lock’d & load’d for Columbus

Signed up to judge. You can all rest easy that not a single module at Origins stems from any of my ideas. Only a few of you will have to suffer the dreaded Tony.

That said, for the first time *ever* at a convention, I have actually signed up to play something (I’ve played before, but it was always being used to fill tables instead of GMing). I am definitely looking forward to the Witchhunter LARP Friday evening…

The Origins system is definitely not ideal but I highly prefer it to GenCon (not to mention the horrific GenCon housing system). With GenCon, if you don’t get your queue in literally the second it goes live, you will have events sold out (and the last 2-3 times I went to GenCon, my submit got stuck on submit and never in the queue so I lost out on events every single time even though I was sitting at my computer hitting submit the moment I could).

2238 Ipswitch Calling Thu 7:00 PM This is one of the new LARPS
2445 The Storm Fri 7:00 PM This is one of the new LARPS

they are non continuity if i understood correctly

The Origins system is definitely not ideal but I highly prefer it to GenCon (not to mention the horrific GenCon housing system). With GenCon, if you don’t get your queue in literally the second it goes live, you will have events sold out (and the last 2-3 times I went to GenCon, my submit got stuck on submit and never in the queue so I lost out on events every single time even though I was sitting at my computer hitting submit the moment I could).

UGH. Connection issues to servers and databases is never a good thing. There is no perfect system, but the ‘wish list’ ahead of time then submit on registration day is a much better design than the ‘hope you get and keep a connection on this wildly under-powered server’. GenCon has much better hardware and software running their system. I got events for that yesterday in less than 20 mins while being the 3300+ customer in line, and I did not have to do anything besides submit. It took me more than half an hour to get events today and I had to watch a server get stalled out about a million times and myself hit reload about 617 times. And get double booked, double charged, and have to start over multiple times. And GenCon’s load was was probably 100 times that of Origin’s. If PCI wasn’t so well treated by Origins I’d gladly drop this convention forever.

And the housing system was completely different than event registration for GenCon.

I have to disagree. I think the Origins event pre-reg system is superior to GenCon. Maybe not from a technical perspective but definitely from a fairness one.

With GenCon, if you get in at the front of the queue, you get everything with no chance of anyone else getting any of your events – which is much worse than it sounds since a single person can register entire groups of people (so there are very likely events sold out before the first dozen people are done in the queue).

The Origins system may take longer and be more annoying to register on pre-reg day but it is fair – everyone must register one event at a time for one person – this puts everyone on a completely equal footing. The one “trick” that seems to improve the Origins system handling a lot is to always search by event number. I had no timeouts, no database errors, and was done with 15 events in 20-30 minutes.

A fix that would make the gencon system far more fair would be to process a single event for everyone in the queue and then send them to the back of the queue (repeat until the queue is gone).

As to the GenCon housing system, mostly, I just hate the whole concept. Why not allow people to book their own rooms instead of being forced through the system. Also, Indy has become a stupidly overpriced city for hotels – downtown Indy hotels go for $300+/night (I can get an okay hotel in NYC for less). I used to just ignore the housing block and pay $30-50/night extra to book direct (until the hotels got ridiculously expensive 3-5 years ago).