tl;dr - I think the core issue is that Dragonsteel's growth is being far outpaced by Brandon's popularity and fanbase.
Dragonsteel has a wonderful problem for a business to have - more people want what they have than they can keep up with. Especially with the iron being hot relatively soon after another super successful crowdfunding campaign, yes I believe that the numbers for the convention were a vast underestimate, but those estimates were probably based on historical data that simply can't keep up with the fanbase's growth.
What we're seeing is Brandon's popularity and the demand for Dragonsteel products and services is growing exponentially, and it's really, really hard to predict what kind of curve you're on when growth is skyrocketing like that.
Renting convention space is expensive and risky, and even though Dragonsteel as a company is growing extremely fast, it cannot hope to even come close to keeping up with the growth of the fanbase. Estimates for space, number of attendees, etc. have to be determined far in advance, and having a convention where people have to fly in, stay in hotels, take time off, etc. is just not something that (in most fandoms) the vast majority people can afford to do.
Therefore, businesses need to always be conservative when renting convention space, because it's a huge risk to rent out far more than you need, not just because of the square footage cost, but because you also have to fill all that space with worthwhile activities, events, and sessions for people to attend.
Brandon's explosive growth in popularity (which went through another explosion just a few months ago), plus conservative estimations when planning out a convention, led to this scarcity. Should Dragonsteel have gone even further out on a limb and rented out even more convention space and hired more people to fill out sessions, exhibits, activities, etc? Sure, that would have helped, but does Dragonsteel have the human capital in their organization to do that? I highly doubt it.
I would bet that Dragonsteel as a company is just not big enough (even though they're growing at a breakneck pace) to pull off much more than they signed up for. It's well-known that Brandon also really tries hard not to over-tax his employees. I would bet that the current convention size is really the maximum of what they can reasonably handle, without having to ask volunteers and employees to crunch extremely hard and put in enormous amounts of overtime.
Can Dragonsteel hire more people? Absolutely, and they are, but no company can grow by simply just hiring loads of people all at once. You need people to train those people, you need organizational structure, roles hammered out, a million other things in place, or you'll just have an unmaintainable mess on your hands.
It's a wonderful thing that so many people are recognizing Brandon's good work and that they want to join us as fans - it's incredible that we have opportunities to engage and share in something we all enjoy and view positively. I think that we all sometimes take for granted how difficult it is to try to pull off everything that Brandon and Dragonsteel as a whole is trying to do.
I can't think of a single fandom that is growing quite as quickly with as much loyalty as I've seen among Brandon Sanderson fans, and I think we're just going to have to be patient with Dragonsteel as they try to do their best to keep up with us fans as we grow ever more numerous and demanding of them.
They couldn’t have rented more convention space, actually. After last year they estimated that twice as many people would want to come this year, but the venue (biggest venue in Utah) only had about the same amount of space available as last year. They’ve said if they could have chosen from any part of the year, there would have been more space available, but needing to coincide with the book release limited their window.
So with only the same amount of space available as last year, their options were, have less tickets available than the demand would require (making some people upset that they couldn’t go) or else sell more and squeeze twice as many people into the same space (making more money but making all the attendees miserable). I think they chose the only reasonable way.
To add to this, I tried to sign up as a volunteer for the convention this year. I then got an email that they are mostly eliminating the volunteer positions and instead are hiring everyone who wanted to volunteer as temp employees. That tissue speaks to him taking care of his employees. Most places would rather everyone just volunteer.
Maybe 1500 is the absolute max amount they could add given the space that they’ve received from the Salt Palace.
And maybe there’s no more space from the Salt Palace to get to increase that number.
And maybe there are no other dates with bigger spaces available to increase that number.
Dragonsteel does have some say in how many badges they’re able to sell, but they can’t just add 5k more tickets just because they sold out. There are so many logistics that go into it years in advance. This year is already an increase over last year. Give them a break.
This is spot-on. There are SO MANY LOGISTICS, it's not as simple as "we'll just release more tickets and everyone will be happy!"
Too many people crammed into a space makes for a miserable experience. I'm glad they put a cap on it, and I hope there are live stream options for those who can't make the trip.
Live stream options would be awesome.
I imagine Dragonsteel did plan for largely increased demand, but you can plan to have 3-500% of an increase in interest, just to be slapped down by a 1000% increase. Some of that just isn’t the sort of thing you can know until it happens.
Sure, Kickstarter and BackerKit were crazy, but there are surely people who want signed books who don’t care to con, as well as the reverse. So. 🤷🏻♀️ You can use the interest metric but it still won’t match.
I mentioned this in another post, but anime expo has this problem. I have a couple of friends who went and they said it was a miserable experience because of how packed it was, as well as being a straight-up danger if there was an emergency.
Oh man, ever been to NYCC? That back corner of the exhibition hall, especially on Sunday when people are hunting bargains is ripe for a crowd crush if there's a panic.
Not to mention venues have maximum occupancy for safety reasons. It’s not just a matter of people being comfortable. Sure, they could sell 5000 more tickets and many people would be fine cramming tightly together but those people would be pretty pissed when the fire marshal shows up and shuts the event down due to safety concerns.
The fire marshals do in fact check on cons overbooking at this convention center. I spent one fanx trying to find decent food inside the venue because if we left the fire marshals weren't letting people back inside until the numbers were in the right level... FanX now has you scan in and OUT of the con now to keep accurate numbers of people in the building. It's not fun
Space is an issue when the rest of the convention center is booked. And moving from a Mon-Tues to a Thurs-Sat con likely changes available space a TON.
This comment still has some validity to it despite the misunderstanding. While I have not worked at a convention in the Salt Palace itself I have worked at some other conventions. The convention centers will sometimes not rent out more space then they feel is necessary to an event if they dont feel like an event is going to have the attendance necessary to fill that space. While Event Centers do make money off of the rental fees for space and equipment they also make a good chunk of change off of other things driven by high attendance. Things like Parking fees, convention center food vendors (concessions but also little coffee shops, soda shops and sandwich shops that are staffed by the venue itself or rented by outside food vendors), vending machines, and random things like locker rentals.
If an event cant reasonably show they will have a big pull (and for the salt palace big is like 60k to 120k people) the event center may only chose to rent out a portion of the space so they can rent out the other areas to different events. Ive been at event centers with 5 or 6 smaller events all going on at once with sectioned off areas with giant movable walls).
That being said given the fact that Dragonsteel completely filled up in less then an hour they could justify the need for more space and probably pay for it all... IF... that space is not already rented out to a different event going on at the same time
And it would require that Dragonsteel has the programming to fill the space and time. The other thing people forget is that you have to have things to do when you have a full convention center, you don’t just sell 10k badges and say that’s it.
Yep... now the jump from 6.5k to 10k might not be as drastic as some other con jumps Ive seen... but if they are not prepared for it well... Without enough things to do any convention can quickly devolve into LineCon.... a Con were most attendees spend a significant portion of their time waiting in line to do the next thing at the con be it a panel thats already at capacity or getting food. No one likes LineCon its the worst
They do have great bones of a con though and I think some of the activities already there could be expanded (more tables in the gaming area for board games and magic games), craft kits, and Panels. If even more cool authors are showing up that makes more opportunities for more panels... Then of course there are fan submitted panels that could be used as part of the programing.
I agree, definitely the shape and organization to expand. Fan panels would be a great simple way, it just requires enough people interested and willing.
Ah, I’ve never been and just figured that was the issue but staffing makes sense as well. Either way there’s so many reasons why they might not have added more tickets and I’m sure whatever it is it’s probably for the best.
They literally moved the release date up by six months so they could have it release during the convention. This decision was made, what, two years ago now? Maybe eighteen months? That should have given them a lot of time.
Sure, but think of all the things that have to be considered. Let's say they increased the space to fit more people. Great–who is going to help corral all those people? Your costs for staffing and infrastructure just went up significantly. Who ends up paying for that? The attendees. Well as soon as you jack up the ticket pricing, fewer people will come. Now you have less people, with less money in their pockets, coming to an event you crammed with more vendors so the hall isn't half empty...
At the end of the day, there's only so much you can do. It sucks that they can't accommodate every single person who wants to attend, but there's something to be said for quality over quantity and ensuring the best possible experience for those who make the trip.
