My brother had this idea after he and looked around and couldn't find any Harry Potter stuff for my wife.  We didn't have a lot of time to search through the dealer's room and we had no idea where to look.  Fortunately my wife found what she wanted when she looked around.  Anyway, his idea was that maybe Gen Con could set up a search engine for the dealer's room.  You type in what you're looking for and it gives you a list of dealer's who sell it.  This could be linked to the Gen Con website and maybe have dealer room kiosk provide the same service.

Urthforce1:

My brother had this idea after he and looked around and couldn't find any Harry Potter stuff for my wife.  We didn't have a lot of time to search through the dealer's room and we had no idea where to look.  Fortunately my wife found what she wanted when she looked around.  Anyway, his idea was that maybe Gen Con could set up a search engine for the dealer's room.  You type in what you're looking for and it gives you a list of dealer's who sell it.  This could be linked to the Gen Con website and maybe have dealer room kiosk provide the same service.

I don't think this would be practical. My suggestion, as mentioned in another thread, is schedule time in the hall as you would an event to give you enough time to "search" the hall. An hour or two is certainly not enough time to view the whole hall.

Osarious:

I don't think this would be practical. My suggestion, as mentioned in another thread, is schedule time in the hall as you would an event to give you enough time to "search" the hall. An hour or two is certainly not enough time to view the whole hall.

What I usually do myself is to take an hour or two and race through the hall at high speed. Don't stop for more than a minute or to to confirm what is there - just take note of the booths you want to stop at later and set aside some time for.

Then later in the weekend when you have more time you can go straight to those booths and take as much time as you want to browse through. It also helps you figure out how much of a budget you'll need to buy everything.

If you stop at every booth the first time you'll see if, you'll never get through the hall quickly and you'll end up either spending too much or run out of money and find out that the one book you've spent years looking for was waiting for you in the next aisle.

 Wise words, there.... that's what I've been doing for a number of years now, and it works like a champ. Thought I was the only one who knew that trick. :-)

Aren't all the boothes numbered and listed in that cool catalog we get? Not trying to be mr smarty here, but seriously.

 In years past, I have scheduled time for the hall, and scoped out booths I knew I wanted to check out, planning the first expedition by the map as thewildeman suggests.  This year I just scouted as I walked through as Derek recommends.  Both have worked.

thewildeman:

Aren't all the boothes numbered and listed in that cool catalog we get? Not trying to be mr smarty here, but seriously.

Problem is, the book doesn't have a description of what they carry, especially if it is on the more obscure side. Some booths may not even want to promote what they carry (as in the bong booth).

Fair enough, I just wonder if you could tell what some people might be selling by how they list their booths. So and so's costumes would be obvious and you might narrow down your search by eliminating things that don't match. I dunno.

Bong booth, lol. I still say it would be good not to see that next year. Is it a gaming convention or a smoking convention?

 I have a suggetion. I was a total noob and missed out on stuff I know I would have loved. If there was an area where total noobs could go and get great information and maybe someone who has about 30 minutes to spare to show you around this would be cool.

I tried to do my own research before going but I did not have enough time to do all of it and find everything.

 I still had an awsome time, but it would have been better if I knew that there were events at the hotels attached to the convention. I thought after I walked around the entire convention that I had seen all there was to see. I noticed that I had missed a ton as I was about to leave on sunday after getting there early saturday monring.

I know I personally would do this if I had attended this for several years and felt I was a veteran of it. I think if a just ten or so could give 1-2 hours a day to help first timers find everything. They would meet some new and interesting people this way too.

 The Gamer Wenches (I believe) did that last year. I know there was a post that mentioned they were just too short-staffed this year to do it again, but that it might happen next year if they get the personel.

As I keep saying, one day I need to sit down and do a handout; Gencon Adventuring, Making the Most out of the Best Four Days of Gaming. 

Set time to walk and window shop the dealer room, first time through don't buy just check things out.  This is about a three hour tour!

Now, having said that, it would be nice if the dealers attending had a place to post information about themselves, links to their sites/blogs/etc.  Yes, this really is up to them but there are only a few that seem to interact with the forums. Take for example what the RAM does, not a dealer but part of the community. 

Osarious:

Urthforce1:

My brother had this idea after he and looked around and couldn't find any Harry Potter stuff for my wife.  We didn't have a lot of time to search through the dealer's room and we had no idea where to look.  Fortunately my wife found what she wanted when she looked around.  Anyway, his idea was that maybe Gen Con could set up a search engine for the dealer's room.  You type in what you're looking for and it gives you a list of dealer's who sell it.  This could be linked to the Gen Con website and maybe have dealer room kiosk provide the same service.

