Many tickets have been printed and shipped. They cannot be refunded until they can be returned at Customer Service onsite.

That is in no way a penalty to attendees who manage their schedule early.

It is certainly a repercussion late event organizers should keep in mind when planning their schedule.

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Derek Guder
Event Manager
Gen Con LLC

That is correct.  During the brief period of time between preregistration ending, and the Wednesday before the convention, you cannot drop an event from your schedule.  Most every ticket has already been printed and mailed or sorted.  There's simply no way to go back and pull tickets that have been shipped, and it's nearly impossible to go into the thousand of tickets sitting in the office now and find the one ticket that needs to be refunded.  I get that this is an inconvenience, and I'm sorry, but we've been pretty proactive about broadcasting this preregistration deadline.

Marian McBrine
Event Coordinator
Gen Con LLC

Here's a case where the Event Coordinator is more customer oriented than the Event Manager.

It is in no way NOT a penalty/inconvenience to attendees who manage their schedule early.

Attendees who schedule early, fill their schedule, and then want to add an event that is late-added or opens up during July cannot do so. Those attendees who organize their events late will be more likely to pick up these sorts of event opportunities as they appear.

I get it though. I think the only way around it would be to scan every ticket as it is collected. This would allow Gen Con LCC to invalidate tickets that had already been printed. But obviously, this is completely unfeasible considering how many people take tickets and who those people are (not really affiliated with Gen Con LLC). And I'm sure there would be other issues as well.  As it stands, I stop looking at the event listings once pre-registration closes so I'm not tempted/annoyed by events appearing that I physically can't add.

I am new to GenCon. I did not know how to search for, prioritize and organize my schedule, and the "guides" available online to do this are insufficient.  I do not know anyone who has ever attended, so I am on my own, learning by doing, hoping that if I attend again, I'll know better what to do.

In my case I am finding out about cool events that I would like to attend, for which limited seats are available, but I cannot "trade up" because something I previously signed up for is in the way.  At least I understand now why this is happening.

Bill

This is my first time attending a convention. Badges have been purchased, so now I am signing up for additional events. One event I want to sign up for is the Large Group Game Night. It shows for location as: Marriott: Denver: HQ. What does this mean? 

So, many conventions take place just in one hotel, or in a convention center.  Gen Con is so huge that it takes place in the convention center and all surrounding hotels.  So that event is in the Mariott (not the JW Mariott), in the room called "Denver", and there's an HQ table right when you walk in that room.

They'll be maps in the program book onsite you can look at to get your bearings.

Here's the Marriott map from last year. You can see the Denver room in the upper right.