Gen Con LLC Community

To try to keep everyone involved and make sure that we don't miss an easy thing we can do to make our system better, post your feedback and thoughts on how the event registration system worked last year.

First off, a few ground rules:

• Be polite and civil. Seriously.
• Be specific. What we're looking at here are specific thoughts. Something like "There needs to be a way to buy True Dungeon tickets in an all-or-nothing manner, so I don't only half the tickets I wanted to a given slot" is great. "Ur system sux" is not as helpful.
• Suggest a solution or alternative if you have one, but you don't need to. Don't be offended if the elegant solution you dreamed up turns out to not be what we're looking for or simply not feasible.
• Remember this thread is not a guarantee. Gen Con in any way guarantees that anything mentioned in this thread will happen this year. Or next. Or ever. We very much want everyone's feedback, but obviously that doesn't mean we're promising to deliver on every request.

Other than that, it's better to focus on specific tweaks/improvements as opposed to whole new tools or dramatic overhauls, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't bring an idea up; we just might not have time for it right now.

We have a list of stuff noted and remembered from our launch last year, but we want to make sure that y'all have a chance to chime in again so that we don't miss anything we can resolve this time around.

Oh, and yes - "More servers" is definitely already on the list, just to head off that question.

1) A method for bulk submissions. Seriously, after 160 events, I was tired of the web interface.

2) A method to delete submissions in advance of review.

3) A way to search submissions, and output information on a 1 event per line kind of format, with selectable fields, like hours, judges, etc.

4) Inline calculation of points by event, and a page that shows points and GM hours submitted, and approved.

 5) I'd like a field in the event submission that indicates how many players per single set/board/deck, and then a field where you supply how many set/board/decks you're offering in the slot. These two figures could be used to calculate the max capacity of the slot, and it would also help avoid me wanting to submit multiple simultaneous small events to maximize my GM hours (maybe giving a little credit for multiple boards per event in GM hours would be nice too, not full credit, but something).

I think that's it, at the moment.

* If I can't have A, then B, then C, and so on. For example, I might have three events I'd like to play from noon until 4 on Thursday; let me order them, and the system will sell me the first one with open slots.  Or, I might want any True Dungeon ticket that starts in the windowof 8am to 10am on Friday; let me list all 20 or so and give me the first one with an open slot. These are both actual(ish) examples from my registration last year.  From memory, you could do this last year by entering conflicting tickets into the system, but the system ordered the requests by event number, so TDA0905007 would always be tried before TDA0905008, even if I wrote in in the opposite order.

* My dream would be the above, but with a simple scripting language allowing complex contingencies.  "Sign up for these two events; falling back to this one event that runs the full duration of both and a different event on in a different slot."  (This is obviously silly and would only please the programmer subset of attendees, I'd reject it myself if I were you. :-)

* Allow some conflicts. I have a friend who likes to register for seminars, even if they're free.  It gives her a reminder of her plans.  She was angry a year or two back she registered for a seminar which proceeded to block out a game she wanted to play; she had expected to just leave the seminar a bit early for the game. Possible fixes: Don't include free events with large numbers of allowed people; those are almost certainly large form seminars and talks, and people arriving late and leaving early isn't a big deal.  Or maybe allow a single conflict at any given time slice.  No matter what you do, a big "You have conflicting events; make sure that's your intent, and remember that it's rude to leave a game in progress," would be good.

* Again from memory, I believe last year I could create some sort of wishlist of events in advance of registration which I could just click a button to say "try to get these for me now."  That was awesome.  Please keep that functionality!

* Allow easy online returns, but charge a fee to discourage playing games with the system, and perhaps a limit on the total number of returns.  A random time window before a returned ticket became available would discourage "I'll buy a ticket and hold it for you."  Why bother? I believe that some significant percentage of no-shows for a game decided they weren't going to go well in advance of the convention.  For example, they might have got a ticket for an event, then discovered that a friend got them a True Dungeon ticket that conflicted, or a friend they only see at Gen Con scheduled a dinner get together. Making it easier to return these tickets into the system increases the chances that someone who will play will buy it and show up.  Anything to cut down on the number of no-shows would be great. On the down side, there is a risk of people gaming the system, so this may be a dangerous idea.