I don't think this would be practical. My suggestion, as mentioned in another thread, is schedule time in the hall as you would an event to give you enough time to "search" the hall. An hour or two is certainly not enough time to view the whole hall.

Urthforce1:

Why wouldn't it be pratical?  Some people don't have time to do a thorough search of the dealers' room.  I wouldn' think that it would be that hard to set up.

Try to coordinate x00 dealer's info (althought Derek does a good job with events, I don't know who would have the time to assemble the info.) Some may not list everything they carry (or even provide the info) and you wouldn't find it anyway.

Also, you do have time, you just choose to do something else. And that is fine.

Right, I mean it's a fun suggestion; but honestly, I can't imagine how long it would take to do something like this.  There are over 300 vendors, and some of them bring hundreds of different pieces of merchandise, and of course some of that changes at the last minute.  I can't imagine how many man hours it would take to do such a thing, and I can tell you that Gen Con does not have the man hours to spare. 

 I also shudder a bit to think of the chaos in the area surrounding the kiosks where this info would be available. I can't imagine all 32,000 people would want to use it at once, of cours, but even if .1% of the people were in constant rotation for wanting to use it, the lines would be annoying, let alone near opening time when (one assumes) that number would increase dramatically. They'd pretty much have to setup another cattle line like they have for registration.

Add in fun tidbits like the potential damage issues involved with large numbers of people having access to computers (do you use basic workstations and risk mouse/keyboard damage, or do you use touchscreen kiosks-and who gets to pay for all this extra technology?) Not to mention the probability of having a volunteer or two tasked with supervising the area (not to mention the manpower needed to input and maintain the data) that could be better utilized somewhere else.

Seems like quite a bit of extra effort when the simple reality is that these forums are wide open and vendors are more than welcome (considering the responses I've seen to places like the RAM and the Say Anything game, I'd even say encouraged) to come here and post about themselves.

Terminaxe:

marimacc:

Right, I mean it's a fun suggestion; but honestly, I can't imagine how long it would take to do something like this.  There are over 300 vendors, and some of them bring hundreds of different pieces of merchandise, and of course some of that changes at the last minute.  I can't imagine how many man hours it would take to do such a thing, and I can tell you that Gen Con does not have the man hours to spare. 

 I understand what you mean it does look like a massive task, but it is easily remedied when it comes to inputting it. I am in the computer business and it would be real easy to set up a parser program to first take select values and post to a file and then take those files from each vendor and place them in a single file that would be parsed to get the information and place it on a web site. Then they would do a search through the website looking for what they want. How many people at Gen Con would have a smart device where they could search a website? How many people bring their laptop to do a search through an internet website? Would you still think that over 20,000 would use a kiosk system? Or do you think it would be more like maybe 5,000 or less? I think this one is doable.If someone with GEN Con LLC wants I could make a demo to show you. It would take me like a month to create said test program and website set up. 

Again, this is something that Gen Con simply does not have the resources to implement, I can assure you.  If someone wants to privately contact all the vendors and see if they want to provide you with a list of their merchandise for next year, I'm not going to stop anyone from doing that, as long as they don't say they are with Gen Con, and make it clear they are doing this on their own.  But, the time and resources required from Gen Con to implement this are simply not available.

Let me just elaborate, this includes, contacting all the vendors, requesting a list of merchandise, following up with those vendors (several times) who do not comply, answering questions from the vendors regarding this "new thing", creating a web site, creating a program to parse the information, and to present it in a usable format; maintaing the website, adding/'subtracting merchandise as new vendors come, old vendors drop, and existing members alter their merchandise; fielding CS requests from people on how to use the system; fielding CS complaints from people if the system turns out to not work, work poorly, or is inaccurate due to last minute vendor stock changes (which happen all the time).  And that's not even everything.  I know it seems easy to just create a databse to parse info, but that's only the tip of the iceberg on this one.

I would also point out that I know of NO OTHER CONVENTION ANYWHERE that does this.  It's simply too time consuming for something that wouldn't be accurate onsite anyhow, and for information that can simply be gathered by walking the exhibit hall.

I will also chime in on the side of it is not practicle, nor do any other conventions do this.

