Gen Con LLC Community

I forgot to mention earlier (so angry and frustrated at this fiasco) that I wish the rest of you good luck.  Hope you get every game you wanted.

Mark

OK, what am I doing wrong? I'm on the same computer as earlier, but my cart is now empty, and when I search for my events none are found. WTF?!?

 I started at 3pm...finally got event tickets after 10pm tonight.  Childbirth was less painful than ticket purchase this year.

OMG I am  so glad I did not go this year like I wanted to. I am sorry for all your pain. All I can say is, GO TEAM GEN CON !!!!!!

I started at 12p Eastern and managed to get checked out by 230p.  Guess I won this year's lottery by it only taking 2.5 hours to buy tickets for 6 events.

This is my fourth year of registering for Origins and each year it sucks harder than the last.  And each year, they rave about their "improved" system.  Actually, all they are doing is improving my (already impressive) colorful language.

Having to click on four separate links in order to add events to a badge is not an improvement.  Especially when each page takes 5 minutes to load and is guaranteed to timeout at least once.  And if you're trying to buy tickets to an event for more than one person?  Forget that mess; you have to repeat this process for every person.  Needing to select an address that you know is unecessary is also just plain stupid. 

Oh yeah, and not every page needs to be secure.  Why are the purchase instructions on a https page?  Having to "okay" the need to show both secure / nonsecure items was a pain on a whole different level.

Who came up with this registration programming?  Seems like three brain-damaged monkeys hacking on an iPhone would have been about as useful.  Worse yet, who thought this was an "improvement"?

This thread needs to be saved and stickied for the next time people *** about Gen Cons registration system.

As I said on their forums, I'd rather be waterboarded than go through this again.

Well, I woke up this morning and my cart still is showing 0 events, but I can't add any of my events to my cart, so, MAYBE they are in my cached cart at work.  We'll see shortly!  I just wish Origins would put out some kind of statement, I haven't seen any posts from them on their website or forums since reg opened.

Braelun:

This is my fourth year of registering for Origins and each year it sucks harder than the last.  And each year, they rave about their "improved" system.  Actually, all they are doing is improving my (already impressive) colorful language.

I definitely agree.

Braelun:

Oh yeah, and not every page needs to be secure.  Why are the purchase instructions on a https page?  Having to "okay" the need to show both secure / nonsecure items was a pain on a whole different level.

And then the credit card checkout looks very unsecure to me... but I didn't use my debit card so I don't really care at this point.  I'll notice if any odd charges go on that card and can just dispute them. 

Braelun:

Who came up with this registration programming?  Seems like three brain-damaged monkeys hacking on an iPhone would have been about as useful.  Worse yet, who thought this was an "improvement"?

I don't know who's idea it was to change systems... but I can tell you who is designing and running it.  It's a company called Plain Black (funny how that rimes with pain in the back)

I tried again this morning with John's account.  No luck before I went to work.  I came into work and tried my own cart (which by the way was still here thankfully).  After about 10 attempts (and it insisting I was also Seth Bacon of MN) I managed to get a checkout screen and bought my tickets.  Still need to get Johns though, and that's on my home computers cache.  So it's all on him today to do it on my computer. 

I present to you my Origins Schedule:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=r2geTmJWQTRaWJJDVlnRPHw

marimacc:

I haven't seen any posts from them on their website or forums since reg opened.

Yeah, I went looking for that too.  I found one post from Trey about reg... and that was at like 12:30pm saying they'd seen a few hundred transactions trickle through so it's functioning but just slow, lol.  Nothing about the disasters everyone saw. 

Fat Dragon Games:

OK, what am I doing wrong? I'm on the same computer as earlier, but my cart is now empty, and when I search for my events none are found. WTF?!?

 

Fat Tom the computer is your friend. To mock or 'dis' the computer is treason. The penalty for treason is using the Origins system to register for Gen Con next year.

Randu the High Programer

 

Well. my cart IS here at work, but I'm still getting the choose address endless loop. :(

 

Ok, well, after going through the choose address loop about a dozen times, I was actually able to purchase my events this morning.  So, since I was able to actually buy events, I think my overall score for registration this year would be a D, based on the fact that I WAS able to register, and there was no rollback of event reg such that people had to reregister (I hate when that happens).

