In the next seven months you can call a travel agent, contact an air b-n-b provider, work with the forums to try to get an unused room, or call hotels to ask about rooms outside the block. 

 Or you can try for origins, BGGcon, dice tower con, etc etc. We don't all have to go to gencon. Gencon is huge, and resources are limited. If that is a frustration that doesn't work well for you, there are other choices. Origins is my standby second choice each year.

I think it was about 50 minutes and they were all gone last year.
 

Absolutely no downtown rooms left.

Oh well, won't be going this year.

At 1:29pm Eastern, all the downtown stuff was gone for 2 and 3 people, and for any combo of dates I used, from 8/2 to 8/8.

Just got Omni Wed-Sun, King room. I think only one other room came up downtown. We were only looking for a King so I don't know about doubles. I'm glad we got anything. Last year we paid $2.5k to stay 4 days at the JW out of block. This year we would have been out $4k at the JW out of block. This is the first year we have EVER gotten anything in the block downtown. 
I wish everyone else the best of luck.

Another 1.5 hrs to go before I see what I can get. Hopefully my backup air bnb booking comes through, otherwise is Airport for me. At least that way I'm close to one of the places I need to be.

I already have a room, but logging in to a different group members housing block there are still downtown rooms available. One tip is to play around with the days you are staying ie, just having doing thursday to sunday even if you are staying longer. Worse case scenario you can stay one night in suburb hotel and have a connected hotel the rest of the con. Also keep refreshing as there is a lot of dropping going on right now. 

This booking system seems a bit muddled. One can search for hotels for 2 guests and downtown hotels come up, but when they are clicked on to book, it says there is nothing available. This occurs when looking for 4 guests as well, but it is much less frequent for one of the downtown hotels to come up. I suspect that downtown even for 2 guests was sold out long ago, even though they continued to pop up in the search results as available.

I had a time of 1:05 and my first 5 or 6 choices downtown were down to Kings only at the time.  Finally found a double at the Sheraton and am happy to be back downtown this year.  Last year I had a time of 12:05 and was caught up in the housing Snafu, so ended up at the Wyndham out by the airport.

Here's a thought; the con should set up some "rideshare" area where they can arrange for people to offer to drive other people back to the hotels.  Okay, this isn't a perfect solution (it would require the drivers to agree to make multiple stops in the area, and cost is out of the question as the taxi and Uber drivers would complain), and there's still the problem of getting from the hotels to the con, but it's better than nothing.
 

Play around with the days and keep trying. I did that and within five minutes found a room that was dumped at the JW Marriott. So we went from a 7 mile away stay to right across the road. Keep trying!

With a 1h 30 m wait, all downtown was sold out.  I did see the Hyatt show up, but it was gone by the time I clicked it.  Seems like you needed a few minutes earlier to get the last downtown options.  Guess it's time to refund 2 badges now and write off the $20 as a loss.  2nd year in a row couldn't get a downtown hotel.  Looking at Origins now.  At this rate I might simply stop trying for Gen Con, there's better and less frustrating ways to pay for a gaming vacation.

After refreshing a ton of times, I was able to get a JW King room.

There are no more downtown rooms.

At this second may be, but people will drop rooms.  You just have to be persistent.

1 hour 35 minute wait time, no downtown left when I got in :(

Persistent? You mean that, after waiting until my wait time to get into the system, I now have to spend over 30 minutes looking/refreshing just in the hopes that the people who got in before me dropped a room? Hoorah.