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.

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!

It took about 2 hours to complete everything.

Walt

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).

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?

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

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!

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’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.

I’m so hung I can hear a bad rendition of “She Bangs” in my head.

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.