kgbuller wrote:
Gen Con would like to say they have 20,000+ events, but nobody really wants to learn how to make a medieval basket, or listen to a seminar on how to make a plastic bead necklace. They were only 5500 role-playing events on the catalog and I'm sure that attendance was greater than 25,000. Do the math. Myself and 3 friends smashed the button right. at. 12. Three landed in the 3000s, while I was rewarded with almost 17k. I decided to go make breakfast. It was still processing after I had finished eating eggs and potatoes. Of our group, no one got anything even close to what they wanted. I didn’t do it, of course, but I think I understand why people rage quit GenCon. It’s gotten too big, and there’s not enough games.
This, I think, is the crux.
The past two years my group has signed up for multiple events per day throughout the day and received maybe 1 or 2 events out of probably 20 put in for. I don't know what the issue is...is it the games we're putting in for are just that popular that everyone is know playing them, thus increasing demand but not the supply? Is the number of games offered lower, thus decreasing the supply? Is both happening? We put in for a lot of Pathfinder events, and thought since Paizo increased their ticket prices that could slightly increase supply, plus Paizo is making a larger play again again finally. However, Paizo also doesn't do any Pathfinder events Friday evening, so that knocks out a huge percentage of games for Pathfinder, and thus decreasing the supply.
So we decided to ditch so many Paizo events and instead go for other RPG events. We got none of them as a group (we signed up for 2 per day of many other RPGs).
It is very frustrating and I don't know what to do about it. We usually spend several hours putting together a coherent schedule, and the past two years the time taken to put one together and add to our wishlist was nullified. We aren't sure we'll do it again next year, we are really wondering if it's worth the effort to go to GenCon and spend the money again if we don't get anything we would like to do. I hope GenCon can figure out some incentive to increase the supply of games being run.
@jigreen, 1 ticket availability doesn't help with people who go to GenCon and want to game there with a couple of other friends in the same group.
@smithrj, the last 2 years 2 of us has been turned down with generics at RPGs such as Call of Cthuhulu, Shadowrun, and Pathfinder.
All I'm saying is when people who've gone to GenCon for years and spend a lot of time playing games and making the schedule, buy the badge before knowing if they get tix...this wears on people, you know?
