We all love GenCon, but few of us can say that they love Event Registration. As a rite of passage, surviving Event Registration is one of the first steps on the path of GenCon nirvana.
In years past, the Event Registration process has been agonizing with sever timeouts and customers trapped in the payment system. This year, GenCon LLC has rolled out RUBI, their new Registration system. There have been promises that RUBI will be faster, stronger, able to handle more transactions.
Today is RUBI’s baptisim by fire. At Noon (EST) RUBI opened for True Dungeon Registration, and at 3pm it opens for general registration.
We would like to hear from you today, about your Registration experiences. Let us know how RUBI is doing. Now if year’s past is any indication of the afternoon to come, please keep your comments polite; impassioned but polite.
Oh…and good luck.
1. Can’t sort events in any logical manner.
2. Still has Google Analytics installed, which slows the site down.
3. Load testing — what’s that?
4. Usability testing what now?
Saving grace for those ignoring True Dungeon and just trying to build event lists: http://gencon.highprogrammer.com/ — browse independent of the GenCon site, with better sorting.
I’m Twittering my pain this morning.
Attempting to Log In and check my friends lists….
503 Service Unavailable
No server is available to handle this request.
I found out last night that the site was live, but no ‘purchase’ functionality. I put a bunch of stuff on my watchlist, but it hung up when I forgot to remove the non-TD slots.
True Dungeon has always been the Achilles heel of registration. The rest of it seems to go much smoother. Let’s see how RUBI does when the rest of the games go live.
Oh, and http://twitter.com/Gen_Con
@Kurt “Telas” Schneider – So how does the watch list work?
I’m not sure, but for my (failed) purposes, it was a place to centralize all of my wanted events, and then submit them all at once.
But I tripped myself up by failing to remove the non-TD events before submitting. By the time I fought the crowds to uncheck those, it was too late.
1:51pm: The True Dungeon surge appears to be over. RUBI is much more responsive, and no timeouts.
3:00 EST: I feel a gentle breeze on my scrotum. It must be the approaching whirlwind of pain!
3:12…Fantastic. Clicked the Buy Tickets button at 3pm on the dot, and 12 minutes later, I get blocked out of every RPG I tried to register for, while the system hung me up. Good job RUBI.
3:15 EST: We have 3/4 of our first choices (and did as of 3:05), and are close to being done. That’s pretty damned awesome, actually.
I got hung up with too many selected (I guess “resend” will do that…). So I submitted at about 3:03 or so, and got what I wanted, minus the one SotC game that probably sold out around 3:00:01.
All in all, it was far better than last year, although there is still plenty of room for improvement.
3:28– The system is doing pretty good. In the end I got one of the 3 RPG’s I was looking for, and the other two, a friend of mine, who was in ahead of me, is passing me his tickets for.
Moving through the system is not bad right now. Its an improvement from last year, but they really need to be able to handle the first 10 minutes better.
3:31 EST: Done! Happy with all of our choices.
I registered with a friend on the phone, buying tickets for four, and we found things started moving well about 3:15. This was by FAR our smoothest registration process ever.
There’s still room for improvement (especially in the interface), but this was a pleasant surprise to say the least.
Apparently I had an uncharacteristically positive experience. I was able to log in right at 3:00 p.m. and by 3:03 I had all the events I wanted – except the one that was already sold out. Less than 5 minutes later I’d made my alternate choices and by 3:10 I was done and paid for.