I was having the same problems as everyone else: Endless loop, etc. I was using Internet Explorer 7.0 (with updates). I may have made a mistake when I cleared my cache to see if that was the problem. I had tickets in my cart, cleared the cache, and logged back in and the tickets in my cart were gone. Tried searching for said events and they would not show up in the search. Maybe they are hung up in the server cache as mentioned earlier. Since I couldn't find the events, I decided to try using Firefox 3.0. Still couldn't find the events in my cart. Searched for the same events (but different times) and got those in my cart. Then it was play in the address/checkout loop for about an hour (reading Knights of the Dinner Table Issue #150). Eventually got the address to read MY address and check out. Started around 5:00 finished around 7:30. 

That was just to get the TWO events I really wanted. Now the trouble is trying to get a few more events to fill my schedule.

Not impressed with the "New/Improved" system at all. Fire the management who chose this program! 

  

Yeah Sherilyn mentioned this earlier, but just to restate, if you have ANY events in your cart, or think you might, do NOT clear your cache, apparently your cart is cached locally on your computer. :/

Well, I have now reached maximum frustration. I'm really not sure if I'll even go to Origins now at all.

I had items in my cart since last night and was stuck in the endless check-out loop. Checked my cart this morning at my home computer...items still in cart, but still endless check-out loop. Wife checked just now and items are gone from cart and no records exist on the events we wanted...yay us, I guess.

This is absolutely asinine. How is it that the "Business End of Gaming", GAMA can't even handle simple customer service aspects is way beyond me. I'm wondering why I'm even considering giving them money for this kind of run-around and lack of communication.

So, Shri...if you can let the powers that be at Origins know this, I'd really appreciate it. I love to help cons succeed, but I gotta wonder if its not better if this one dies a slow and painful death.

Man this is frustrating and i'm not even trying to register for events.   just remember everybody asd painful as this is the CoN wil be fun.  Though it does sem like bobbing for chocklate kisses in bucket full of razor blades.

Just spoke with someone at Gama. They told me to leave the carts as-is and they should be fine when this issue is resolved (yeah, right.) There is a private industry forum for owners I'm on and I left a posting there outlining everyones frustration and pointed them to this forum as an example, not that it'll ever do any good. Hard to believe just how far Origins has degraded in the last 4-5 years.

You know though, and I know others have said this but, as much as things suck right now with registration, we all WILL have a good time if we go, even if we don't do any ticketed events.  I say, as bad as this is, I'm going to try and focus on the positive, which is a fun vacation seeing my friends.

Yeah, but why am I rewarding Origins with money for this???

We could all have fun with no events if we all decided to meet THIS weekend in Columbus...is Origins the reason we have fun? The hotel cost is worth it to meet and play with friends, the boarding of the dogs cost is worth it to hang with my friends....why am I buying a badge and events that don't exist to have a reason to meet all my friends again??

 

You could do what we're doing this year..,. buy the exhibit hall pass $10 for the whole family ... and hope to get into/run some pickup games for free.   i'll have most of Gencon Con games with me.   Of course the whole time i've been wishing Ai could go a regular badge and get into some scheduled games... even with ll this mess.

Rbree:

You could do what we're doing this year..,. buy the exhibit hall pass $10 for the whole family ... and hope to get into/run some pickup games for free.   i'll have most of Gencon Con games with me.   Of course the whole time i've been wishing Ai could go a regular badge and get into some scheduled games... even with ll this mess.

We did that last year and really enjoyed seeing the GC crew outside of GC...more relaxed atmosphere. Yeah, we could do it again, but I like supporting cons to see them grow....this one looks like it has no pulse and people should pull the plug as they continue to regress every year with no concept of the plumetting numbers they are seeing in attendance.

I have always championed the idea that GC registration, while painful, was getting better. This year...they proved it. GAMA seems to consider Origins as an afterthought to their Trade Show, and it shows in the execution...which is getting worse from what I can see.