petrea_mitchell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
petrea_mitchell) wrote2020-07-10 07:34 pm
petrea_mitchell) wrote2020-07-10 07:34 pm
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Secrets of the Gen Con wishlist
One big advantage Gen Con has over nearly every convention which has abruptly moved online is that it already had its own software for managing an online schedule and signups. Warhorn is okay for your gaming conventions of a few hundred people, but it isn't built to handle the traffic rush from mega-cons. (When PaizoCon signups smacked it with 10 times its previous traffic record, the resulting slowdown led someone to comment, "How much XP do we get for killing Warhorn?". And PaizoCon is well over an order of magnitude smaller than Gen Con.)
Gen Con's software allows you to gather everything you especially want to attend onto a wishlist. Then, when signups open, you can press one button to try to sign up for everything on your list, instead of having a tab open for every event.
Chatter on Discord revealed another very useful feature: You can put conflicting events on your list, and the software will resolve it by signing you up for your highest priority that it can actually grab. So if you sign up for A, B, and C in the same timeslot, your process will first try to get a seat at A, and if not, go for B, and so forth. If it does manage to get you a seat in A, then it skips B and C and moves on to something at another time.
So if you really, really want to play the PFS multi-table special in English in the level 3-6 tier, and there are 25 tables that meet that description, by golly you can add all 25 of them to your wishlist and not worry about getting duplicate signups.
It occurred to me after doing that that if I absolutely wanted to make sure I had a chance to play the special, the thing to do would be to add all the English-language level 1-4 tables too, and be prepared to show up with a new character if I wound up in something that far down the list. In the process of doing that, I discovered that the wishlist tops out at 50 items. I do want to play some other things, so I took the level 1-4 tables back out of my list and will just hope that I'm one of the first 150 people in the queue who wants to bring a level 3-6 character.
Gen Con's software allows you to gather everything you especially want to attend onto a wishlist. Then, when signups open, you can press one button to try to sign up for everything on your list, instead of having a tab open for every event.
Chatter on Discord revealed another very useful feature: You can put conflicting events on your list, and the software will resolve it by signing you up for your highest priority that it can actually grab. So if you sign up for A, B, and C in the same timeslot, your process will first try to get a seat at A, and if not, go for B, and so forth. If it does manage to get you a seat in A, then it skips B and C and moves on to something at another time.
So if you really, really want to play the PFS multi-table special in English in the level 3-6 tier, and there are 25 tables that meet that description, by golly you can add all 25 of them to your wishlist and not worry about getting duplicate signups.
It occurred to me after doing that that if I absolutely wanted to make sure I had a chance to play the special, the thing to do would be to add all the English-language level 1-4 tables too, and be prepared to show up with a new character if I wound up in something that far down the list. In the process of doing that, I discovered that the wishlist tops out at 50 items. I do want to play some other things, so I took the level 1-4 tables back out of my list and will just hope that I'm one of the first 150 people in the queue who wants to bring a level 3-6 character.