I was able to fill my form with a maximum of 10 events.

Mick Bradley: Thanks, Mick! I’m trying to get as many TT readers as possible to sign up for SEM00052, Mastering Your GM-Fu. I’m one of the four panelists, and I have a nice big block of free time right after the seminar.

Whether it’s at GM-Fu or not, though, I’d love to catch up with you at the con.

I had pretty much the same experience you did. Took about ten minutes to get my events into my cart, then about 80 to finally check out.

Interesting.

Well, I hope to meet you in Indy, because you are consistently one of my favorite rpg bloggers.

Now, True Dungeon registration, on the other hand, was a bit weird.

It’s made worse by a web site that’s difficult to navigate on a good day; I shouldn’t have to download an Excel file and turn on auto-filtering to display at all of the games by a given publisher or being run for a given game.

Someone mentioned this being better than the old snail mail way … but is it? It’s nice knowing what events I have, but in the 3 years I registered via mail (I think it was 1999-2001, but my memories fuzzy) I got about 80% of my events … which is what I got yesterday. And the entire process was much easier and user friendly: you had a printed catalog, nicely divided into easily-readable, color-coded rows, that you could browse at your leisure. You could then register without worrying about your transaction dying somewhere between here and GenCon HQ.

With regards to GMs, VV_GM’s got it exactly right. Make the GMs feel special, and give them perks that are worth something. Hell, advanced registration alone would probably increase the number of available games by 25%.

GMs should get a better deal on from the GenCon staff. You have to run 8 hours worth of games per day with a minimun number of players attending to get a 50%/capped hotel reimbursement. My time is worth a lot more than that. Have an event that only GMs can attend, like a dinner in their honor. Gice them preference with registration by opening it a week early for them. Do things like that and have a minimum of one 4 hour game per day requirement and I would run more games. Make it a one for one deal. You agree to run 4 games and you get to register for 4 events early.

I don’t think that’s puzzling at all. As someone who’s literally spent entire conventions running games (demos) non-stop, it’s a crappy job, to be frank.

Go round up 6 random people and run a game in a 2-4 hour block. Now do it again 4 other times, with maybe a 30 minute break. Do at least two a day. Make sure to run the same adventure four times for the full effect.

Running games can be fun. Running games with a limited timeframe of opportunity, with entirely random participants notsomuch. (Do I get a good roleplayer, the gamer and his not-interested-in-gaming girlfriend, or the guy who can’t shower…or all three…at my table?) Expecting people to get excited to pay for the privilege to fly X-hundred miles and run a game for complete strangers seems like a stranger puzzlement to me, IMO.

Let me put it another way…how many games did you sign up to run?

An added complication was that I won a free badge in the 40 years of Gencon competition, and they had credited my $67+ that I’d originally spent. I didn’t know how I would be able to make use of that. Gencon was on top of that, though – there was even a box with the amount of my credit that asked how much of it I wanted to use…

It seemed to me that they did in fact just shift the bottleneck from the ordering-to-cart portion to the checking-out portion. This was an improvement in that my chosen games (numbers and quantities entered in the boxes before noon PST and ready to trigger) were in my cart and didn’t disappear during the roughly 70 minutes it took me to successfully check out. I needed to change a game when I realized it would overlap one I was running, and it was a matter of seconds to delete it from my cart and enter the number for another game.

I haven’t tried the search engine – that would be a massive pain, trying and trying to find an open game.

Which leads to my last puzzlement – why *are* there so many more players than games?

It’s still better than mailing in your choices and finding out what you actually got when you picked up your packet…

I would’ve loved (assuming it wasn’t there) the ability to search by game. Seeing what’s available for Call of Cthulhu up front would have been great.

Finally, I do wish that the event search would exclude filled events. Last night, I decided to try and add a Thursday night game. I had to scroll through 493 entries, the vast majority of which were closed.

Walt

I absolutely agree that 90 minutes is still too long, and that it only compares favorably to GenCon’s past performance in this department — it doesn’t hold up well in more general comparisons.

From my own and others’ experience, the hang-up this time around seemed to be the actual “Checkout” process (i.e. paying for the events). Since I didn’t know how long my shopping cart would last, I furiously F5′d the server, which probably didn’t help the situation.

If the shopping cart could last for a couple of weeks, and I could pay at my leisure, this would be a much more workable process. I admittedly don’t know the feasability of this, so consider it an unsolicited and uninformed bit of advice…

Telas