* Pressure (or increase pressure) on event hosts to run 4-hour events starting at standard times.  Currently it's a bit of a mess, as evidenced by this chart.  There is an almost flat number of event starts at 4, 5, 6, and 7 PM each day; the "after lunch" slot could start at noon, 1, or 2, and so on.  As a result, booking an aggressive schedule is hard as lots of game overlap in uneven games.  If my plan is game A 8a-noon, then B noon-4p, and C 4p-8p, everything falls apart if I miss A and my fallback is D, 9a-1p.  The same goes for 2 and 8 hour events, but I'm less familiar with the windows.  (Generating charts for other durations or purposes is pretty easy for me if it would help; let me know.)

AlanDeSmet:

Again from memory, I believe last year I could create some sort of wishlist of events in advance of registration which I could just click a button to say "try to get these for me now."  That was awesome.  Please keep that functionality!

I FULLY agree this fuctionality was great. Log in and click purchase. It doesn't get any easier than that. In and out so others can purchase tickets. I would like to see this again.

Also I am in favor of some event overlap because there were times when I wanted to buy tickets for two events for the same time slot because I wasn't sure if the event would make or not, luckily it did make though. Other than that, the server was laggy but there isn't much you can do about that with 10,000+ people all logging in at the same time doing exactly what you are. It will Never be lag free. Thanks for your hard work Derek!

it seems you have already heard the all-or-nothing request for TD, please make this happen.

also, i will second the above suggestions about contingencies, extremely useful for TD (yeah, main thing i pre-reg for), but also helpful for those of us who plot out a large variety of possible events based on if our first choice is available.

the wishlist was great...if it worked properly.  for events where you can buy more than 2 tickets, the wishlist needs to be allowed to do this.  last year, it had the full set of checkboxes to claim the full slot of 8 tickets (and was actually the only place i could find that showed more than 2 checkboxes), but it only put 2 tickets per event in my cart.

PLEASE allow online returns, even if it means there will only be system credit allowed on these, and refunds require email. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE.

Please. Really, for real.

Braewe:

PLEASE allow online returns, even if it means there will only be system credit allowed on these, and refunds require email. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE.

Please. Really, for real.

 Yes please do this if you can, I do not switch a lot of my choices but often stuff comes out later than first batch and I find things I would enjoy trying and that I am willing to drop other games for.

Draken Korin:

1) A method for bulk submissions. Seriously, after 160 events, I was tired of the web interface.

2) A method to delete submissions in advance of review.

3) A way to search submissions, and output information on a 1 event per line kind of format, with selectable fields, like hours, judges, etc.

4) Inline calculation of points by event, and a page that shows points and GM hours submitted, and approved.

 5) I'd like a field in the event submission that indicates how many players per single set/board/deck, and then a field where you supply how many set/board/decks you're offering in the slot. These two figures could be used to calculate the max capacity of the slot, and it would also help avoid me wanting to submit multiple simultaneous small events to maximize my GM hours (maybe giving a little credit for multiple boards per event in GM hours would be nice too, not full credit, but something).

These are almost entirely directed towards event submission, not registration. I don't really understand your point 5 at all, but I have thoughts on most of these that I'd be happy to chat with you about either directly or in the GM forum.

I'm glad everyone seems to like the "purchase everything" button for the wish list. I don't anticipate us removing any features. As for something like online returns, you'll want to email customerservice@gencon.com with your feedback about that. It's a bit beyond the scope of what we're talking about here

I'll also say that we're certainly not going to allow for any systematic overlapping registration of events this year, and it's unlikely we'll open that up in the future, or push GMs to submit for specific time slots.

It is worth noting that if you're an EO and you want to allow people to double-book themselves to your game, you can request that. Tournaments allow for double-booking as well, since you might be eliminated and we don't want to lock out your day. It's incredibly frustrating, however, to sign up for a game, get all excited and then not be able to play because people didn't show or left early. We don't want to do anything to encourage that.

