OK, so I've arrived in Columbus for Origins - and discovered I'm booked in the wrong damn hotel. Perfect time/place for a blog post, right? So I said I was going to talk about event placement, that I had a lot to say. Let's see if that's true.
So how do we actually place events? It's a coordinated combination of juggling and grunt work. Initially we take the map of all available space and just kind of earmark different areas for categories of events
(TCG, RPG, minis, etc.), usually based on last year's demand and what we know about any big changes due this year. Things are very loose and fluid at this point. There's lot of "Hey, what if we put that there?" and "That might work, but we'll have to double-check and get full details." Things tend to change a great deal once we actually have to start using the space we set aside for something. Inevitably, something just doesn't fit.
That initial pass, however, lets us get at least basic table-counts. After we take care of large-scale events and stuff that has really special needs (separate rooms, large open floor space, etc.) we just fill rooms with tables and get to work. We take an export of the registration system and create an Excel table with visual blocks for schedules (special thanks to Rennie for this, btw - he wrote a script to automate that step this year, something I'd been bitching about since forever). We use that to plot out table use in individual rooms. If a given room has 10 tables, obviously we can only have 1 games in there at any given time (assuming they're all only 1-table events). The visual schedule helps us sort out what rooms have availability at what times.
When doing these assignments, we try to keep events for the same gaming group together in the same rooms over the course of the entire weekend - if we can. Frequently things just don't work out that way, unfortunately. Rooms fill up very quickly and because we have to do place one group at a time, inevitably some groups' games get completely scattered around. Sorry if that happens, we tried to do the best we could on that.
Sadly, it's not a particularly smooth process. It's all based on Excel files, so nothing's really fully automated and it can get quite difficult to juggle everything. I spent most of my time placing RPGs which is more tedious than anything else - it's much easier for TCGs but much, much harder for minis (pity Rennie - he had to handle most of those). Individual events are relatively easy to place, it gets complicated when people have special or specific needs or when we try to keep most of someone's events in the same location, or at least near to each other. Friday and Saturday afternoons fill up really fast and quickly make it impossible to give everyone their own space they can count on.
Then, when we inevitably find that there is some kind of conflict (a request we didn't notice, an accidental double-booking of a room, etc.) we have to try to juggle things again to adjust and find space where there sometimes really isn't any. Thankfully we have been able to place everything submitted before the deadline (and a great deal of what came in afterward) this year, though late events that wanted those packed Friday and Saturday afternoons may have to be turned away.
Once we've placed everything in our visual Excel grid, we take the big Excel list of locations and have that uploaded into the system so events actually get officially assigned a location, room number, etc. That's when you actually get to see it online. Right now only the building is being displayed online, but that's only because we're actually using the "Room Number" and "Table Number" fields now, instead of putting everything into "Location." We'll update things to display the full information as soon as we can. The priority the last few weeks was getting the program guide and event charts together for publication. That gets sent off the printer pretty far in advance (in the next few days, I think).
So that's how it's handled now - we take the entire event database (5671 active events when I just checked) and place everything manually in an Excel form. We take that info to build a list of locations associated with event IDs and upload that back into the registration system. As has become my mantra of late, I've got plenty of ideas on how to change that in the future, but that's down the road. Right now, Indy. And I wanted to give you some context on how stuff is placed.
