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Virtually Expo
Aug. 29th, 2020 07:22 pmI made it to Virtually Expo. The schedule firmly adhered to British time, so I couldn't do much besides check out the dealers' room. It had modest improvements over all the online dealers' rooms I've been to so far, which I will get to in a minute. But the real innovation was on their Discord server.
There was a channel called #the-queue. In it, you could type "/queue" to experience standing in line. People would move to the front of the line at a predetermined rate, and when you made it to 1st in line, the bot would @ you with a description of what happened next. This was about a 50/50 split between geeky pop culture references and descriptions of imaginary games at the Bring-and-Buy.
The way it was supposed to work, and did work on the actual days of the event, was that lots of people would be typing "/queue", and so there would be a significant delay between joining the line and reaching the front. However, that was one of the first things available when the server was made public weeks beforehand, and so the early birds spent those weeks amusing themselves with it when there was no line to wait for.
Anyway, onward to the actual dealers' room...
The page was headed by four larger virtual booths which never changed position, followed by four medium-sized ones which always appeared after those, and then a huge swath of the small ones seen above. The small ones would be presented in a newly randomized order every time the page loaded-- great for making sure everyone had an equal chance to be seen, but I had to remember to open everything in tabs because the hall would scramble itself again if I clicked into one booth and then hit Back.
Icons on each listing indicate the categories of items the booth offered; some were obvious and easy to remember, but there were ones where I had no idea until I hovered over them.
No huge innovations on the booth pages, but everything was given a standard professional, polished look. At the top was a banner with the dealer's name and logo, below that were the category icons and text, and below that was a four-part layout: a freeform description which could include images and videos, a list of new products the dealer was promoting, a space for links to their own Discord, Twitch, and/or Zoom where customers could contact them while the room was open, and listings of all the official con events the dealer was running.
There was a lot of variation in how well all these spaces were used. A few dealers, mostly physical stores, just had a sentence or two of description and nothing else filled in. A couple places looked like they had taken an entire PowerPoint presentation, converted every slide to an image, and then stuffed all those images into their descriptions.
So, not a quantum leap, but still a noticeable improvement over the title-plus-random-images that I'd seen up until now. Plus, it did get me to buy some things.
There was a channel called #the-queue. In it, you could type "/queue" to experience standing in line. People would move to the front of the line at a predetermined rate, and when you made it to 1st in line, the bot would @ you with a description of what happened next. This was about a 50/50 split between geeky pop culture references and descriptions of imaginary games at the Bring-and-Buy.
The way it was supposed to work, and did work on the actual days of the event, was that lots of people would be typing "/queue", and so there would be a significant delay between joining the line and reaching the front. However, that was one of the first things available when the server was made public weeks beforehand, and so the early birds spent those weeks amusing themselves with it when there was no line to wait for.
Anyway, onward to the actual dealers' room...
The page was headed by four larger virtual booths which never changed position, followed by four medium-sized ones which always appeared after those, and then a huge swath of the small ones seen above. The small ones would be presented in a newly randomized order every time the page loaded-- great for making sure everyone had an equal chance to be seen, but I had to remember to open everything in tabs because the hall would scramble itself again if I clicked into one booth and then hit Back.
Icons on each listing indicate the categories of items the booth offered; some were obvious and easy to remember, but there were ones where I had no idea until I hovered over them.
No huge innovations on the booth pages, but everything was given a standard professional, polished look. At the top was a banner with the dealer's name and logo, below that were the category icons and text, and below that was a four-part layout: a freeform description which could include images and videos, a list of new products the dealer was promoting, a space for links to their own Discord, Twitch, and/or Zoom where customers could contact them while the room was open, and listings of all the official con events the dealer was running.
There was a lot of variation in how well all these spaces were used. A few dealers, mostly physical stores, just had a sentence or two of description and nothing else filled in. A couple places looked like they had taken an entire PowerPoint presentation, converted every slide to an image, and then stuffed all those images into their descriptions.
So, not a quantum leap, but still a noticeable improvement over the title-plus-random-images that I'd seen up until now. Plus, it did get me to buy some things.