AlanDeSmet:

* If I can't have A, then B, then C, and so on. For example, I might have three events I'd like to play from noon until 4 on Thursday; let me order them, and the system will sell me the first one with open slots.  Or, I might want any True Dungeon ticket that starts in the windowof 8am to 10am on Friday; let me list all 20 or so and give me the first one with an open slot. These are both actual(ish) examples from my registration last year.  From memory, you could do this last year by entering conflicting tickets into the system, but the system ordered the requests by event number, so TDA0905007 would always be tried before TDA0905008, even if I wrote in in the opposite order.

Hm. Any thoughts on how to lay this out in a form without getting too clunky? Part of the challenge here is that this really only applies to the first few hours of the opening day of registration. After that, the time pressure is over and you can browse as needed.

What if the form attempted to register you for events in the order you entered them on the form? Thus, if you want A->B->C, then you'd list those IDs in order. It would try A first and if it does get tickets for you, then B and C would obviously be blocked out. If it can't, it would just move on to B and repeat.

On that topic, should the "all or nothing" logic that was the issue with True Dungeon tickets just be the rule for everything on the "register by event ID" form?

AlanDeSmet:

* Allow some conflicts. I have a friend who likes to register for seminars, even if they're free.  It gives her a reminder of her plans.  She was angry a year or two back she registered for a seminar which proceeded to block out a game she wanted to play; she had expected to just leave the seminar a bit early for the game. Possible fixes: Don't include free events with large numbers of allowed people; those are almost certainly large form seminars and talks, and people arriving late and leaving early isn't a big deal.  Or maybe allow a single conflict at any given time slice.  No matter what you do, a big "You have conflicting events; make sure that's your intent, and remember that it's rude to leave a game in progress," would be good.

This might be feasible for some specific event types, like seminars or anime & film, but it's not something we could apply across the board for all event types. I'll have to ponder that.

Anyone have suggestions for the logic for this? Should all ANI, FLM and SEM events not count as conflicting? Are there system-definable traits for other event types that we could use to make them as non-exclusive? Price alone isn't necessarily enough, unfortunately.

Derek Guder:

I'm glad everyone seems to like the "purchase everything" button for the wish list. I don't anticipate us removing any features. As for something like online returns, you'll want to email customerservice@gencon.com with your feedback about that. It's a bit beyond the scope of what we're talking about here

I'll definitely send an email about this because I think it would be awesome to have online returns!

Derek Guder:

AlanDeSmet:

* If I can't have A, then B, then C, and so on. For example, I might have three events I'd like to play from noon until 4 on Thursday; let me order them, and the system will sell me the first one with open slots.  Or, I might want any True Dungeon ticket that starts in the windowof 8am to 10am on Friday; let me list all 20 or so and give me the first one with an open slot. These are both actual(ish) examples from my registration last year.  From memory, you could do this last year by entering conflicting tickets into the system, but the system ordered the requests by event number, so TDA0905007 would always be tried before TDA0905008, even if I wrote in in the opposite order.

Hm. Any thoughts on how to lay this out in a form without getting too clunky? Part of the challenge here is that this really only applies to the first few hours of the opening day of registration. After that, the time pressure is over and you can browse as needed.

What if the form attempted to register you for events in the order you entered them on the form? Thus, if you want A->B->C, then you'd list those IDs in order. It would try A first and if it does get tickets for you, then B and C would obviously be blocked out. If it can't, it would just move on to B and repeat.

 

I don't know if there is an elegant solution to the problem.  Nor do I think that this is a good solution to the problem.  I actually think the way the system is set up for purchases works just fine as far as entering codes, navigating and selecting events.  It feels more egalitarian because I'm able to try for my highest priority item and so is everyone else. My two cents at least.

Derek Guder:

On that topic, should the "all or nothing" logic that was the issue with True Dungeon tickets just be the rule for everything on the "register by event ID" form?

I'm drawing a blank on this issue.  Can you refresh my memory?

Derek Guder:

Anyone have suggestions for the logic for this? Should all ANI, FLM and SEM events not count as conflicting? Are there system-definable traits for other event types that we could use to make them as non-exclusive? Price alone isn't necessarily enough, unfortunately.

