Comments on: GenCon Registration 2009: RUBI System = Best Reg So Far

By: Alan De Smet

Alan De Smet — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:10:42 +0000

Wishlists were a great addition. You could fill your wishlist before registration when things were relaxed. Then during the crush you could log in, mash two or three buttons, and it tried to buy one of everything in your wishlist. Not perfect if you need multiple tickets for one event, and while it let you try for conflicting events the fallback system was crude (you got the lowest numbered event available, later conflicts were dropped). Still, a serious step forward. I have some sympathy for the scaling problem for the initial crush. Gen Con is, relatively speaking, a little company. Scaling up your entire system what I'm guessing is an order of magnitude for 30 minutes a year is hard for anyone.

By: Patrick Benson

Patrick Benson — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:04:58 +0000

It is an improvement, yes, but it is still not a good system. Maybe I'm just being too harsh because of my profession, but a good system doesn't slow down during the high impact periods. And a good system wouldn't require that I go to another site in order to search for information about Gen Con events. Yes, it is better. It still isn't the gold standard and Gen Con should be at the gold standard. A for effort, C- for the site.

By: Kurt "Telas" Schneider

Kurt "Telas" Schneider — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:26:59 +0000

Anyone can criticize (and if the internet proves anything, they usually will), but it's a rare individual who will publicly praise something they once criticized. As a Gen Con attendee who has to deal with both the frustration of registration, and the (well earned) complaining from the users, I think your series of "registration reviews" is an example of how to provide solid feedback, both negative and positive. Your article above (and your previous ones) expresses my sentiments exactly: This year's registration was the best ever, and by a goodly margin, but there's still room for improvement.

By: DNAphil

DNAphil — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:56:15 +0000

I have to agree. While I did have some problems in the first 12 minutes, after that the system was much faster than any of the previous years. I also really liked the Watchlist feature, and the ability to buy tickets for everything on your watchlist all at once. I also liked that you could buy tickets for friends, and that the schedule showed you where you had conflicts when you looked at other events. All in all, RUBI was a big improvement over past systems. But on one bit of criticism, and this is meant to be positive. With a few years of online registration under their belts, the GenCon registration team, knows what the initial volume of transactions are going to be in the first 15 min of opening registration for both True Dungeons and the rest of the events. Efforts should be taken to scale the system up to handle that level of volume. While the system seemed to recover after 15 min, those first few minutes after the opening of registration felt like years past. So, in your post mortem analysis of the 2009 registration, please set a goal for next year to scale RUBI to handle more than the volume of transactions in those first 15 min. Otherwise...good job, and far less painful than years past.