I've been a silver badge attendee. I've been a gold badge attendee. Doubt I'll ever have a higher type of badge. Am I the only one who didn't mind event registration the way it was before the limitation on seat openings was instituted?
I think this system is much more equitable. All events will have at least 1 seat available during the silver badge registration period. In the past it was possible that silver had zero chance at some seats. Now...they a possibility. Gold still gets an advantage. Also, if this discussion continues it deserves its own thread.
Agree with it being more equitable. It is more transparent. https://tabletop.events/conventions/gary-con-xii/schedule/1020
As of 2020-02-07_08-22-01 number of events: 1,971 total_seats: 15,130, available_seats: 7,317 number of badges 2,263
@gizmomathboy - are you able to get the number of badges per level? Thanks for the interesting stats!
I'm not sure that I'm properly following the math on the % of seats released. Diamond - 50% Platinum - 65% Gold - 80% Silver - 100% So, when the seats are released Diamond will have a chance at 50% of the seats. Then, 15% more of the seats are released in which Diamond and Platinum have a crack at them. Is that correct thus far? Then 15% more of the seats are released in which Diamond / Platinum / Gold have a crack at them. Then at Silver all of the seats are open. Does this now mean that at Gold I potentially have to compete for tickets twice on two different dates? As I play with a number of friends, enjoying games at the same table, are we now going to have issues gaming together? Again...I'm probably missing something with the math. Can someone expound on it? Thanks.
Blake, that's basically it. They try to have at least 1 seat open at each level. Remember that there are less than 50 Diamond+Platinum badges. There are 238 Gold badges. It is very, very likely more than 1 seat will be available at every event. Of course, the high demand events with a small number of seats at a single event instance could be very scarce. The goal of this model is to have at least 1 seat available for *all* events when silver badges can register. It is a lot more equitable than in the past and still preserves the Gold advantage. Will it be perfect? Probably not in 100% of all cases. For the vast majority of folks? It should be "better". Let them try this model this year and give them a chance to find the problems with it. So far, the only weirdness I've seen is for 1 event. It had 4 seats available total. Three seats have already been taken. Ideally, only 1 seat would have been available at Diamond, not 2. That way 1 seat is made available at each badge level. I think they just didn't have the rule in place for a 4 seat event. I'm pretty sure they will next year. There are always edge cases and you can never account for them all. It takes iteration to find them and fix them.
1) Yes and No Nobody has to go through multiple registration sessions. There will be tons of open seats available to attendees (especially earlier badges like yourself) at your regular registration day. Last year as a Silver, I went after almost all the other Silvers (and other types) due to a rare glitch. I still got 100% of my 5-6 first choice events. However, that said, yes, to maximally optimize your chances of a desired event that is in heavy demand, you would want to participate in registration twice (if you don't get in in the first try). Because there are so many Silvers going at once in that "2nd registration" for you, it isn't going to up your chances that heavily, but it will a little. I'm going to post some "badge stratification math" before too long. 2) Trying to coordinate playing sessions with friends is always going to be tricky, no matter what the registration system is, getting tougher the more people you're trying to include. You may not all get in on this system, but generally speaking, I wouldn't anticipate it improving or worsening your odds by much. Of course this varies by the number of people you are trying to include and the number of slots for the event. The one likely major wrinkle or consideration I can think of for you (assuming your friends are all Golds, too) is this: In the old registration, you would know right away if all of you got Game X or not. And if you want to switch to Game Y (less desired, but has room for you all), you could do that right away, before the Silvers got their turn. In this registration, you can still do that, but only if you forego your "2nd chance registration" when a few more seats are released. If you decide to gamble on your last friend getting into Game X when Silver registration starts (odds aren't good, unless the demand for the game isn't that high), your backup Game Y might fill up with Silvers while he's trying to get into X. If there's a lot of you, you might also consider: Try for games with lots of slots. The ADD Open, for example, has tons of spaces and you can form your own team. Set your expectations reasonable. Maybe at 10am all 6 of you get into the same game, but at 2pm 3 of you are in one thing and 3 in another, and likewise at 7pm. That's still a pretty good amount of togetherness. Off the Grid/pickup games don't have limitations, so you may be able to get a lot of people into those, too.
I've written and deleted my post three times. I'm just going to say I do not like the way the new system worked out.
Some calcs: Suppose the badge breakdown is about: 12 31 342 1600 And suppose for the sake of simplicity that a hypothetical super-high demand event is desired by half of all attendees across the board, leaving 6 15 171 800 ppl seeking it And the breakdown on seat release is: 4, 1, 1, 2 Then, if registration was temporarily restricted to only "your week", the chances of getting into the event would come out to: 4/6 = 67% 1/15 = 7% 1/171 = 0.60% 2/800 = 0.25% If high badges are allowed to jump back in to battle later badges, although you do get the possibility of an event filling with all high badges and no low, the individual odds of getting in usually don't move much. In this case, 1 - (2/6 * 16/17 * 186/187 * 984/986) = 68.9% 1 - (16/17 * 186/187 * 984/986) = 6.6% 1 - (186/187 * 984/986) = 0.74% 1 - (984/986) = 0.20% ---------------------------- Changing the desire on our hypothetical event to a more plausible 10% of all attendees, we get: 1 3 34 160 people seeking it And the breakdown on seat release is: 4, 1, 1, 2 If you can only register during your week: 4/1 = 100%* 4*/3 = 100%* 2/34 = 5.9% 2/160 = 1.3% If badges can participate in the later releases, also: 4/1 = 100%* 4*/3 = 100%* 1 - (32/34 * 190/192) = 6.8% 1 - (190/192) = 1.0% Again, you can see the numbers don't move that much on the 2 different methods ------------------------- Disclaimer: Calculations done hastily Friday when I should have been working Even if high badges are allowed to do later registration waves, not all would I suspect a lot of Silver badges mostly do pickup/offgrid games, GMing, etc and don't sign up for many ticketed events. If so, 1600 probably overstates how many are in on the registration rush. There's plenty of complexities not included here. They tend to be very complex and not very impactful, though.
I've created a new thread to take discussion out of this thread and over there https://forums.garycon.com/community/index.php?threads/new-registration-process-thoughts.2052/
As of 2020-02-09_12-27-22 number of events: 1,971 total_seats: 15,122, available_seats: 8,153 number of badges 2,291
As of 2020-02-14_08-03-09 number of events: 1,971 total_seats: 15,122, available_seats: 8,130 number of badges 2,343
As of 2020-02-16_09-18-07 number of events: 1,971 total_seats: 15,128, available_seats: 8,798 number of badges 2,372
what happened here? the number of available_seats went up after gold badge registration? these numbers do not make sense. even with the minimal increase in total_seats, it wouldn't go up by that many.
Probably the effect of the staggered release of seats? Across all games, more seats got released than taken.
Total seats is like apples. Available seats is like oranges. The available seats is a running tally with more seats added each week. Total seats is where this number ends up at when adding in number of seats reserved after online event registration is closed.
As of 2020-02-17_07-34-51 number of events: 1,971 total_seats: 15,128, available_seats: 8,735 number of badges 2,380