I think that would be a good idea.  ZED would also be a good fit, too.

On a related True Dungeon note, I am usually purchasing for a large group of players, but may not necessarily be participating in a particular game.  Last year, I was unable to register for events later in the registration process because of a group of TD tickets.  I'd like to be able to transfer the TD tickets that I purchased to the appropriate participants (of course, once the 'friending' has been set up in RUBI), rather than having them block my schedule.  This would also make it easier for my friends to determine their schedules in their own accounts, without needing to set up separate spreadsheets to reconcile the timing of tickets which were purchased in my account.

laohu1:

 

Derek Guder:

AlanDeSmet:

* If I can't have A, then B, then C, and so on. For example, I might have three events I'd like to play from noon until 4 on Thursday; let me order them, and the system will sell me the first one with open slots.  Or, I might want any True Dungeon ticket that starts in the windowof 8am to 10am on Friday; let me list all 20 or so and give me the first one with an open slot. These are both actual(ish) examples from my registration last year.  From memory, you could do this last year by entering conflicting tickets into the system, but the system ordered the requests by event number, so TDA0905007 would always be tried before TDA0905008, even if I wrote in in the opposite order.

Hm. Any thoughts on how to lay this out in a form without getting too clunky? Part of the challenge here is that this really only applies to the first few hours of the opening day of registration. After that, the time pressure is over and you can browse as needed.

What if the form attempted to register you for events in the order you entered them on the form? Thus, if you want A->B->C, then you'd list those IDs in order. It would try A first and if it does get tickets for you, then B and C would obviously be blocked out. If it can't, it would just move on to B and repeat.

 

I don't know if there is an elegant solution to the problem.  Nor do I think that this is a good solution to the problem.  I actually think the way the system is set up for purchases works just fine as far as entering codes, navigating and selecting events.  It feels more egalitarian because I'm able to try for my highest priority item and so is everyone else. My two cents at least.

 Well, what I described above would still allow you to do that - it's basically just changing the form into a priority list. The system will attempt to grab tickets in that order, so put them in the order that you want them.

laohu1:

 

Derek Guder:

On that topic, should the "all or nothing" logic that was the issue with True Dungeon tickets just be the rule for everything on the "register by event ID" form?

I'm drawing a blank on this issue.  Can you refresh my memory?

People would try to buy a full slot of True Dungeon but would only get some of the tickets. They wanted to bring 6 friends along, but only got 3 total tickets - and they don't want to have to split the party to play, for example.

laohu1:

 

Derek Guder:

Anyone have suggestions for the logic for this? Should all ANI, FLM and SEM events not count as conflicting? Are there system-definable traits for other event types that we could use to make them as non-exclusive? Price alone isn't necessarily enough, unfortunately.

 

I think that would be a good idea.  ZED would also be a good fit, too.

ZED events are probably too weird and varied for that logic, unfortunately. Maybe for $0 ZED events.

YupImJen:

On a related True Dungeon note, I am usually purchasing for a large group of players, but may not necessarily be participating in a particular game.  Last year, I was unable to register for events later in the registration process because of a group of TD tickets.  I'd like to be able to transfer the TD tickets that I purchased to the appropriate participants (of course, once the 'friending' has been set up in RUBI), rather than having them block my schedule.  This would also make it easier for my friends to determine their schedules in their own accounts, without needing to set up separate spreadsheets to reconcile the timing of tickets which were purchased in my account.

That's not something we'll be able to implement this year, I don't think - but neither should it be necessary in most cases.

The only time you should need to transfer a ticket is if you change your mind about who should get it or if you make friends later on and want to trade.

If you want to buy True Dungeon tickets for friends and don't want them clogging up your own account, just buy them directly for friends. Make sure they're listed as your friends before event registration opens up and the tickets will clog their accounts.

New ideas:

Share My Schedule

It would be nice to say, "These email addresses/accounts are my schedule buddies, let them see what tickets I've purchased."  A simple, one-way transaction; they don't need to reciprocate.  I've specifically called them "schedule buddies," not "friends" because friends means something else at the moment; the ability to buy tickets for them. I don't trust my friends that much. :-)  Ideally this would also integrate into the iPhone app.