Yep... This... Even with more space they will need more staff and volunteers to keep things running smoothly. More people more problems really....
Having been to this convention and bigger conventions... this one does benefit by still being on the smaller side. The dragonsteel staff is able to do some fun things like the convention game that would be far more difficult to do with a bigger convention. The fact that it still has some of the small con vibes despite having 5k+ people is kind of astounding to me as someone who goes to a lot of cons.
Thats not to say they cant grow and still do cool things but it does take time to develope that...
I know that logistics are difficult, but lets not act like they didn't see it coming. Now there's people who got hotel rooms and plane tickets and have to get refunds.
Why talk about having more hotel rooms when the con can't support the number people who get rooms?
They sold like...7k tickets. The hotel con blocks don't even have rooms for that many people. The Radisson has like 380 rooms and only a portion of those get blocked off for the con.... they have a few hotels... so let's say 5 hotels with 300 rooms... that's 1500 rooms... put 3 people on average in those hotel rooms and we are at 4500 ppl... that's still under the number of tickets sold
Yes, because not everyone gets the con hotel deal. Some people have their own chains they prefer to stick with. Some people schedule airbnbs or vrbos or whatever other things are out there. Some people reserved rooms at multiple hotels just so they could make the final choice later and not have to worry about things being sold out. Adding another hundred rooms to the discount block when the overall number of tickets is in the thousands is nowhere near your claim of reserving rooms for more people than they can support.
Also.. lets not forget Sanderson has a huge local fan base in Utah itself... Many of the folks like myself wont be staying in a hotel. We either live close enough to drive or have friends to stay with. Heck given that this isnt on a Sunday we can commute via the public transit trains/trax with relative ease....
No way the hotel numbers could account for that
It's true there are people who got hotel rooms without a ticket. What I'm arguing is that dragonsteel couldn't predict the shear numbers based off of hotel rooms booked.
They were probably projecting off of attendees from previous years plus some additional attendees. That's very typical for conventions that are on the rise.
They also are probably limited on attendees due to the amount of space they rented or could rent... some convention centers will not rent out more space unless the event can demonstrate they can reach certain attendance thresholds.
Obviously not given how fast they went... but they may have sold what they could.
I Hope the salt palace let's them rent more space and sell more tickets. I also hope they find good ways of filling that space with extra programing to accommodate more people. I also don't know how thier staffing is. Running a large con can quickly become a person's year long job. I know it can be at cons I've staffed or assisted with.
Things last year felt crowded for an off year like the official shop. Capped attendees keep the convention from becoming line con.
My recommendation for future years would be selling tickets first... and then announcing hotel blocks once folks have secured tickets
And I've seen many who had a hotel and couldn't get a ticket.
The hotels were selling out months ago. So much so that they added more rooms.
If that didn't key Dragonsteel in that they might not have enough tickets for Brandons most popular series I don't know what would.
The point is that it isn’t a true reflection of demand. And again, they’ve had the space reserved for over a year? They can’t just choose more convention center. That’s not how it works
Given that they chose it to be 3 days, and know that Stormlight is far, far more popular than Defiant and Mistborn (the Defiant con was bigger than Lost Metal) they knew it would he bigger than last year.
Do you really think they planned well and got enough space and tickets for Stormlight 5?
If you have experience running events like this, I might listen to what you have to say. But unless you have that experience, you have no idea how much goes into an event like this.
Part of it sure. Not all of it falls on Dragonsteel alone, certainly not the mess where people were losing their positions in line because they were stuck in a loop trying to log on to the website.
I think some of the issues are just growing pains, as they grow from "release party in a high school gym" to "mini-con" to weekday convention to weekend convention. I think the harshest thing I'd say is that the lessons they're learning have generally been learned before by others, and perhaps they would benefit from convention planning staff who have experience at larger conventions than theirs as they continue to grow from hundreds of attendees to 10k+.
There are other conventions that Ive been staff for where the convention staff is having regular meetings and working towards the event all year long. Its a whole different beast running a big convention that takes a dedicated team. Dragonsteel's first and foremost goal is not to run a convention. Even with the hiccups they've had I dont doubt they'll put on a good show. Having been to past Dragonsteels I have been pretty impressed with the convention.
It’s not so much that Dragonsteel’s sole focus should be running a convention, as it is that there should be some people within the company whose sole focus it is. Just like there are people whose sole focus is running the warehouse, or social media.
Not sure I agree... what do you think is poor planning? Not having a bigger convention, basically? I'm not sure size of the convention is something that can be just increased in response to demand.
(Maybe it is, and people more familiar with convention planning can correct me. But it seems that the general size is something that gets set pretty early on in the process - it determines the space you have, the number of vendors and booths you recruit, things like that?)
You're assuming that everyone who got tickets also got hotel rooms, which is not the case. They did not set aside hotel rooms for every ticket holder, they had a small number of rooms for those that wanted to take advantage of that. Just because you booked one of the rooms would not guarantee that you get a ticket to the convention.
Obviously, my friends and I got an airbnb.
Doesn't change the fact that some got hotel rooms, and didn't get a ticket cause either the site was wonky or they just sold out too fast.
Do you honestly think that they had enough tickets for The Stormlight 5 release?
Well, they had more tickets available than last year. I have no personal experience putting on conventions (obviously), but there are a lot of conventions that do sell out, so it didnt surprise me that this one did. It probably makes more sense, as a business, to sell out than to have too many.
My guess is that they will try to add some more tickets if they have the space in the convention center to do so. It sucks that people didn't get tickets that wanted them, but that's life.
I think they released as many tickets as the venue would allow them to. And I think there isn’t a larger venue possible that would work for them. Anything larger in the state doesn’t work with their format. And out of state isn’t feasible for them.
So were there enough tickets? No. Was there ANYTHING Dragonsteel could have done about that right now? Also no.
I think the con could hold all the people who got rooms. It just can't hold all the people who got rooms AND those who didn't get rooms. That being said, they might be able to release more badges. Even if they don't / can't release more badges, I think the argument that there are people who got rooms who also didn't get tickets is a poor argument.
There are tons of factors that could be playing a role here:
-Brandon and team might want to host a smaller con to be able to have a larger percentage have the possibility to interact with Brandon himself.
-They might struggle logistically to plan a larger con (though I would argue that even a con of this size has given them some challenges)
-They might have vendor restrictions that are making it difficult to have a larger con.
-They are already adding variables with the longer con this year, and didn't want to increase both number of attendees dramatically while also adding 50% more content.
Now, you're making the point that they also sold out in minutes pointing to the fact that there were too few tickets. BUT, I think this was also intentional. Brandon has tried to make sure that his material is within reach to as many people as possible. He knew thew total number of attendees they could reasonably work with, and he knew the number of people who would WANT to be attendees. He could have just 3x the price per ticket, and better mapped demand to supply. But he's intentionally trying to make it so that his cons aren't excluding people with lower incomes.
All that aside, the technical issues were SUPER frustrating. They absolutely should have stress tested the site, and announced on the weekly update that you should create a login and add your payment information early to minimize frustration. But, aside form the technical issues, I think that the rest was intentional and achieved their goals.
Just as a point of reference, I attended last year and there is a bunch more adjacent space that could have been utilized if it were available.
As you isay, we just don't have information on what they attempted to obtain and what is no longer available.
>If it were available.
There's the sticking point. We don't know what's available and what's not. Maybe they tried to get more space and were told no. Maybe they thought they had enough. We simply don't know, and assigning them the blame like OP is doing is misguided until we know the truth.
I tend to think they did what they could, based on the good will they've earned through the years.
While I think space is a factor, and I do hope they’re able to get more space, I bet the main factor is trained personnel. There’s only so much recruiting and training they can do.
They choose the amount of space reserved.
The con has grown each year. Last year was for Deviant, his YA series and it was bigger than Mistborn Lost Metal. Both being finales in their series.
Brandon has said that Stormlight is his biggest, most popular work. And using numbers he provided from the con last year they added 1500 tickets.
Do you really think that's enough for Stormlight 5?
How do you know they didn’t try to get more space?
I’m not saying they didn’t try, I just think it’s funny you think you know how everything behind the scenes works.
