The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Real Talk: is it time for a new Prime venue?
[disclaimer: I was able to get 4 single day passes.]
We thought it was crazy last year when 4-day badges sold out in a couple hours, but did anyone expect it to take less than 2 minutes this year? That's insane. The addition of the 4th day was an attempt to stave off demand, but that clearly had no effect.
I know it's a difficult topic for some, but is it time to revisit the idea of a new venue? PAX started in Seattle, Penny Arcade is based there and this will be the 10th year with Seattle as it's home. There's a lot of history there and it would be a huge bummer to loyal local fans and long-time attendees. This will be my 5th Prime and I know I'd be a little bummed to bid WSCC farewell. But what else can be done?
Other West Coast options have been floated before, like San Francisco, LA, Vegas. I'm curious if the PA crew have seriously considered moving the show to one of these other cities and the reasons why/why not (aside from any current contract with WSCC). And sure, a valid option is "nothing", and this is just how it is for PAX Prime. A lottery where we should feel lucky to go instead of planning and expecting to go each year.
Thoughts?
-Sean
PS: Let's try to stay on topic. I know there's probably some anxiety and anger simmering about today, but take a deep breath.
We thought it was crazy last year when 4-day badges sold out in a couple hours, but did anyone expect it to take less than 2 minutes this year? That's insane. The addition of the 4th day was an attempt to stave off demand, but that clearly had no effect.
I know it's a difficult topic for some, but is it time to revisit the idea of a new venue? PAX started in Seattle, Penny Arcade is based there and this will be the 10th year with Seattle as it's home. There's a lot of history there and it would be a huge bummer to loyal local fans and long-time attendees. This will be my 5th Prime and I know I'd be a little bummed to bid WSCC farewell. But what else can be done?
Other West Coast options have been floated before, like San Francisco, LA, Vegas. I'm curious if the PA crew have seriously considered moving the show to one of these other cities and the reasons why/why not (aside from any current contract with WSCC). And sure, a valid option is "nothing", and this is just how it is for PAX Prime. A lottery where we should feel lucky to go instead of planning and expecting to go each year.
Thoughts?
-Sean
PS: Let's try to stay on topic. I know there's probably some anxiety and anger simmering about today, but take a deep breath.
Prime '09, '10, '11, '12, '13
+1
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
Thing is, I think the folks at Penny Arcade know and are trying to find ways to make it work without leaving Seattle. They added 4-day passes, added more venues over the years... it's just exploding lately and I can't blame them for not making it perfect.
Because what good would moving it do? Seattleites would still be wanting to go. It's not that Seattle is small, it's that PAX is too big. The only real solution to that is more PAXes, more frequently. Eventually, if they moved it, a new PAX would spring back up in Seattle eventually. The area is just too perfect for there not to be a PAX here.
The only problem is that Seattle can't expand, but PAX always will. PAX *has* downtown Seattle, for the duration. That's already enough of a traffic nightmare, I can imagine, with the detours and closed-off roads that we already have. If we start having to run shuttles through different parts of Seattle (and then eventually out to Bellevue again...), the traffic burden will increase. Logistically, this is just plain a hard problem with no simple solution. Hopefully the past two years of PAX incite some progress on the front of the expansion to the convention center... but there just cannot NOT be a PAX in Seattle. Period. Make new ones in new areas, make Prime more frequent, maybe, but it'll always come back. And the demand will keep growing.
The real issue that needs to be handle is how people are getting tickets. [-scratch this i forgot about a discussion last year about how the ticketing team did in fact cancel orders of sketchy nature- The fact that people are able to buy up multiple passes with no question ask is really causing a lot of deserving con-goers to lose out.] They should really do something like San Diego Comic-Con, in which a name must confirmed for a ticket. It be nice way to ensure passes are going to people and not being hoarded to sell for scandalous prices back to con-goers who just missed out cause every ticket sells out in a few hours, because of these people. Maybe they could incorporated a veteran thing that allows for pass con-goers to get a leg up, although that might be pushing away the chance of any new con-goers the chance to make it to this great con.
The single day pass and than the 1 every day passes is awesome and everything but the addition of another day doesn't make much sense. They should include another pass specific for just weekend/3 day passes.
Oh biggest issues why da heck are they selling tickets at 10 in the morning, like seriously how does that help anyone but the people whose job it is to scalp tickets. Most of us have jobs or classes at this time how the hell are we expected to get tickets at such a random time.
Hopefully PAX will spread across more of Seattle due to how much Seattle is increasing their mass transit http://www.soundtransit.org/Projects-and-Plans
Hey cool my Queue page just got a server timeout.
Also having badges go on sale in the middle of the day means that all hands are on deck for companies like showclix and onpeak that are handling issues as they arise.
They have stated on multiple occasions that they do not want to go the Comic-Con route, because this makes things difficult for legitimate people (transferring passes between friends when you can't go, name/ID mismatch for cases like transgender individuals, overall unreliability of that system for little gain because scalpers are not the problem). A veteran thing is a terrible idea for their goals, because they want more people to be able to experience PAX, and the veteran system would just mean PAX would be perpetually sold out, because everyone who goes will want to go again.
This is a possibility, but outside of PA/Reed's direct control, since they'd have to okay that with third parties.