A secondary option of "share my schedule with the whole world" (ideally without requiring the whole world to log in to RUBI) would also be nice, but I'm betting almost no-one would use it.

Staggered registration. (Admittedly, this isn't new to Derek, since I email in this suggestion once a year. :-)

Problem 1: the registration system gets crushed for the first few hours. Coping with this small window costs a bunch of money and is unlikely to totally eliminate the problem.

Problem 2: People who are aggressive about registration system get first dibs on everything. (I'm part of the guilty group here.) I'm aggressive because there are two or three events that I know will sell out that I really want in on.  However, as a side effect I also sign up early for events that are lower priority for me, that I could find replacements for. By an hour in I and a bunch of other people have snarfed up our low priority picks, so the guy logging in an hour later loses out.  He might not get his highest priority because I grabbed it as a low priority.

Intercon (an admittedly much smaller convention of about 300 people) has the same problem 2.  They solved it with staggered registration. When registration opens, you get to register for one and only one event.  One week later, you can register for another event.  One week later it's a free for all.  It works well; people are forced to make tradeoffs for those two first two weeks and everyone is likely to get one of their top few games.

My proposal would be: When registration opens, you can only register for a single event. 24 hours later the total number of events you can sign up for is 2. The next day, 3 total events. Repeat for a week, at which point it's a free for all. As a result people registering a bit later still have lots of choices.  Someone missing a day only missed one opportunity.  The crush of doom is spread out over a week, hopefully eliminating the need to have extra servers for a few hours only.

Derek Guder:

What if the form attempted to register you for events in the order you entered them on the form?

That seems like a good balance of usability, implementation simplicity, and usefulness.

Derek Guder:

Should all ANI, FLM and SEM events not count as conflicting?

That also seems like a good starting point.  I would have added "and are free", but a quick check of the 2009 data suggests that they're always free.

I do know there are some of those that do fill, that having a ticket is necessary to enter (as I discovered last year when I figured, "Hey, I've got some time to kill, I'll check out the Hentai Dubbing. Oops, what's the line of doom?").  Perhaps the answer there is that they should be charging, at least a little bit.

Hrm. Interesting topic. I suspect you'd still have server crush each and every time, however. I know I, personally, would start calling in each and every favor I've stored in order to be able to login to snag my events, since I personally, have like, at least 8 events I really really really want, plus even my low priority ones? I /want/ to know whether I've got them or not. Only once my schedule is set to my satisfaction will I rest easy and happy.

I suspect those with less flexible schedules might be quite irate at this proposal, though it may also ease the server stress, if folks can't get each time off.

I still think, though, given how many of us are RIGHT THERE READY TO HIT ENTER that you'd just get the same crush, repeated times.

And to be depressed in my outlook, unless there were enough spaces in every event for everyone to get everything they wanted, there will probably always be server crush. I am such a glass half empty person sometimes!

<edit> if we really could get the 'try each one in order' thing though, that would be excellent. Like, very excellent.

AlanDeSmet:

Share My Schedule

Staggered registration

I've mentioned before that I really want more sharing/exportion functionality for scheduled, etc. but it's unlikely to happen this year. As for a staggered registration, I believe the current plan is to break up True Dungeon and everything as normal. I don't think we're planning on breaking things apart further; that's a broader policy question for Customer Service to consider.

AlanDeSmet:

 

Derek Guder:

Should all ANI, FLM and SEM events not count as conflicting?

That also seems like a good starting point.  I would have added "and are free", but a quick check of the 2009 data suggests that they're always free.

I do know there are some of those that do fill, that having a ticket is necessary to enter (as I discovered last year when I figured, "Hey, I've got some time to kill, I'll check out the Hentai Dubbing. Oops, what's the line of doom?").  Perhaps the answer there is that they should be charging, at least a little bit.