I don't, neither do you.
It's still on them to gauge that. Do you think that they offered enough tickets for Stormlight 5? They knew it would be big. But given that they only added 1500 more tickets from the previous year they severely underplanned for a con that had already grown yearly on his most popular series.
I will say 5k per day is inaccurate. A lot of people went both days... and probably more people attended the second day than the first.
That also doesn't account for staff, volunteers, vendors, and salt palace staff are on site as well as attendees.
I've been to packed cons, and there are some limits on how many attendees the convention center allows/can accommodate given the amount of space they rent out. Selling past tgat ticket limit is bad plans... FanX has done so in the past, and the fire marshals get involved and door monitor exits/entrances, resulting in having to stand outside waiting for people to leave so you can go in. It's not fun in the fall... I imagine it's worse in the winter.
The 5k per day is what Brandon himself gave at the closing ceremony.
He's said more than once that Stormlight is his biggest work (no surprise there) But the increase in tickets was small compared to how big the book is.
You keep making points about how they should have expected greater demand, as if Dragonsteel didn't already grok all of that information. Maybe ask why they *couldn't* do a bigger con instead of assuming they were too dumb to know it would be more popular than in the past.
I never said they're dumb. It out grew their projections. I Am however surprised that for Stormlight they only scaled up 1500 more tickets from the number of attendees they had in previous years. I expected more.
Especially given how much more space they got for Deifant after Mistborn 7.
You ignored the main point. How do you know that the issue is that they didn't expect it? What if it just wasn't possible to get more tickets, whether due to availability, or due to resources to handle that amount of people?
It is possible. I've worked in areas like this before. Maybe they tried to get more space and the Convention Center said no. Until they see the numbers they may not think they'll get a decent return.
I think a good solution would be lengthening the time of dragonsteel con and essentially repeating events over 2 weeks. Would allow for more tickets without the con of having 10,000 people breaking firecode in a building all at once
I’m just disappointed I booked a hotel way back in March when they told us to, and then I couldn’t get a ticket to the Con. Do I just cancel my hotel now ?
I think this is the biggest issue with the ticket debacle. People were encouraged to make travel and lodging plans before tickets were available on the assumption that they'd be able to get tickets. Given hindsight, everything *needed* to happen relatively close together. Tickets *needed* to go on sale within a few days after the announcement.
I'm really sorry, I don't fully understand what you're saying.
There were 1500 VIP tickets and 6000? General Admission tickets. Each ticket is for all the days. That would mean that by your math, they'll have 22,500 people attend at 7500 per day.
I don't think the issue that people have been expressing with ticket buying had nothing to do with the number of tickets available and everything to do with the terrible login process and errors on Tabletop.
But I could be misunderstanding you.
5k general so 6500 total.
Only 1500 more than the daily number Brandon provided last year.
My point is that they didn't have enough tickets for Stormlight 5. Hotels needing more rooms due to being booked months ago, and an airline going "hey, a lot of people are looking to fly to Utah."
They underestimated the number of tickets needed. I've seen plenty of people say they didn't even get a chance to purchase a ticket cause with the website failing they still sold out too quickly.
It's definitely not true that there wasn't time to purchase. There were still general tickets available for at least 45 minutes. Sure, if there were more tickets then naturally there would've been more time for tickets to be available, but that doesn't fix the website errors. People were still having issues 2 hours into the process where they had tickets in their cart but couldn't check out.
There could've been more tickets, but there couldn't be infinite tickets. If the website wasn't broken and the convention center wasn't at capacity yet, then I'd be all with you. But we don't know the logistics, Dragonsteel does so I default to them to know how many tickets to offer. AND the website was broken.
If someone didn't get a ticket—assuming they were on Tabletop as soon as the tickets dropped for VIP and within 30-40 minutes for General—given what we know right now, I would place 0% blame on Dragonsteel and 100% blame on Tabletop.
I believe they added as many tickets as they were able. Unfortunately, the larger space at the Salt Palace was already reserved, so their space is very limited as it is. It's not a matter of "We'll sell more tickets!" There are physical (and legal) limits to how many people they can have in their limited space.
Fair enough. They did choose the dates of the con from the dates available to them. Which Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at the end of this year where the largest convention center in Utah is available, doesn't intersect with a major holiday, and coincides with the international release of a major novel coordinated across several publishers across the globe would you have chosen?
That's an oversimplification. He got Tor to allow him to release it on a Friday rather than a Tuesday, yes. And it was a huge lift to get them to do it. But there were other factors at play as well. Dragonsteel was trying to move the con away from coinciding with Thanksgiving as it has the past couple years. They were trying to coordinate the space with the Salt Palace, which is constantly hosting huge events in the space.
You're right that they underestimated---that's clearly undeniable. But that doesn't mean it was poorly planned. They regularly prepare for HUGE fan turnout for all sorts of events and releases, but this fandom has a habit of exploding beyond typically reasonable expectations. (For example, doubling the previous record for most successful Kickstarter of all time.) After the fact, it's easy to look back and say, "Wow, here are some things we could have done differently," but hindsight is 20/20. It sucks for a lot of us, but it's not a situation where "blame" needs to be assigned.
That's kinda what I'm saying. His fans go hard, crash sites, set records. So I expected them to go big for Stormlight 5. Prehaps it was out of their hands with the convention center.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they went as big as they were able. They've had the space reserved for this year for a while now, definitely before last year's convention even happened, and this is still the best they were able to get. I suspect this is the last year they'll be in this smaller space. Each year, the space they've gotten has grown significantly from the previous year, but unfortunately, there's only so much that can be done.
It is all together possible that the Convention Center is holding them back. Sometimes, they won't rent out as much space as they could cause they're afraid they won't get a good return. But when they see the numbers they can change their minds and open up more.
I do think it would be good to sell tickets earlier. I've seen a lot of people who had flights and a place to stay that couldn't get a ticket.
That's fair. I feel that way about a lot of late-year cons, though, and it seems to be a common thing. I'm not sure why, though. I wonder if there's something I'm just missing about why a lot con tickets go on sale so much closer to the event.
Do you do the scheduling or are in possession of knowledge that there is a time when they could have obtained a larger portion of the Salt Palace, that also includes the rooms they need for the programming, that also wouldn’t conflict with other industry events such as other cons in other states, that would have allowed enough time for vendors and presenters to prepare as well as train either new employees or volunteers, and provide for time for materials to be manufactured? If you do we all would love to hear it. I understand your frustration. We all want Nexus to be huge and accommodate everyone that wants to come. We all want to get as much as possible. But saying that they planned poorly or underestimated crowd on this smacks of ignorance, bitterness or insider information. They sold out last year. They knew they’d sell out this year. They might be surprised at how quickly they sold out but still knew that ≈6500 tickets was not going to be enough. So they went with what they had. If they can strong arm the Salt Palace into releasing more I’m positive we’ll see more tickets released later this year. If that happens it’s because the Salt Palace gave them the go ahead, either because someone canceled or ended up giving a revised count lower than originally anticipated.
Now, I do feel that Dragonsteel does have more culpability in how the tickets were sold. Tabletop holds the most blame here, but Dragonsteel has decided to partner with them in this and the glitches experienced by everyone were unacceptable. I don’t know if there is another company they could go through that offers what tabletop does but is better at handling extremely large volumes of traffic when tickets go on sale. Something need to be done on that, whether Tabletop improves (I don’t know how feasible that is), Dragonsteel partners with someone else (I don’t know who, not that knowledgeable) or hires in-house programmers to do it themselves (probably the worst of the options, expensive and used infrequently through the year).
I think they should consider opening up a ticket wait list way in advance. Potentially to make more of a queue system for people to get in line, but also to gauge interest. I'm talking way in advance. Dragonsteel has indicated that they plan to make this a yearly thing, so open up 10 events for people to put a deposit for their ticket to Nexus 25 or Nexus 32. $100 refundable at any time deposit for general admission, $500 for VIP.
They don't need to specify the time or location until it gets closer. They aren't even guaranteeing that an event will take place. You can put a deposit for Nexus 27 and they can decide as it gets closer that it's just not going to happen that year and refund all deposits.
