Dear Peter Adkison,

After sending you Peter Adkison Hates Us: An Open Letter About GenCon Registration last year, and reading your responses, I decided to give GenCon another chance this year.

Once again, my group prepped for registration by making a master list of events, ordered by preference, with at least five backups for each time slot. Since we need four tickets for every event (playing at GenCon is one of the only times we get to see each other), two of us coordinated our simulataneous registration by phone.

From Noon PST on the dot, it took us 24 minutes to register for seven events. Server response times were generally pretty good, although a bit sluggish, and the event search results were informative — much improved over last year across the board.

Unfortunately, it took us 70 minutes to check out. There’s plenty of room for improvement there — on top of simply being too long, an hour and a half in the middle of a workday is a real pain. (Why is it always on a weekday, anyway?)

That 94 minutes, though, is miles ahead of 2006, when it took us several hours from start to finish. Kudos to you and your team for listening to the many complaints that were made about last year’s registration, including mine, and taking steps to make this year go more smoothly.

My request for 2008 is to bring that time down from 90-plus minutes to under 30 minutes. Without this year’s checkout issues, you probably would have met that goal — and with the resources at your disposal, you should be able to.

I hope to hear back from you regarding this letter, either on Treasure Tables or in the GenCon forums. Thanks again for making progress this year, and I look forward to a 30-minute registration process in 2008.

Sincerely,

Martin Ralya

As with last year’s letter, comments are welcome. GenCon registration issues affect thousands of gamers, including many GMs, and I wanted to make sure that I followed up on last year’s letter.

That’s enough GenCon reg talk from me, though — TT will be back to normal (or what passes for it) tomorrow.