Yeah, there may be some changes for stuff like Hentai Dubbing, possibly a $2 charge. I'm a bit paranoid about charging for most anime events, since that's such a departure from established, independent anime conventions, but there's a huge demand for Hentai Dubbing each year, and some revenue would help me get a bigger budget...

Derek Guder:

YupImJen:

On a related True Dungeon note, I am usually purchasing for a large group of players, but may not necessarily be participating in a particular game.  Last year, I was unable to register for events later in the registration process because of a group of TD tickets.  I'd like to be able to transfer the TD tickets that I purchased to the appropriate participants (of course, once the 'friending' has been set up in RUBI), rather than having them block my schedule.  This would also make it easier for my friends to determine their schedules in their own accounts, without needing to set up separate spreadsheets to reconcile the timing of tickets which were purchased in my account.

That's not something we'll be able to implement this year, I don't think - but neither should it be necessary in most cases.

The only time you should need to transfer a ticket is if you change your mind about who should get it or if you make friends later on and want to trade.

If you want to buy True Dungeon tickets for friends and don't want them clogging up your own account, just buy them directly for friends. Make sure they're listed as your friends before event registration opens up and the tickets will clog their accounts.

Your solution only works in an ideal world where people can know in advance which slots of TD were going to be successfully purchased, and where everyone already knows what other events they will be able to successfully purchase which could conflict. 

 Generally speaking, neither of these is ever true, leading to the need to sort out who gets what AFTER the purchasing is all completed.

Related to being able to enter all the events you would like and then click a single button I have a couple suggestions.

Keep the web page design to the bare minimum. In particular eliminate all graphics images that you can. Graphics typically use up the vast majority of a web sites bandwidth and are the major cause slow page loads. It is amazing what you will see if you look at the web server stats and compare the amount of bandwidth used by graphics. As an example on one of the interanl web servers I administer that runs a couple PHP web applications 30% of the hits are GIF files, 21% are PNG files, and 27% are PHPcode hits. So the graphics account for almost twice as many hits as the actual application code.

It would be nice to be able to enter your list of desired events days in advance and save them to your account. This way all you have to do on registration day is click the buy button.

Particularly with the saved list above it would be nice to enter 6, 8, 10 event ID's and then click a button that will check for scheduling conflicts and missing events. So just in case you made a mistake in your scheduling or an event has been changed or cancelled recently. Thus you can greatly reduce the number of problem situations before actual registration time. Which should make the entire system move more smoothly.This should actaully be pretty easy to implement I would think.

At a coding/database level you could even mark someones account as being pre-checked for schedule conflicts and then not need to execute a conflict check at registration time. Which would save a few thousand clock cycles and a couple database round trips. If enough people actually did this ahead of time it could make for a measurable performance boost. In general you could increase effective performance by allowing event selection well ahead of time and then preprocessing that data. I implemented a sort of simlar pre-selection and pre-verification system in an application a number of years ago and it improved performance by almost 15%. This could however require a significant architecture change to do right, depnding on how things are currently structured.

jsfetzik:

Keep the web page design to the bare minimum. In particular eliminate all graphics images that you can. Graphics typically use up the vast majority of a web sites bandwidth and are the major cause slow page loads. It is amazing what you will see if you look at the web server stats and compare the amount of bandwidth used by graphics. As an example on one of the interanl web servers I administer that runs a couple PHP web applications 30% of the hits are GIF files, 21% are PNG files, and 27% are PHPcode hits. So the graphics account for almost twice as many hits as the actual application code.

As an end user, I change the properties of my browser to ignore the graphics anyway, so it seems to work faster. But this is a good idea! 

jsfetzik:

It would be nice to be able to enter your list of desired events days in advance and save them to your account. This way all you have to do on registration day is click the buy button.

Where's that like button when you want one?  This is a great idea.  I'd love to see something like this implemented.

laohu1:

 

jsfetzik:

It would be nice to be able to enter your list of desired events days in advance and save them to your account. This way all you have to do on registration day is click the buy button.

 

Where's that like button when you want one?  This is a great idea.  I'd love to see something like this implemented.

The watch list is supposed to allow you to do something similar to that, though you will need to select how many tickets you want when you attempt to actually buy then all in one batch.