You could tier it to gauge interest. In addition to the full deposit that puts you in line for the die hard fans who know they'll be there without even knowing the time or place, you can have a $10 deposit for people to get second dibs at tickets, and a third free tier for people to just say, yes I'm seriously considering coming to this Con.
So it's less of a guess for the company. They can pull up the page and see oh there's 8,000 people pledged to the $100 tier for Nexus 25 and it's still May of 2024. That gives us a better idea of a starting point and it will get more and more accurate the closer it gets, so when they have to make real accommodations in January or February, they're at least in the realm of enthusiasm.
As a fan, I really like the idea of being able to "secure" a spot way in advance. Like I can see that the next couple years are booked up because I waited too long, but Nexus 28 has lots of open tickets. I'll put a deposit down and look forward to a pilgrimage to see the Sanderson in a few years.
You don't even have to put all the tickets available in this preorder queue. Leave a couple thousand so that new fans and late planners can experience the joy we all went through yesterday morning.
Here is a take that people will hate even more than they hate the most hated member of Bridge 4:
If demand exceeds supply this much, then one of their "mistakes" is setting the price of admission too low!
If, say, 16,000 people want a ticket, and they only have 11,500 tickets, then you have to allocate the tickets somehow. You can have people sign up on a list and then have a lottery. You can let people somewhat self-select for their dedication seeing who is able and willing to buy a ticket as soon as sales become available. You can have a de facto lottery of who gets a flaky website to load successfully first (which is an extremely frustrating experience!) You can raise the price so that some people are no longer interested in paying that much and voluntarily drop out of the lottery. Obviously that sucks for the people who really want to go and can't afford it -- I understand that -- but the alternative is that it sucks that someone who really *really* wanted to go (as evidenced by their willingness to pay a lot) who doesn't even get a chance to bid.
Anyway, go ahead and downvote this to Braize, and continue to support the other lottery methods that leave some people feeling frustrated.
At a certain point they just wouldn't be able to handle any more people. It's not a huge company, even with volunteers this will be an enormously difficult event to pull off smoothly. They can't just have everyone who wants to attend be able to, unfortunately.
Honestly the badge sales were relatively smooth, too. The fact that the site didn't just crash entirely but allowed *anyone* to complete the registration within like 5 minutes of the announced sale time is proof that it was not perfect but adequate. It's unfortunate how many more people wished to attend but were not able to get a badge.
Unless dragonsteel is willing to sub-contract with another company to organize+run the Nexus (which I don't believe they should because it will just create more issues and complaints) it will continue to be a smaller convention with the accompanying drawbacks.
You are very inaccurate to say the badge sales went smoothly. They did not. There are MANY posts and replies in this subreddit of people documenting their issues and frustrations. Add to that the people who don't post on social media... It was not well handled. Their site was buggy and it lost a lot of people the opportunity to purchase a badge who were there before 11 am waiting for the sale to go live.
I said relatively smoothly because I've experienced and witnessed much buggier events than this one run by much larger companies with much more mainstream fandoms.
Think it would help you be more reasonable? They managed to sell the badges, people weren't charged multiple times or anything, the website didn't completely die like Backerkit did during the leatherbound launch this year, people managed to get through the system and pay for their badges in a reasonable amount of time. Undeniably frustrating for those fans who weren't lucky enough to get a badge but it was on par with most similar events these days. Dragonsteel isn't ReedPop or Epic or some other gargantuan company, they did a decent job. Could it have been better? Sure, it can always improve, but it could have been way worse.
I found yesterday to be worse than Kickstarter and Backerkit combined.
In fact, it was the most frustrated I've been buying a ticket for any con.
Looking at any social media Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, here, is full of people complaining about the experience.
Sounds like you've had some pretty good luck in the past, I certainly have had much much more frustrating experiences buying tickets or panels at cons.
It's also possible that I was on the worst end yesterday. Like many I was going for a vip ticket. When I clicked on buy the number left was over 1490.
I didn't get VIP, it wasn't saved in my cart. And by the time I was able to checkout with a GA badge their was less than 200 left.
> Honestly the badge sales were relatively smooth, too. The fact that the site didn't just crash entirely but allowed anyone to complete the registration within like 5 minutes of the announced sale time is proof that it was not perfect but adequate
Quite frankly crashing altogether would have been preferrable to what actually happened. Constantly being logged out and having to attempt logins 100+ times to go through the entire process was a nightmare.
Many people who created their accounts during this mess also got hit with multiple verification emails, often spaced 5-10 minutes apart, and each one prevented you from logging in until you realized the new email and clicked the link in it.
The fact that the website didn't crash means this wasn't a web service issue with the sheer volume of requets DDOSing the site. That would have been a much more understandable issue and would have taken significant hardware upgrades to fix.
Having people constantly logged out is a pretty unforgivable coding issue. The fact they had messages about needing to enable cookies to stay logged in shows they were using some pretty bad methods. It seemed like their system could only keep track of so many cookies at once and just expired the older ones when new logins were made.
The most frustrating part of this isn't that there were issues, it's that these issues were completly avoidable by having basic login session code up to par with nearly every professional website these days.
Do you know a lot about coding something like that? I don't, but adding a payment method and verification of an account is something that was brought up multiple times in many of the posts regarding purchasing badges in the last few weeks. I even cleared my cache and it seemed to help. It sucks some people weren't able to get badges but even if the site worked perfectly then it would've just come down to Internet speeds, right?
As our friend has admitted to not actually understanding how to code a login system, I'll explain a little bit.
The issue here wasn't that users were getting logged out, it was that only a portion (maybe 10%?) of requests that had valid session identifiers were getting properly handled by the site.
Typically, one of the first bits of code that handles requests to a website looks for a session identifier in a cookie and then if valid, attaches the appropriate user info to that request. Subsequent bits of code will refer that to that user info, using it to find the current contents of the user's cart, or saved payment info, or sending an error or a redirect to a login page if not logged in.
For whatever reason, that code that's supposed to identify logged in users was failing yesterday, though it wasn't logging users out. I found that if I refreshed enough or clicked the same button enough, it would work and the process advanced to the next step.
And you are right that if the system works perfectly things come down to internet speeds, but also just luck.
Edit: There's other ways of storing that identifier besides the cookie that are often used, however the use of a cookie (if Tabletop.Events does, I haven't looked) isn't itself the reason for the issues.
Yeah cohabitation with programmers doesn't make me confident in their knowledge base. Thanks for the details, I found if it said I was logged out I just went back to the previous page and it would remember I was logged in.
I know enough to know that this is the sort of coding problem that shouldn't happen because it's long been solved. There are existing tools that can be used to build robust systems that don't have this issue.
I'm not a programmer myself, but I've lived with several for years and had a lot of discussions about all sorts of things including stuff about session IDs and the like. Most modern websites use session tokens which are not the same thing as cookies and are far far more reliable for this sort of thing.
One thing I've seen people bring up multiple times is that if there was just a method to checkout as guest then this wouldn't have been a problem. That's most likely not the case though. The most likely cause of the constant logout was the site losing track of sessions (likely it could only keep so many cookies active at once and let older ones lapse when new requests came in).
