Wednesday Knights Blog

Every year I am amazed at how much Gen Con LLC can screw up the registration process. This year, just like it has been in the past, the registration for housing was abysmal. The servers kept timing out and it took forever to try and register for any hotel.

Today, event registration opened in a bifurcated process. True Dungeon events went on sale at 9 PDT and all other events went on sale at 1 PDT. I wasn’t interested in buying any True Dungeon, so I did not sign on until a little before 1 PDT.

When I got there, there was a message on the web site saying that the servers were running very slowly and that they were trying to address the problem. Describing the servers as very slowly is an understatement. It took me 4 minutes from the time I entered by user name and password until I got signed on.

It took me 30 minutes before the system would recognize the events that I had chosen. It took me another 20 to actually purchase those events. When I finally got to that point, I ended up purchasing two tickets to each of three events. Given all of the problems that I had before, I certainly was  not going to try and fix the problem then. The real irony was that it let me purchase multiple tickets to the same event, however, I was completely unable to purchase any generic tickets, because they “conflicted” with events I already had. WTF? Who programed that in.

Chuck called customer service seeking assistance, because the system was claiming that he had not yet purchased a badge. The lady he spoke with admitted that the servers were running slowly and that they had been trying to add additional servers since 9 this morning. WHAT?

I am no IT expert, but it seems to me that one would attempt to add additional servers BEFORE the deluge starts, not after. This does not seem to be a terribly difficult to predict. We have this same freaking problem every year. You don’t need a crystal ball or even an augury spell to predict it. All you have to do it talk to people who tried to register last year, or the year before, or the year before, or . . . (you get the picture).

It’s not as if they don’t know when the deluge is coming. They do not need huge amounts of computing ability all of the time. However, on a couple of days a year, they need the ability to handle tens of thousands of people hitting their servers at the same time. Either they have the ability to handle that or they do not. If they do not, they need to find someone who does, and use their servers or mainframes, or computing power.

The current situation is simply inexcusable, however. Something should be done to address the situation. And that something should not be adding server AFTER registration starts.