I will offer this: 

If you are looking for a General description of what a listed booth is selling - then that list already exists.  LivingDice.com ususally does a list of the vendors with a short descrption and a link to the vendor's website a few weeks before the convention which would help in pre-planning your dealer's room shopping.  This is useful if you are not familiar with what a company generally sells based upon its name.  For example - Chessex sells dice, I know this as an experienced gamer and Gen Con attendee; however, the name itself on the vendor list does not specifically indicate dice sales to the a n00b, this is where the Living Dice list is of great help.

If you are looking for a list of exact merchandise at each booth - that is not going to happen for all of the reasons already indicated above.  I also offer that it may not be in the power of the individual vendors to have this information before the con either.  For example one of my favorite Terrain Dealers is War Torn Worlds - they make cool pre-painted terrain pieces many of which are made with recycle tire rubber -just cool.  Any way they are a small outfit and the are often in production with new stuff right up until the convention so they really won't have an idea of exactly what they are bringing.  Just between Origins and Gen Con this year, they had new stuff that they had recently tried out. They wouldn't have been able to give an exact list of items for sale in the time required for this database project. 

Aklevah:

I will also chime in on the side of it is not practicle, nor do any other conventions do this.

I will offer this: 

If you are looking for a General description of what a listed booth is selling - then that list already exists.  LivingDice.com ususally does a list of the vendors with a short descrption and a link to the vendor's website a few weeks before the convention which would help in pre-planning your dealer's room shopping.  This is useful if you are not familiar with what a company generally sells based upon its name.  For example - Chessex sells dice, I know this as an experienced gamer and Gen Con attendee; however, the name itself on the vendor list does not specifically indicate dice sales to the a n00b, this is where the Living Dice list is of great help.

If you are looking for a list of exact merchandise at each booth - that is not going to happen for all of the reasons already indicated above.  I also offer that it may not be in the power of the individual vendors to have this information before the con either.  For example on of my favorite Terrain Dealers is War Torn Worlds - they make cool pre-painted terrain pieces many of which are made with recycle tire rubber -just cool.  Any way they are a small outfit and the are often in production with new stuff right up until the convention so they really won't have an idea of exactly what they are bringing.  Just between Origins and Gen Con this year, they had new stuff that they had recently tried out. They wouldn't have been able to give an exact list of items for sale in the time required for this database project. 

It is all cool.

I would like to tell you all a story from my experience at Gen Con. I was looking for someone selling Anime DVD's. I went to a place that had Anime in their name.(can not remember their name) I then went to all of them that had Anime in their name. I was told by one of them that they had partnered up with another both that was selling their DVD's. They did not know where that other booth was cause they sent me to the wrong booth. Only good thing is that that next vendor sent me to another booth. That other booth knew exactly where to go to find it. All in all this only took me 2.5 hours to locate something that if this system was actually working would have only cost me 15 minutes at most.

But hey it is all good. Next year I will know what to expect and plan on it. Next year at gen Con If I see somone, that looks like I was last year, I will help them!

Aklevah:

I will also chime in on the side of it is not practicle, nor do any other conventions do this.

I will offer this: 

If you are looking for a General description of what a listed booth is selling - then that list already exists.  LivingDice.com ususally does a list of the vendors with a short descrption and a link to the vendor's website a few weeks before the convention which would help in pre-planning your dealer's room shopping.  This is useful if you are not familiar with what a company generally sells based upon its name.  For example - Chessex sells dice, I know this as an experienced gamer and Gen Con attendee; however, the name itself on the vendor list does not specifically indicate dice sales to the a n00b, this is where the Living Dice list is of great help.

If you are looking for a list of exact merchandise at each booth - that is not going to happen for all of the reasons already indicated above.  I also offer that it may not be in the power of the individual vendors to have this information before the con either.  For example one of my favorite Terrain Dealers is War Torn Worlds - they make cool pre-painted terrain pieces many of which are made with recycle tire rubber -just cool.  Any way they are a small outfit and the are often in production with new stuff right up until the convention so they really won't have an idea of exactly what they are bringing.  Just between Origins and Gen Con this year, they had new stuff that they had recently tried out. They wouldn't have been able to give an exact list of items for sale in the time required for this database project. 

Drat, I wished I had known this before hand. But thanks for the heads up. I will definately use them next year. Myself, I usually walk every roll and write down the booth numbers of the vendors that interest me. Saves me alot of time. I had to learn this the hard way from the previous year. Even though I had a the vendor listing in the gencon book I would find a vendor or two and then in make plans to go back to them. But then would forget their name..and/or the booth number and thusly had to run around looking for them. Not fun!

I learn new ideas and better ways of doing things every year. But I can relate to the new attendee's and the steep learning curve at times.