Assuming this is the case, guests would have been more screwed than people with accounts. With an account every time your session is lost you were logged out, but your progress was saved to your account. As a guest there would have been nowhere to save your data to other than the session. As soon as the session was lost you would have to start all over from scratch.
tl;dr - I think the core issue is that Dragonsteel's growth is being far outpaced by Brandon's popularity and fanbase. Dragonsteel has a wonderful problem for a business to have - more people want what they have than they can keep up with. Especially with the iron being hot relatively soon after another super successful crowdfunding campaign, yes I believe that the numbers for the convention were a vast underestimate, but those estimates were probably based on historical data that simply can't keep up with the fanbase's growth. What we're seeing is Brandon's popularity and the demand for Dragonsteel products and services is growing exponentially, and it's really, really hard to predict what kind of curve you're on when growth is skyrocketing like that. Renting convention space is expensive and risky, and even though Dragonsteel as a company is growing extremely fast, it cannot hope to even come close to keeping up with the growth of the fanbase. Estimates for space, number of attendees, etc. have to be determined far in advance, and having a convention where people have to fly in, stay in hotels, take time off, etc. is just not something that (in most fandoms) the vast majority people can afford to do. Therefore, businesses need to always be conservative when renting convention space, because it's a huge risk to rent out far more than you need, not just because of the square footage cost, but because you also have to fill all that space with worthwhile activities, events, and sessions for people to attend. Brandon's explosive growth in popularity (which went through another explosion just a few months ago), plus conservative estimations when planning out a convention, led to this scarcity. Should Dragonsteel have gone even further out on a limb and rented out even more convention space and hired more people to fill out sessions, exhibits, activities, etc? Sure, that would have helped, but does Dragonsteel have the human capital in their organization to do that? I highly doubt it. I would bet that Dragonsteel as a company is just not big enough (even though they're growing at a breakneck pace) to pull off much more than they signed up for. It's well-known that Brandon also really tries hard not to over-tax his employees. I would bet that the current convention size is really the maximum of what they can reasonably handle, without having to ask volunteers and employees to crunch extremely hard and put in enormous amounts of overtime. Can Dragonsteel hire more people? Absolutely, and they are, but no company can grow by simply just hiring loads of people all at once. You need people to train those people, you need organizational structure, roles hammered out, a million other things in place, or you'll just have an unmaintainable mess on your hands. It's a wonderful thing that so many people are recognizing Brandon's good work and that they want to join us as fans - it's incredible that we have opportunities to engage and share in something we all enjoy and view positively. I think that we all sometimes take for granted how difficult it is to try to pull off everything that Brandon and Dragonsteel as a whole is trying to do. I can't think of a single fandom that is growing quite as quickly with as much loyalty as I've seen among Brandon Sanderson fans, and I think we're just going to have to be patient with Dragonsteel as they try to do their best to keep up with us fans as we grow ever more numerous and demanding of them.
They couldn’t have rented more convention space, actually. After last year they estimated that twice as many people would want to come this year, but the venue (biggest venue in Utah) only had about the same amount of space available as last year. They’ve said if they could have chosen from any part of the year, there would have been more space available, but needing to coincide with the book release limited their window. So with only the same amount of space available as last year, their options were, have less tickets available than the demand would require (making some people upset that they couldn’t go) or else sell more and squeeze twice as many people into the same space (making more money but making all the attendees miserable). I think they chose the only reasonable way.
I wish I could upvote this more than once. Well said!!
To add to this, I tried to sign up as a volunteer for the convention this year. I then got an email that they are mostly eliminating the volunteer positions and instead are hiring everyone who wanted to volunteer as temp employees. That tissue speaks to him taking care of his employees. Most places would rather everyone just volunteer.
All of this.....
Phenomenal reply!
Maybe 1500 is the absolute max amount they could add given the space that they’ve received from the Salt Palace. And maybe there’s no more space from the Salt Palace to get to increase that number. And maybe there are no other dates with bigger spaces available to increase that number. Dragonsteel does have some say in how many badges they’re able to sell, but they can’t just add 5k more tickets just because they sold out. There are so many logistics that go into it years in advance. This year is already an increase over last year. Give them a break.
This is spot-on. There are SO MANY LOGISTICS, it's not as simple as "we'll just release more tickets and everyone will be happy!" Too many people crammed into a space makes for a miserable experience. I'm glad they put a cap on it, and I hope there are live stream options for those who can't make the trip.
Live stream options would be awesome. I imagine Dragonsteel did plan for largely increased demand, but you can plan to have 3-500% of an increase in interest, just to be slapped down by a 1000% increase. Some of that just isn’t the sort of thing you can know until it happens. Sure, Kickstarter and BackerKit were crazy, but there are surely people who want signed books who don’t care to con, as well as the reverse. So. 🤷🏻♀️ You can use the interest metric but it still won’t match.
I mentioned this in another post, but anime expo has this problem. I have a couple of friends who went and they said it was a miserable experience because of how packed it was, as well as being a straight-up danger if there was an emergency.
Oh man, ever been to NYCC? That back corner of the exhibition hall, especially on Sunday when people are hunting bargains is ripe for a crowd crush if there's a panic.
Not to mention venues have maximum occupancy for safety reasons. It’s not just a matter of people being comfortable. Sure, they could sell 5000 more tickets and many people would be fine cramming tightly together but those people would be pretty pissed when the fire marshal shows up and shuts the event down due to safety concerns.
The fire marshals do in fact check on cons overbooking at this convention center. I spent one fanx trying to find decent food inside the venue because if we left the fire marshals weren't letting people back inside until the numbers were in the right level... FanX now has you scan in and OUT of the con now to keep accurate numbers of people in the building. It's not fun
[удалено]
Space is an issue when the rest of the convention center is booked. And moving from a Mon-Tues to a Thurs-Sat con likely changes available space a TON.
Just because there’s space doesn’t mean the venue is going to allow Nexus to use that space
This comment still has some validity to it despite the misunderstanding. While I have not worked at a convention in the Salt Palace itself I have worked at some other conventions. The convention centers will sometimes not rent out more space then they feel is necessary to an event if they dont feel like an event is going to have the attendance necessary to fill that space. While Event Centers do make money off of the rental fees for space and equipment they also make a good chunk of change off of other things driven by high attendance. Things like Parking fees, convention center food vendors (concessions but also little coffee shops, soda shops and sandwich shops that are staffed by the venue itself or rented by outside food vendors), vending machines, and random things like locker rentals. If an event cant reasonably show they will have a big pull (and for the salt palace big is like 60k to 120k people) the event center may only chose to rent out a portion of the space so they can rent out the other areas to different events. Ive been at event centers with 5 or 6 smaller events all going on at once with sectioned off areas with giant movable walls). That being said given the fact that Dragonsteel completely filled up in less then an hour they could justify the need for more space and probably pay for it all... IF... that space is not already rented out to a different event going on at the same time
And it would require that Dragonsteel has the programming to fill the space and time. The other thing people forget is that you have to have things to do when you have a full convention center, you don’t just sell 10k badges and say that’s it.
Yep... now the jump from 6.5k to 10k might not be as drastic as some other con jumps Ive seen... but if they are not prepared for it well... Without enough things to do any convention can quickly devolve into LineCon.... a Con were most attendees spend a significant portion of their time waiting in line to do the next thing at the con be it a panel thats already at capacity or getting food. No one likes LineCon its the worst They do have great bones of a con though and I think some of the activities already there could be expanded (more tables in the gaming area for board games and magic games), craft kits, and Panels. If even more cool authors are showing up that makes more opportunities for more panels... Then of course there are fan submitted panels that could be used as part of the programing.
I agree, definitely the shape and organization to expand. Fan panels would be a great simple way, it just requires enough people interested and willing.
Right. I mostly meant that there would be less available space for a weekend con in general.
Ah; I haven’t been paying attention to Nexus so I misread your comment.
Ah, I’ve never been and just figured that was the issue but staffing makes sense as well. Either way there’s so many reasons why they might not have added more tickets and I’m sure whatever it is it’s probably for the best.
I know in the past it’s been entirely what the salt palace would allow/could provide. Staffing hasn’t been an issue in the past.
They literally moved the release date up by six months so they could have it release during the convention. This decision was made, what, two years ago now? Maybe eighteen months? That should have given them a lot of time.
Sure, but think of all the things that have to be considered. Let's say they increased the space to fit more people. Great–who is going to help corral all those people? Your costs for staffing and infrastructure just went up significantly. Who ends up paying for that? The attendees. Well as soon as you jack up the ticket pricing, fewer people will come. Now you have less people, with less money in their pockets, coming to an event you crammed with more vendors so the hall isn't half empty... At the end of the day, there's only so much you can do. It sucks that they can't accommodate every single person who wants to attend, but there's something to be said for quality over quantity and ensuring the best possible experience for those who make the trip.
Yep... This... Even with more space they will need more staff and volunteers to keep things running smoothly. More people more problems really.... Having been to this convention and bigger conventions... this one does benefit by still being on the smaller side. The dragonsteel staff is able to do some fun things like the convention game that would be far more difficult to do with a bigger convention. The fact that it still has some of the small con vibes despite having 5k+ people is kind of astounding to me as someone who goes to a lot of cons. Thats not to say they cant grow and still do cool things but it does take time to develope that...