PAX @Official_PAX 1m
They've bumped up the servers and according to Showclix if you get a 502 error, refreshing your screen will put you back in the same spot.
PAX South to do list: Tickets: [X] Hotel: [X] Flight: [X] HQ: [X] BBQ: [] Cookies: []
That's an interesting idea, but there's usually always a Seahawks pre-season game there on the same weekend. PAX actually kicked the Raiders out of a hotel one year because they were booked into a block of rooms that PAX was supposed to have.
Otherwise, yeah, Seattle is home to PAX and that will never change. They're taking over more and more of Seattle each year but they need a bigger convention center, something like the BCEC which is massive. I say Penny-Arcade should just build their own somewhere outside of Seattle, or Bellevue.
What they really need to do is build their own PAX convention center, that way they could build it twice as big as the Washington State Convention Center, and pay for it by renting it out to Sakuracon and Emerald City Comicon and whatnot. They could even include their own Penny Arcade offices on the very top floor, and design it with see-through floors so they can stay in their offices and just look down to watch what's going on in PAX.
Have there been plans for expanding WSCC? I can't imagine where it would go, there's almost no room around there already. Being bordered by a freeway certainly doesn't help. Seattlites, how busy is WSCC the rest of the year? Do they hold other massive events there that take up the entire convention center? It's possible that PAX is the outlier and every other event fits just fine. edit: I do know about Emerald City and Sakuracon, just don't know how massively attended they are.
For reference, WSCC is ~415k sq ft; Moscone in SF is ~800k sq ft; San Diego center is ~1mil sq ft (!); LA Convention Center is ~850k, and Vegas is 3.2mil sq ft (!!!). So yea, a big part is that WSCC is just a small venue. Which honestly is probably part of what gives it the charm that Prime has...
-Sean
Nothing definite, but at least there's hope for the future of Prime in Seattle.
Sure it might not let Jimmy give John his ticket because Jimmy can't go anymore, but it'll stop Ben from buying 5 to resell for $400 each. Pax is finally at a point something needs to change. Ideally I'd love to see them move to Vegas and put names on badges.
Making sure a few dozen scalped tickets on eBay don't get issued is not going to change the demand of the event from 50,000 people/day to 17,000 people/day.
I literally walk through the Convention Center on the way into work every morning, so I've seen *most* of the conventions that roll through WSCC. Sakuracon and ECCC can get pretty large (ECCC this year had the registration/swag line stretching out through Freeway Park this year, and down around the city block along Seneca), but I do believe that PAX is much larger than even those. Sometimes Microsoft can stage largish events at WSCC, but the rest of the conventions are nowhere near the numbers that PAX pulls in.
I'm in charge of a VERY large network. Know what happens when a vendor wants to have a launch after 6 pm in a given time? WE STAY LATE THAT DAY. If your vendor won't have "all hands on deck" at a time that is convenient to the masses of people who actually have JOBS, then perhaps you need a better vendor.
It's not that we're anti-tax up here - Seattlites vote for most taxes. Seattlites are, by and large however, very provincial and some very powerful people want to limit the city's growth. The whole reason the convention centre was placed atop I-5 was because some designer and the City Council wanted to prevent the ability to double-deck I-5 to increase traffic capacity. It was a typical Seattle passive-aggressive maneuver.
The way anything in this city works is someone comes up with a plan, then a small but ridiculously vocal minority (we'll call them the "thin-skinned justice-warrior bicyclist" crowd, since that's usually the background of them) screams and stomps their feet and delays any actual work for 10 years whilst they try every possible avenue to prevent the idea from happening. See also: Replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct with the tunnel.
I could teach your chosen vendor how to properly account for capacity issues (since this "queue" has clearly failed) given that my company can successfully process over FOUR BILLION TRANSACTIONS A MONTH in less than 4 seconds a transaction and whilst never hitting a capacity issue, but my insight as to a vendor's willingness to make their staff stay late is purely from the perspective of someone who knows what a company that actually values its vendors operates like. The point remains - whomever thought it would be a good idea to release badges during a time of day when the ENTIRETY of the working 8-5 nation is actually at work is a bonehead that needs to explore new career opportunities.
OK fine. People in Alaska and Hawaii had 15 minutes (that they were probably commuting for, regardless) of non-work hours to play around. I'm sure the 8 people this applies to are thrilled. Seriously, you're gonna try to nitpick that way?
The event is in the US, so US time zones are the standard convention. When the event is in Seoul, Korean time zones would be important. Further, I can guarantee you every scalper in the city (keeping in mind scalping is legal in Washington) was set up for a 10:45 am release - Joe Schmuck at the Red West campus over at Microsoft, however, was likely buried in a meeting and listening to some MBA talk about how things can go even leaner. Advantage scalper.
To say nothing of the fact that this "all hands" theorem clearly failed since even though "all hands" were on deck, they didn't fix the token issue until about 20 minutes ago according to my sources.
That's not really a fixable problem, aside from getting more space, but it is part of the problem with the venue. I personally love seattle and would be sad to see it go, but would be willing to go somewhere else if it made the absolute clusterfuck of a process that registering for PAX has become significantly easier.
I really think that a registration/ticketing system that doesn't fail would be a good first step though. They had the false start last year and now the debacle of the queue and the token bugs and the crashing site this year. I'd really just like to see one year of a registration system that actually works without melting down before a decision to move is made.