Today, February 22, 2020, at Noon Central U.S. time, Silver Badge registration opened for Gary Con 12.

The server almost immediately had issues and no one could stay logged in. The company that runs the online even registration service, TableTop Events indicated that their Cache servers had an unanticipated issue, even though they had prepared for the load of all the badge holders signing up simultaneously.

Sadly, that effort was short-lived. A few individuals, such as myself, were able to select events into their carts and complete checkout.

Thankfully, the decision was made to allow those few who checked out to keep their registration.

Later the decision was made to keep items in the carts of those who did not complete checkout. Normally, they expire after two hours.

Direct Link to Facebook post with the link contents below plus a screenshot.

https://www.facebook.com/GaryConLLC/posts/2791721214229655

Full Text:

Greetings Seekers,

Today, TTEs server had an unprecedented error and were disabled. We suspended sales at that time to take the load off the servers while they were repaired. No tickets were able to be sold before then, to our knowledge. The president of TTE released a statement regarding the error at that time and repaired the error. We attempted to reopen, but more errors kept popping up and the servers, despite adequate load, were still not functioning.

At this time, it seems our best option is to reschedule the launch. We understand that this is incredibly inconvenient and disappointing. We don’t quite know when we will reopen, but we promise to notify you by update through TTE at least 24 hours in advance. Some attendees were able to get tickets. We are unsure whether we will reset tickets at this time, but we promise to give you notice on our decision soon.If you have further questions, please feel free to contact me. It may take me a little longer than normal to answer as I have many, many emails to sort through already, but I will personally respond to each and every email I receive.

Update @ 1:43pm: The staff has made a decision regarding tickets already sold: you will certainly get to keep those. We believe very few were actually able to accomplish this feat and it seems inequitable to take those tickets away from the lucky few. TTE normally empties carts after 2 hours, but TTE has disabled cart expiration, so events in your cart right now SHOULD stay in your cart.

Thank you,
—
Caroline Burks
Director of Guest Relations
Gary Con Gaming Convention
Caroline@garycon.com

History

Registration for Gary Con has had issues in the past. They have used TableTop Events for the past several years. This year’s issues have been the worst that I’ve seen it. The history of past issues has not helped.

When the registration failed the first time, Table Top Events shared this through the Gary Con Facebook page. Direct Link.

https://www.facebook.com/GaryConLLC/posts/2791673430901100

Full Text:

An explanation of the TTE problem today and an apology from the head of TTE, JT Smith. Thanks to JT and his crew for their quick response and resolution today.

“Tabletop.Events were prepared well in advance of the launch of Silver tickets today. We had fired up over 20 extra web application servers and nodes to the database. Unfortunately, something we could not anticipate was that our cache server was about to be overloaded. The cache server is used to maintain user login sessions. We’ve handled conventions double the size of Gary Con on it, and even Gary Con itself on it without issue in the past. We’re still trying to diagnose what went wrong there. Needless to say we have replaced it with larger servers that are 12 times the size of the current servers just to make sure that it can’t happen again.

“Even though we had done everything we thought we could do in this case, Tabletop.Events still takes full responsibility for this outage. We are sorry we caused a delay in your registration. We apologize to both Gary Con and the attendees. Moreover, as the owner of Tabletop.Events, I am also personally sorry for this mishap. We will do better.

-JT”

All Over Again

Unfortunately, the re-try at 1:00 PM Central had issues again. Thankfully, as mentioned above, those with successful completion get to keep their registration. Also those with items in their cart will keep their cart when it goes live again.

On top of issues with the hotel overbooking some rooms that lead to confusion and anger among some, this has lead to a lot of harsh criticism across social media.

My Experience

My first Gary Con was number 8, and I’ve been every year since. Registration hiccups have been minor, to me. Other things, like no alert of cancelled games, table service being slow or occasionally not happening. Overall, they have been great experiences and the minor issues are fairly easy to overlook.

Growing Pains

This year, Gary Con is the biggest ever. It has morphed from a con focused on older games and miniature war games to having a large contingent of newer D&D 5e with Adventurer’s League and official Wizards Of The Coast support. Some have called this selling out to the big money, or big names, as more D&D celebrities are attending.

D&D 5e and all the rest is not a problem in itself. The real issue is that the family is committed to keeping it in Lake Geneva, home to D&D and the original TSR. This results in the reality that there is only one location big enough to hold it, and that location has exceeded capacity to house it under one roof.

It is a huge roof with the boonies at the far end of connected structures. This year, some events are occurring on the grounds of the venue but in detached buildings that are 20 minutes by available transport away. Some comments online indicated they were not sure if there was a walking path available for that.

This year will be a real test for Gary Con. Will it be capped at a certain size? Will Gary Con really be able to stay in Lake Geneva?

I certainly hope it can stay in Lake Geneva. I really like going to Gary Con as I get to see some people I don’t see anywhere else, other than other similar cons. Sadly, there is a limit to how many cons I can attend each year.

Suggestions For Improvement

I suggest getting the word out across all social media, and not just Facebook. There are lots of people who avoid Facebook and were left in the dark on other social media until those of us on Facebook could fill them in.

Such instances of “telephone” can lead to inadvertent misinformation being introduced.

Gary Con is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and perhaps others. I suggest coping & pasting the message from one social media to all the others so those who only follow on one get it.

Also, Table Top Events should have a way to put up a message on the website so we all see it.

I’m no expert on running a busy website, but I know there are ways to deal with this. I hope they can keep a list of the issues that occurred this time, and all prior times, and verify that all of those issues are resolved before trying again. It makes both Table Top Events and Gary Con look bad.

I’ve gone to other, smaller cons that use Table Top Events and had no issues. Table Top Events handles conventions larger than Gary Con. I am not aware of the other cons using Table Top Events having these types of issues.

KUDOS

Caroline is the Director of Guest Relations and she is the best person for that job. She remains cool under pressure and handles the chaos of stressed out gamers. We should all show our appreciation to Caroline, as she is a key member of the Gary Con team. We should all chip in and get her something nice, like a vacation in a place without internet, or at least a gift card to a business she wants to patronize.