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Twitch pin stampede
thelonegoldfish
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Are they trying to get someone trampled? Has anyone done a first 50 people to the booth thing before?
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It's kind of lame because you could get there at 6am and be way way up there in the queue room line, and still not even get in the top 50 if you took a wrong turn or just weren't very fast. Also, I would imagine that those with a physical disability wouldn't have any sort of chance.
http://pinmash.info - Two pins enter, one pins leaves... then the other pin leaves with a lower Elo rating
Those with a medical badge always get in a few minutes early so they can get clear of the rush. But for the rush, the best we can do is ask people loudly "please do not run". Trying to maintain any sort of line cohesion when people are splitting up and going to any of the 100 or so booths has not been worth the effort.
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I'm less concerned with getting the pin vs people getting hurt. Pax, and most crowd organizations, have a bad habit of incentivizing dangerous crowd dynamics. Given how close they skirt getting shut down by the fire marshalls in Seattle, you'd think they would be more careful.
We are well aware of the non ideal situation that surrounds the queue room, and would love it if more people show up at 10:30 or after when they could just walk right into the hall without waiting in the initial line.
Lots of vendors do giveaways for the first x people to their booth and some give things out randomly through the day. Some do raffles. Some have contests or give things out at panels. Some do all of the above. They all have different pro's and con's for them, the attendee, and the enforcers trying to make sure everything goes smooth. You'll continue to see a variety of ways for getting things from the company into your hands as new marketing ideas come into fashion and old ideas resurface.
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How robust is their LTE hardware in the BCEC? At South during the day, it was more or less impossible to get a reliable data connection.
http://pinmash.info - Two pins enter, one pins leaves... then the other pin leaves with a lower Elo rating
I have been bugging T-Mobile to put up extra towers at the BCEC. Each company has temporary portable towers that they can deploy for things like festivals or parades. Letting them know that they have customers who desire data at a place is a good way to increase their awareness of just how much we can crash a system.
@Beker does PAX talk to any providers about coverage in return for ad space? Because that would be useful to attendees and vendors alike. I read about the prices for convention wifi and realised why some booths are still cash-only, or offline card readers.
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I've no idea, if that was a thing it would probably be a Reed thing, so not even in the office here.
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I imagine they'll bring these to future PAX as well. So they might not run through the entire supply at East.
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Yes, this will earn you 10 tickets.
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You need 100 tickets for a 25% chance at the pin. You have to pay the tickets to spin the wheel for that chance.
It's the Hidden Path wheel from Prime 2013, repurposed.
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This only reminds me of the hell that was the "From the Vault: 20" from WoTC a couple years back. IT was 10 a day at MSRP ($40ish) for something that was Ebaying for $400+ at the time. The rush for them was pretty intense for the 3 days that it was available. Not sure if anyone got hurt, but still there are going to be a lot of unhappy people
They could do a quick ticket thing, where everyone who shows up at the Twitch booth in the first 5 minutes gets a slip with a symbol/number/whatever on it. Once they were given out they put up a sign saying anyone with a "Z" on their ticket or whatever gets a pin. They achieve their goal of getting people going at their booth right away in the morning, and there's no reason for anyone to stomp someone in the back.
I just really don't like these things where it's all about who can run/push/dive their way in a scramble to the front of the pile. It's their business what kind of quantity they give out, but it should be done in an orderly fashion.
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I'm all for them using Pins as a way to build up hype. Marketing tools being what they are and all. But after The Leeroy Debacle and The Order Fiasco I am very conscious that some people haven't thought about the unintended consequences of their methods. The Ugin Contention is a whole other conversation.
Anything "first to the booth" means a stampede out of the queue room. That's a problem for the regular people because tripping in a crowd rushing to get places is not great. For those on medical badges it can be a lot worse. I know that medical badges get in a few minutes earlier, so if they are heading to Twitch they might already be in the queue. But others are likely at different booths, in the aisles and generally "looking at stuff" which can put them in the path of being mown down by overzealous people wanting the "Limited Edition Whatever" that we know booths like We Love Fine and SquareEnix are doing.
Anything that does "you have a 1/x chance of getting this" means queue churn. I'm not a fan of this, because queue space is at a premium already and if there are people taking multiple runs at the booth a la The Order Fiasco then it's actually a problem on the marketing side: fewer unique eyeballs on your product. Yes, you have hype but the cost is counter-productive. In addition to that, with limited booth space and Overwatch being a 5v5 or 6v6 game, 1/5 to 1/12 odds (depending which size of game and if one or both teams are awarded a Gold Pin) means that with a 15-20 minute demo (including switchover time) you aren't going to give out more than 300 Pins in a weekend. You don't have the throughput to do it. So that means with the minimum run of 1,000 there are going to be a lot of Gold Overwatch that disappear into the unknown. Maybe they will get used at Prime, but maybe not. If it is handled as badly as The Order Fiasco, someone will just give out fistfuls at the airport because they don't want to fly with them.
Blizzard also has their own line of pins, which will cause further confusion because their pins are not Pins, but they have regular and Gold Pins which look like theirs... cross-contamination of both collectors is fine, but it would be great if they had some way to clarify for their fans.
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Where does this kind of information live? I dug through at least five semi-official sources (blog, facebook, news stories, etc.) for both of those companies and I can't find references to any kind of limited edition whatever for PAX East.
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Expanding on this a little:
I'm sure they (mostly) aren't doing it deliberately. A quick chat with most booth staff will garner you the telling phrase "We can't give these away/trade with you, they are very limited." and suggests that whoever is in charge has the (legitimate) fear of running out before the convention ends. The problem is that none of them have done the fairly simple maths for booth throughput, which was discussed on the South Live! Podcast. If you have 1,000 Pins and haven't given away 300 on Friday, you can ease up on the restrictions the following days. If you get 600 people a day and restrict your Pins to 1/5, you aren't giving out your full allocation.
Expo is open 8 hours. It runs for 3 days (4 for Prime.) 1,000 Pins is 41 an hour (conservative) or 31 for Prime. So if you are handing out to everyone who demos and not getting that kind of throughput, you can give away a few extras or double up for people who hit the high score, impress you with their knowledge of the game, whatever. I know that smaller indie booths don't get nearly those kinds of numbers, and even if they split an East/Prime allocation evenly, that would still be 20 an hour through the booth.
That's what is troubling for stuff like the Twitch and Gold Overwatch. Clearly they are intentionally restricting supply in a similar fashion as they did last year, but those Pins are going to go somewhere. If they show up at Prime, great. If Twitch and Blizzard decide to haul their collective arses to Australia, fantastic. But I fear that many of them are going to find their way onto eBay after filtering through the office, driving prices up to ridiculous levels for yet another difficult Pin.
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