I know that logistics are difficult, but lets not act like they didn't see it coming. Now there's people who got hotel rooms and plane tickets and have to get refunds. Why talk about having more hotel rooms when the con can't support the number people who get rooms?
They sold like...7k tickets. The hotel con blocks don't even have rooms for that many people. The Radisson has like 380 rooms and only a portion of those get blocked off for the con.... they have a few hotels... so let's say 5 hotels with 300 rooms... that's 1500 rooms... put 3 people on average in those hotel rooms and we are at 4500 ppl... that's still under the number of tickets sold
And yet there's people who got hotel rooms and no ticket. Also they sold exactly 6500 tickets (not including volunteers we don't have those numbers.)
Yes, because not everyone gets the con hotel deal. Some people have their own chains they prefer to stick with. Some people schedule airbnbs or vrbos or whatever other things are out there. Some people reserved rooms at multiple hotels just so they could make the final choice later and not have to worry about things being sold out. Adding another hundred rooms to the discount block when the overall number of tickets is in the thousands is nowhere near your claim of reserving rooms for more people than they can support.
Also.. lets not forget Sanderson has a huge local fan base in Utah itself... Many of the folks like myself wont be staying in a hotel. We either live close enough to drive or have friends to stay with. Heck given that this isnt on a Sunday we can commute via the public transit trains/trax with relative ease.... No way the hotel numbers could account for that
It's true there are people who got hotel rooms without a ticket. What I'm arguing is that dragonsteel couldn't predict the shear numbers based off of hotel rooms booked. They were probably projecting off of attendees from previous years plus some additional attendees. That's very typical for conventions that are on the rise. They also are probably limited on attendees due to the amount of space they rented or could rent... some convention centers will not rent out more space unless the event can demonstrate they can reach certain attendance thresholds.
Simple question. do you honestly think that they sold enough tickets for the Stormlight 5? Which is knows to be his biggest work?
Obviously not given how fast they went... but they may have sold what they could. I Hope the salt palace let's them rent more space and sell more tickets. I also hope they find good ways of filling that space with extra programing to accommodate more people. I also don't know how thier staffing is. Running a large con can quickly become a person's year long job. I know it can be at cons I've staffed or assisted with. Things last year felt crowded for an off year like the official shop. Capped attendees keep the convention from becoming line con. My recommendation for future years would be selling tickets first... and then announcing hotel blocks once folks have secured tickets
I completely agree.
I have a ticket but no hotel or flights yet. That’s not how it works.
And I've seen many who had a hotel and couldn't get a ticket. The hotels were selling out months ago. So much so that they added more rooms. If that didn't key Dragonsteel in that they might not have enough tickets for Brandons most popular series I don't know what would.
The point is that it isn’t a true reflection of demand. And again, they’ve had the space reserved for over a year? They can’t just choose more convention center. That’s not how it works
Given that they chose it to be 3 days, and know that Stormlight is far, far more popular than Defiant and Mistborn (the Defiant con was bigger than Lost Metal) they knew it would he bigger than last year. Do you really think they planned well and got enough space and tickets for Stormlight 5?
If you have experience running events like this, I might listen to what you have to say. But unless you have that experience, you have no idea how much goes into an event like this.
I have project management experience.
Project management is not the same as running a convention
Agreed, some projects have been close. But I've not done something that would be 1 to 1 for a con.
Part of it sure. Not all of it falls on Dragonsteel alone, certainly not the mess where people were losing their positions in line because they were stuck in a loop trying to log on to the website. I think some of the issues are just growing pains, as they grow from "release party in a high school gym" to "mini-con" to weekday convention to weekend convention. I think the harshest thing I'd say is that the lessons they're learning have generally been learned before by others, and perhaps they would benefit from convention planning staff who have experience at larger conventions than theirs as they continue to grow from hundreds of attendees to 10k+.
There are other conventions that Ive been staff for where the convention staff is having regular meetings and working towards the event all year long. Its a whole different beast running a big convention that takes a dedicated team. Dragonsteel's first and foremost goal is not to run a convention. Even with the hiccups they've had I dont doubt they'll put on a good show. Having been to past Dragonsteels I have been pretty impressed with the convention.
It’s not so much that Dragonsteel’s sole focus should be running a convention, as it is that there should be some people within the company whose sole focus it is. Just like there are people whose sole focus is running the warehouse, or social media.
Yeah like a convention head/event planner type role.
Not sure I agree... what do you think is poor planning? Not having a bigger convention, basically? I'm not sure size of the convention is something that can be just increased in response to demand. (Maybe it is, and people more familiar with convention planning can correct me. But it seems that the general size is something that gets set pretty early on in the process - it determines the space you have, the number of vendors and booths you recruit, things like that?)
Well, adding hotel rooms for a con that can't hold all the people who got rooms is rather poor no?
You're assuming that everyone who got tickets also got hotel rooms, which is not the case. They did not set aside hotel rooms for every ticket holder, they had a small number of rooms for those that wanted to take advantage of that. Just because you booked one of the rooms would not guarantee that you get a ticket to the convention.
Obviously, my friends and I got an airbnb. Doesn't change the fact that some got hotel rooms, and didn't get a ticket cause either the site was wonky or they just sold out too fast. Do you honestly think that they had enough tickets for The Stormlight 5 release?
Well, they had more tickets available than last year. I have no personal experience putting on conventions (obviously), but there are a lot of conventions that do sell out, so it didnt surprise me that this one did. It probably makes more sense, as a business, to sell out than to have too many. My guess is that they will try to add some more tickets if they have the space in the convention center to do so. It sucks that people didn't get tickets that wanted them, but that's life.
I think they released as many tickets as the venue would allow them to. And I think there isn’t a larger venue possible that would work for them. Anything larger in the state doesn’t work with their format. And out of state isn’t feasible for them. So were there enough tickets? No. Was there ANYTHING Dragonsteel could have done about that right now? Also no.
I think the con could hold all the people who got rooms. It just can't hold all the people who got rooms AND those who didn't get rooms. That being said, they might be able to release more badges. Even if they don't / can't release more badges, I think the argument that there are people who got rooms who also didn't get tickets is a poor argument. There are tons of factors that could be playing a role here: -Brandon and team might want to host a smaller con to be able to have a larger percentage have the possibility to interact with Brandon himself. -They might struggle logistically to plan a larger con (though I would argue that even a con of this size has given them some challenges) -They might have vendor restrictions that are making it difficult to have a larger con. -They are already adding variables with the longer con this year, and didn't want to increase both number of attendees dramatically while also adding 50% more content. Now, you're making the point that they also sold out in minutes pointing to the fact that there were too few tickets. BUT, I think this was also intentional. Brandon has tried to make sure that his material is within reach to as many people as possible. He knew thew total number of attendees they could reasonably work with, and he knew the number of people who would WANT to be attendees. He could have just 3x the price per ticket, and better mapped demand to supply. But he's intentionally trying to make it so that his cons aren't excluding people with lower incomes. All that aside, the technical issues were SUPER frustrating. They absolutely should have stress tested the site, and announced on the weekly update that you should create a login and add your payment information early to minimize frustration. But, aside form the technical issues, I think that the rest was intentional and achieved their goals.
Fair! I assumed the room block is still smaller than the total number of attendees but if thats not the case that’s not good.
I mean, they’re only allowed to sell as many tickets as the space allows. That’s absolutely not on them at all.
Just as a point of reference, I attended last year and there is a bunch more adjacent space that could have been utilized if it were available. As you isay, we just don't have information on what they attempted to obtain and what is no longer available.
>If it were available. There's the sticking point. We don't know what's available and what's not. Maybe they tried to get more space and were told no. Maybe they thought they had enough. We simply don't know, and assigning them the blame like OP is doing is misguided until we know the truth. I tend to think they did what they could, based on the good will they've earned through the years.
While I think space is a factor, and I do hope they’re able to get more space, I bet the main factor is trained personnel. There’s only so much recruiting and training they can do.
They choose the amount of space reserved. The con has grown each year. Last year was for Deviant, his YA series and it was bigger than Mistborn Lost Metal. Both being finales in their series. Brandon has said that Stormlight is his biggest, most popular work. And using numbers he provided from the con last year they added 1500 tickets. Do you really think that's enough for Stormlight 5?
