everything, which you can’t do solo), which is a HUGE improvement over last year. Unfortunately, it’s been followed by 40 minutes (so far) of trying to check out.
*sigh* I’ve been trying to check out for an hour now. It’s as though the bottleneck has simply moved down the pipeline. Supposedly things will stay reserved in my cart – I can hope, anyways.
It’s better than the pre-internet days when you sent in your first three choices in land mail and found out what you’d gotten when you got there. I think you could register for 3 events…
I made it through finally. Took me 15 minutes to get my events into the cart, and 45 minutes, with 3 attempts at checking out to get everything done.
This is the first year that I have gotten an RPG event before everything closed out.
But I echo VV_GM, about either farming out the registration system or coming up with some other throttle system. It is clear that their software cannot handle the volume they get. Its been several years now, they have enough data. Now do something about it.
Aside from that, it is nice to be done with this round of registration. I will go back and get a few more seminars when the dust clears.
Oh yea, and don’t forget to register for Mastering Your GM-Fu!
OK, registered.
Some lessons: Let it load the next page, or die trying. Endless “reload” commands will not make it go faster. I work in computers and should know this, but apparently needed to re-learn it.
If you can find the commands to change it, adjust your timeout to looonger.
Go directly to registration.gencon.com. One less step in the climb.
Telas
Our checkout just completed: 24 minutes to put events in the cart, 70 minutes to check out — less than half the time it took last year, if memory serves.
That’s still a lot of time, particularly for a weekday, but kudos to Peter and his team for improving the process to this point.
How’s your registration going?
(Telas) Some lessons: Let it load the next page, or die trying. Endless “reload†commands will not make it go faster.
I actually found that after trying to reload a couple of times, hitting the back button, then the forward button, had the best results. That got me over every hurdle except the last one (processing my payment).
I have one RPG event a day, as well as 2 seminars.
It took about 2 hours to complete everything.
Walt
Oof. I hear what people are saying about that website. I started promptly at 1pm MST, all my desired event codes in hand, and didn’t get a “you’re all clear and paid up” message until 3pm. It was brutal. And I was sure my credit card was going to get hit with the same charges about six times.
In any event, I survived it and I’m registered, including for your seminar. I’m looking forward to it. Glad you’re leading one!
I think we should spring for a gift certificate to PetCo for 2 free hamsters.
We should present this certificate to Peter with a note saying, “This way the event registration system can have triple the capacity!”
Just a thought.
I did get signed up, but had many problems. I had all my event codes typed in, hit submit and the system told me I wasn’t signed in. I hit the log-in again button and it told me I was already logged in. I ended up losing three of the events I really wanted. I got into the most important one though. I’m ready to master my GM-FU. Looking forward to meeting other TT’ers.