This didn’t go well. I have stuff to do, and games I’m looking forward to, but … it didn’t go well.

Starting at the start, over the previous week or so, but mostly in the hours before wishlist submission, trying to come up with a suitable balance of events arranged to take advantage of the priority system. In my case, this means that my backups have backups.

See? All perfectly sensible.

The jury is out on what went wrong. At my end, I got the worst queue position I’d ever had, in the 9400’s. And then the Gen Con servers ran amazingly slowly, so it seems like something didn’t work as planned at their end; Maybe their load testing missed something, maybe whatever they’re using to scale up for demand just didn’t work right, or maybe they just dropped the ball.

I’m usually done with events after a few hours; My list this time didn’t even get processed until 2¾ hours after it was submitted.

Eventually, I was offered some event tickets which weren’t sold out. Threw back some duplicates, then spent maybe the next hour looking for games to fit into gaps in the schedule, and in the end came away with something I’m pretty happy with that doesn’t look like a trainwreck waiting to happen.

I tried to convince myself that I’d totally be able to do an 8am game, but in the end could not, because that’s insane and there’s no way I’d actually make it.

I’m still tweaking the schedule a bit in places, trying to get that balance between “that looks fun”, “do all the things”, and “downtime is important”.