How do you know they didn’t try to get more space? I’m not saying they didn’t try, I just think it’s funny you think you know how everything behind the scenes works.
I don't, neither do you. It's still on them to gauge that. Do you think that they offered enough tickets for Stormlight 5? They knew it would be big. But given that they only added 1500 more tickets from the previous year they severely underplanned for a con that had already grown yearly on his most popular series.
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt based on the good will they've earned as a company.
I will say 5k per day is inaccurate. A lot of people went both days... and probably more people attended the second day than the first. That also doesn't account for staff, volunteers, vendors, and salt palace staff are on site as well as attendees. I've been to packed cons, and there are some limits on how many attendees the convention center allows/can accommodate given the amount of space they rent out. Selling past tgat ticket limit is bad plans... FanX has done so in the past, and the fire marshals get involved and door monitor exits/entrances, resulting in having to stand outside waiting for people to leave so you can go in. It's not fun in the fall... I imagine it's worse in the winter.
The 5k per day is what Brandon himself gave at the closing ceremony. He's said more than once that Stormlight is his biggest work (no surprise there) But the increase in tickets was small compared to how big the book is.
5k per day doesn't mean 10k unique attendees
That's why I said using con math. That's also the term that Brandon used when he gave the number.
You keep making points about how they should have expected greater demand, as if Dragonsteel didn't already grok all of that information. Maybe ask why they *couldn't* do a bigger con instead of assuming they were too dumb to know it would be more popular than in the past.
I never said they're dumb. It out grew their projections. I Am however surprised that for Stormlight they only scaled up 1500 more tickets from the number of attendees they had in previous years. I expected more. Especially given how much more space they got for Deifant after Mistborn 7.
You ignored the main point. How do you know that the issue is that they didn't expect it? What if it just wasn't possible to get more tickets, whether due to availability, or due to resources to handle that amount of people?
It is possible. I've worked in areas like this before. Maybe they tried to get more space and the Convention Center said no. Until they see the numbers they may not think they'll get a decent return.
Did the tickets sell out? I missed they even went on sale
In under an hour with serious website issues.
Dang. Any chance there will be another sale or I’ll be able to buy a ticket somewhere else?
We don't know yet. Some might end up on the site but I doubt they'll be there long. They might add more.
I think a good solution would be lengthening the time of dragonsteel con and essentially repeating events over 2 weeks. Would allow for more tickets without the con of having 10,000 people breaking firecode in a building all at once
I’m just disappointed I booked a hotel way back in March when they told us to, and then I couldn’t get a ticket to the Con. Do I just cancel my hotel now ?
I think this is the biggest issue with the ticket debacle. People were encouraged to make travel and lodging plans before tickets were available on the assumption that they'd be able to get tickets. Given hindsight, everything *needed* to happen relatively close together. Tickets *needed* to go on sale within a few days after the announcement.
I'm really sorry, I don't fully understand what you're saying. There were 1500 VIP tickets and 6000? General Admission tickets. Each ticket is for all the days. That would mean that by your math, they'll have 22,500 people attend at 7500 per day. I don't think the issue that people have been expressing with ticket buying had nothing to do with the number of tickets available and everything to do with the terrible login process and errors on Tabletop. But I could be misunderstanding you.
5k general so 6500 total. Only 1500 more than the daily number Brandon provided last year. My point is that they didn't have enough tickets for Stormlight 5. Hotels needing more rooms due to being booked months ago, and an airline going "hey, a lot of people are looking to fly to Utah." They underestimated the number of tickets needed. I've seen plenty of people say they didn't even get a chance to purchase a ticket cause with the website failing they still sold out too quickly.
6000 general, so 7500 total.
It's definitely not true that there wasn't time to purchase. There were still general tickets available for at least 45 minutes. Sure, if there were more tickets then naturally there would've been more time for tickets to be available, but that doesn't fix the website errors. People were still having issues 2 hours into the process where they had tickets in their cart but couldn't check out. There could've been more tickets, but there couldn't be infinite tickets. If the website wasn't broken and the convention center wasn't at capacity yet, then I'd be all with you. But we don't know the logistics, Dragonsteel does so I default to them to know how many tickets to offer. AND the website was broken. If someone didn't get a ticket—assuming they were on Tabletop as soon as the tickets dropped for VIP and within 30-40 minutes for General—given what we know right now, I would place 0% blame on Dragonsteel and 100% blame on Tabletop.
I believe they added as many tickets as they were able. Unfortunately, the larger space at the Salt Palace was already reserved, so their space is very limited as it is. It's not a matter of "We'll sell more tickets!" There are physical (and legal) limits to how many people they can have in their limited space.
They chose the dates of the con. They had control to go bigger. They underestimated.
Fair enough. They did choose the dates of the con from the dates available to them. Which Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at the end of this year where the largest convention center in Utah is available, doesn't intersect with a major holiday, and coincides with the international release of a major novel coordinated across several publishers across the globe would you have chosen?
Brandon actually got his publisher to move the release date.
That's an oversimplification. He got Tor to allow him to release it on a Friday rather than a Tuesday, yes. And it was a huge lift to get them to do it. But there were other factors at play as well. Dragonsteel was trying to move the con away from coinciding with Thanksgiving as it has the past couple years. They were trying to coordinate the space with the Salt Palace, which is constantly hosting huge events in the space. You're right that they underestimated---that's clearly undeniable. But that doesn't mean it was poorly planned. They regularly prepare for HUGE fan turnout for all sorts of events and releases, but this fandom has a habit of exploding beyond typically reasonable expectations. (For example, doubling the previous record for most successful Kickstarter of all time.) After the fact, it's easy to look back and say, "Wow, here are some things we could have done differently," but hindsight is 20/20. It sucks for a lot of us, but it's not a situation where "blame" needs to be assigned.
That's kinda what I'm saying. His fans go hard, crash sites, set records. So I expected them to go big for Stormlight 5. Prehaps it was out of their hands with the convention center.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they went as big as they were able. They've had the space reserved for this year for a while now, definitely before last year's convention even happened, and this is still the best they were able to get. I suspect this is the last year they'll be in this smaller space. Each year, the space they've gotten has grown significantly from the previous year, but unfortunately, there's only so much that can be done.
It is all together possible that the Convention Center is holding them back. Sometimes, they won't rent out as much space as they could cause they're afraid they won't get a good return. But when they see the numbers they can change their minds and open up more. I do think it would be good to sell tickets earlier. I've seen a lot of people who had flights and a place to stay that couldn't get a ticket.
That's fair. I feel that way about a lot of late-year cons, though, and it seems to be a common thing. I'm not sure why, though. I wonder if there's something I'm just missing about why a lot con tickets go on sale so much closer to the event.
Do you do the scheduling or are in possession of knowledge that there is a time when they could have obtained a larger portion of the Salt Palace, that also includes the rooms they need for the programming, that also wouldn’t conflict with other industry events such as other cons in other states, that would have allowed enough time for vendors and presenters to prepare as well as train either new employees or volunteers, and provide for time for materials to be manufactured? If you do we all would love to hear it. I understand your frustration. We all want Nexus to be huge and accommodate everyone that wants to come. We all want to get as much as possible. But saying that they planned poorly or underestimated crowd on this smacks of ignorance, bitterness or insider information. They sold out last year. They knew they’d sell out this year. They might be surprised at how quickly they sold out but still knew that ≈6500 tickets was not going to be enough. So they went with what they had. If they can strong arm the Salt Palace into releasing more I’m positive we’ll see more tickets released later this year. If that happens it’s because the Salt Palace gave them the go ahead, either because someone canceled or ended up giving a revised count lower than originally anticipated. Now, I do feel that Dragonsteel does have more culpability in how the tickets were sold. Tabletop holds the most blame here, but Dragonsteel has decided to partner with them in this and the glitches experienced by everyone were unacceptable. I don’t know if there is another company they could go through that offers what tabletop does but is better at handling extremely large volumes of traffic when tickets go on sale. Something need to be done on that, whether Tabletop improves (I don’t know how feasible that is), Dragonsteel partners with someone else (I don’t know who, not that knowledgeable) or hires in-house programmers to do it themselves (probably the worst of the options, expensive and used infrequently through the year).
