…, most of which don’t affect me.
The Gen Con community forums have been running hot for a few weeks now, and I’m wondering whether ticking ‘update me by email’ was a bad idea. 🙂
I bought my VIG Badge for Gen Con a while ago now, back on the 8th of January. There’s no particular drama there, it’s a pretty simple system, and given that I get first refusal at renewing as a returning VIG, the only real reason to do the badge thing as soon as I could was so that it was done.
In this case, ‘as soon as I could’ was around three hours after VIG badge purchasing opened, suggesting that it was closer to ‘once I woke up’.
Housing was next, on the 10th. There’s a little bit more urgency here, even though there’s a guarantee of getting a hotel through the room block(s) reserved for VIGs, simply because people like to be in the connected hotels, so they fill up faster.
Travelling on my lonesome helps here, as there’s more demand for rooms with two double beds in them than there is for the single king-sized bed option, but I still made sure I was awake well before housing opened, and I had my room mostly booked nine minutes later. I’m back at the JW Marriott, which is a connected hotel, and is probably the directly-connected hotel furthest from the heart of Gen Con. This suits me well, as it means I can escape to my room if need be, and actually feel like I’ve left the con, while at the same time being close enough that a 1 a.m. walk back to the hotel isn’t that big a deal.
About that ‘mostly’; They’ve updated the booking system a bit, and it does a thing where it guarantees/confirms the nights it can, and waitlists the remainder, which basically means the nights at the start and end of the block. The Gen Con housing bods then try to get those confirmed, which took about three days in my case. I think there may be others who still haven’t had those nights confirmed, which would suck, and complicate the planning.
As for ‘directly-connected’, I’m told that it’s possible to go through the JW, down into the carpark, then across to the carpark of the adjacent Springhill Suites, and up into the hotel, without ever having to go outside, which I’d class as indirectly-connected. I can understand doing that if the weather was bad, as there’s not a whole lot of cover, or if it was late at night.
That’s basically it for me until late May. when event registration happens.
The events catalog gets ‘released’ a bit before then, in an electronic form, so that people may go through it, figure out the events they’re interested in, and put them on a wishlist in the hope that the Internet Spirits will smile upon them, and, at the appointed time of High Noon (Eastern) on Sunday, May 17, 2015, will grant them a nice low number in the queue.
This will not happen to me, as I am very far away from the server, so my wishlist will be a multilayered affair, with triple-redundancy where possible.
As a side note, I was contacted by someone on the Gen Con forums, who’d noticed that I was travelling by myself, and wanted to enlist my help.
VIG Badges, in addition to the many many perks which exist to separate VIGs from the hoi polloi allow you to purchase up to 2 VIG Companion upgrades, so that SO’s, friends, or in this case total strangers, may hang out in the VIG Lounge and get early entry to the Dealer Hall on opening day, plus a few other things; I know of a few groups who’ll band together to buy a VIG badge + Companion badges, and share the cost equally.
Zergo, for that was his handle, wanted to bring along a whole mess of people, and needed someone else to purchase VIG Companion upgrades for them. He was surprisingly OK with PayPal-ing the money to me in advance, his friends were quick to do their part in setting up accounts & friending me in the Gen Con system, and fortunately the badge upgrades were still available when I went to purchase them. (there’re a limited number of upgrades out there)