Featured Events - A Proposal

One thought I had. I ran some numbers on just the Legends of Wargaming events and compared to the general numbers as presented by Gizmo:

LOW: 56 total events
Tournament events: 9
So that's 47 LOW events once you remove the 1 "registrant" tourneys. Of those:

25 Featured LOW events with 207 seats, of which 86 are sold = 42 percent
22 regular LOW events with 262 seats, of which 157 are sold = 60 percent

Compare to the general population (incl. LOW):
Total FEs: 202 with 1650 seats, of which 1118 are sold = 68 percent

And without the LOW events (also, I took out all the volunteer shifts, panels, mixers, lectures, and other non-gaming stuff; some judgment calls, but I think nothing overly controversial for these purposes):
Total: 1349 events with 9194 seats, of which 6063 are sold = 66 percent
175 Featured events with 7855 seats, of which 5052 are sold = 64 percent
1174 regular events with 785 1seats, of which 5048 are sold = 64 percent

So that means LOW events are 12.5 percent of the total FEs but are coming in much worse in terms of attendance.

One of the special things about GaryCon is the wargames and the spirit of honoring D&D's wargaming roots. But I think there should be an effort to keeping the barriers to entry as low as possible for the LOW events. It's already a style of gaming a lot of young people don't know much about and might find intimidating. I would suggest giving serious thought to making fewer LOW events Featured and also considering other ways to lower the barriers to entry, whether it's making easily available PDFs of the rules, tutorial videos, actual-play videos, or other things that incentivize participation in these games rather than making it harder to join them.

I used my extra FE ticket to join Little Wars. Space is still available.

 

I'm glad you did the work to come up with the numbers, Handy. I had previously mentioned that I felt the number of LoW (miniatures games in general) events that were Featured was hurting the attendance of those events, and your numbers seem to back that up.

 

As much as it pains me to say it, Handy Haversack is right. ;-) I couldn't agree more about the LoW events. I used my extra featured ticket for a Chainmail featured event. Discovering war games was one of the best surprises for me from Gary Con. I have very fond memories of walking through the LoW hall at the old venue and being invited to play Bridge at Remagen. It opened a whole new world of gaming for me. I'd love it if more players got the chance to try these games out. (Of course, they can still walk up to partially filled events, but I suspect most people filled up their schedule with what they could get into and didn't leave a lot of space for walk up opportunities.)

 

Thanks for running the numbers, Handy. I agree with your, Scott's & Buttmonkey's assessments. The LOW Featured events would have more sign ups if they were not Featured. I first played one at GC2 by walking by & being drafted. A few times I've used my GP or featured event to sign up for one of them & then there weren't enough players for the game to run, which sucked. Only 3 of 25 sold out, & they had the fewest seats to begin with (4, 5, & 6). I would have signed up for more if they were non-featured.

Also, the only way for those games to live on, & not be relegated to the history books, is if more people play & enjoy them at GC, & then start playing them at home or other cons.

 

Ha HA!

That's true, but that also invalidates any reason to make these FEs in the first place -- and is unfair to those devotees who *do* use their precious FE slots on the LOW events.

 

That read like you would prohibit walkups at featured events.

 

it might be the case that the LOW featured events will be the only such events that need to be declassified after the Silver badge registration. that way during the tiered registration process those who make it a priority can use their featured events to get in and then afterward these events can fill up with interested players without requiring them to have featured events available.

 

There are a number of other events that should be considered for down grading to non-featured events after silver registration.

 

I really don't think that's true. I'm saying there's a logical disconnect.

 

I think that we're at the point where all Featured events should be reclassified as normal events. That way all the reshuffling can be done ahead of time & there is much less last minute scrambling to be a walkup. Especially with so many events in the Forum rooms.

 

I think the level up already demonstrated the limited impact to existing schedules. At this point, only 142 extra Featured events were taken as a result of the level up to all badges, and some of those were claimed by attendees that had not registered for any events prior to the 2/10 level up and others were used to fill schedule gaps rather than replacing non-Featured events. That leaves almost 900 unused Featured options, not counting many Silver badge holders that have not even registered yet.