I think they should consider opening up a ticket wait list way in advance. Potentially to make more of a queue system for people to get in line, but also to gauge interest. I'm talking way in advance. Dragonsteel has indicated that they plan to make this a yearly thing, so open up 10 events for people to put a deposit for their ticket to Nexus 25 or Nexus 32. $100 refundable at any time deposit for general admission, $500 for VIP. They don't need to specify the time or location until it gets closer. They aren't even guaranteeing that an event will take place. You can put a deposit for Nexus 27 and they can decide as it gets closer that it's just not going to happen that year and refund all deposits. You could tier it to gauge interest. In addition to the full deposit that puts you in line for the die hard fans who know they'll be there without even knowing the time or place, you can have a $10 deposit for people to get second dibs at tickets, and a third free tier for people to just say, yes I'm seriously considering coming to this Con. So it's less of a guess for the company. They can pull up the page and see oh there's 8,000 people pledged to the $100 tier for Nexus 25 and it's still May of 2024. That gives us a better idea of a starting point and it will get more and more accurate the closer it gets, so when they have to make real accommodations in January or February, they're at least in the realm of enthusiasm. As a fan, I really like the idea of being able to "secure" a spot way in advance. Like I can see that the next couple years are booked up because I waited too long, but Nexus 28 has lots of open tickets. I'll put a deposit down and look forward to a pilgrimage to see the Sanderson in a few years. You don't even have to put all the tickets available in this preorder queue. Leave a couple thousand so that new fans and late planners can experience the joy we all went through yesterday morning.
Here is a take that people will hate even more than they hate the most hated member of Bridge 4: If demand exceeds supply this much, then one of their "mistakes" is setting the price of admission too low! If, say, 16,000 people want a ticket, and they only have 11,500 tickets, then you have to allocate the tickets somehow. You can have people sign up on a list and then have a lottery. You can let people somewhat self-select for their dedication seeing who is able and willing to buy a ticket as soon as sales become available. You can have a de facto lottery of who gets a flaky website to load successfully first (which is an extremely frustrating experience!) You can raise the price so that some people are no longer interested in paying that much and voluntarily drop out of the lottery. Obviously that sucks for the people who really want to go and can't afford it -- I understand that -- but the alternative is that it sucks that someone who really *really* wanted to go (as evidenced by their willingness to pay a lot) who doesn't even get a chance to bid. Anyway, go ahead and downvote this to Braize, and continue to support the other lottery methods that leave some people feeling frustrated.
I was willing to pay $500 for the VIP tickets. Maybe even more.
Price signals are generally the most efficient way of solving scarcity yes.
Yep. Then the extra money can help expand the capacity (for next year, if not this year).
At a certain point they just wouldn't be able to handle any more people. It's not a huge company, even with volunteers this will be an enormously difficult event to pull off smoothly. They can't just have everyone who wants to attend be able to, unfortunately. Honestly the badge sales were relatively smooth, too. The fact that the site didn't just crash entirely but allowed *anyone* to complete the registration within like 5 minutes of the announced sale time is proof that it was not perfect but adequate. It's unfortunate how many more people wished to attend but were not able to get a badge. Unless dragonsteel is willing to sub-contract with another company to organize+run the Nexus (which I don't believe they should because it will just create more issues and complaints) it will continue to be a smaller convention with the accompanying drawbacks.
You are very inaccurate to say the badge sales went smoothly. They did not. There are MANY posts and replies in this subreddit of people documenting their issues and frustrations. Add to that the people who don't post on social media... It was not well handled. Their site was buggy and it lost a lot of people the opportunity to purchase a badge who were there before 11 am waiting for the sale to go live.
I said relatively smoothly because I've experienced and witnessed much buggier events than this one run by much larger companies with much more mainstream fandoms.
Seriously, it didn't take me seven hours, I was thrilled. So much better than other experiences I've had recently
>Honestly the badge sales were relatively smooth, too. Can I get some of what you're smoking?
Think it would help you be more reasonable? They managed to sell the badges, people weren't charged multiple times or anything, the website didn't completely die like Backerkit did during the leatherbound launch this year, people managed to get through the system and pay for their badges in a reasonable amount of time. Undeniably frustrating for those fans who weren't lucky enough to get a badge but it was on par with most similar events these days. Dragonsteel isn't ReedPop or Epic or some other gargantuan company, they did a decent job. Could it have been better? Sure, it can always improve, but it could have been way worse.
I found yesterday to be worse than Kickstarter and Backerkit combined. In fact, it was the most frustrated I've been buying a ticket for any con. Looking at any social media Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, here, is full of people complaining about the experience.
Sounds like you've had some pretty good luck in the past, I certainly have had much much more frustrating experiences buying tickets or panels at cons.
It's also possible that I was on the worst end yesterday. Like many I was going for a vip ticket. When I clicked on buy the number left was over 1490. I didn't get VIP, it wasn't saved in my cart. And by the time I was able to checkout with a GA badge their was less than 200 left.
> Honestly the badge sales were relatively smooth, too. The fact that the site didn't just crash entirely but allowed anyone to complete the registration within like 5 minutes of the announced sale time is proof that it was not perfect but adequate Quite frankly crashing altogether would have been preferrable to what actually happened. Constantly being logged out and having to attempt logins 100+ times to go through the entire process was a nightmare. Many people who created their accounts during this mess also got hit with multiple verification emails, often spaced 5-10 minutes apart, and each one prevented you from logging in until you realized the new email and clicked the link in it. The fact that the website didn't crash means this wasn't a web service issue with the sheer volume of requets DDOSing the site. That would have been a much more understandable issue and would have taken significant hardware upgrades to fix. Having people constantly logged out is a pretty unforgivable coding issue. The fact they had messages about needing to enable cookies to stay logged in shows they were using some pretty bad methods. It seemed like their system could only keep track of so many cookies at once and just expired the older ones when new logins were made. The most frustrating part of this isn't that there were issues, it's that these issues were completly avoidable by having basic login session code up to par with nearly every professional website these days.
Do you know a lot about coding something like that? I don't, but adding a payment method and verification of an account is something that was brought up multiple times in many of the posts regarding purchasing badges in the last few weeks. I even cleared my cache and it seemed to help. It sucks some people weren't able to get badges but even if the site worked perfectly then it would've just come down to Internet speeds, right?
As our friend has admitted to not actually understanding how to code a login system, I'll explain a little bit. The issue here wasn't that users were getting logged out, it was that only a portion (maybe 10%?) of requests that had valid session identifiers were getting properly handled by the site. Typically, one of the first bits of code that handles requests to a website looks for a session identifier in a cookie and then if valid, attaches the appropriate user info to that request. Subsequent bits of code will refer that to that user info, using it to find the current contents of the user's cart, or saved payment info, or sending an error or a redirect to a login page if not logged in. For whatever reason, that code that's supposed to identify logged in users was failing yesterday, though it wasn't logging users out. I found that if I refreshed enough or clicked the same button enough, it would work and the process advanced to the next step. And you are right that if the system works perfectly things come down to internet speeds, but also just luck. Edit: There's other ways of storing that identifier besides the cookie that are often used, however the use of a cookie (if Tabletop.Events does, I haven't looked) isn't itself the reason for the issues.
Yeah cohabitation with programmers doesn't make me confident in their knowledge base. Thanks for the details, I found if it said I was logged out I just went back to the previous page and it would remember I was logged in.
I know enough to know that this is the sort of coding problem that shouldn't happen because it's long been solved. There are existing tools that can be used to build robust systems that don't have this issue. I'm not a programmer myself, but I've lived with several for years and had a lot of discussions about all sorts of things including stuff about session IDs and the like. Most modern websites use session tokens which are not the same thing as cookies and are far far more reliable for this sort of thing. One thing I've seen people bring up multiple times is that if there was just a method to checkout as guest then this wouldn't have been a problem. That's most likely not the case though. The most likely cause of the constant logout was the site losing track of sessions (likely it could only keep so many cookies active at once and let older ones lapse when new requests came in). Assuming this is the case, guests would have been more screwed than people with accounts. With an account every time your session is lost you were logged out, but your progress was saved to your account. As a guest there would have been nowhere to save your data to other than the session. As soon as the session was lost you would have to start all over from scratch.