best way to get prize tickets?

geeeeoffff

so, this was my first pax, and i didn't get any prize tickets. are those just given to tournament winners or were there other ways to earn them?

i heard the prizes included some pretty sweet loot so i really want to try to get in on that next year

b0wser

The most common way is to do well in tournaments, yeah. Tabletop was giving a lot away just for coming over and playing things, if I heard correctly. We did have some awesome prizes, but they all went really quickly. As the new Prize Redemption department manager, I'm going to be working more pro-actively with PAX officials to make sure we've got a lot of awesome stuff next year. Our prizes are by donation from our exhibitors primarily, so I'm hoping that I can contact them ahead of PAX'09 to find out more about their possible contributions. I'm also coming up with an idea for a mobile prize/point team, but I'm not going to spill the details on that one just yet.

I want there to be more points, and more prizes. If I can put in my efforts accordingly, I hope that Prize Redemption will be able to make even more attendees happy in 2009.

Fall

In previous years, tickets were only given to tournament winners (top 4 finishers), but this year thousands were given out to people who won random contests, and in some less... awesome... situations, given out just for participation.

This year, the easiest way to earn tickets, by a hilariously massive margin, was to just hang around the tabletop area all weekend and play in random events. We ran into a guy at the prize booth that had piled up 900 tickets in his time in dice and card land, not one earned for placing high in a tournament.

To put that into perspective, my team won COD4 (16 teams) and BF Heroes (32 teams) and I walked away with 200 points and a spiffy framed BF Heroes poster. I was happy with what I won, mainly since I showed up to claim prizes right after stuff was restocked, but I was pretty annoyed to hear how many points were handed out en masse to folks who probably didn't deserve them.

I felt bad for the winners of the Halo 3 and Starcraft tournaments who ended up walking away pretty disheartened by the lack of anything at the prize booth late Sunday, more so knowing Mr. Bad With 900 Tickets grabbed half a dozen games, a pile of shirts, and a lot of the cooler remaining stuff early-Saturday.

Arco

How much stuff is 900 tickets? Put a dollar amount on it so I know how much to hate that guy.

Viscountalpha

Arco wrote: »

How much stuff is 900 tickets? Put a dollar amount on it so I know how much to hate that guy.

400 tickets could of let you pick up a Core 2 duo extreme chip. But they screwed up the ticket distribution so the sunday tournaments got screwed. They might as well have set prizes instead of tickets. Get rid of the ticket system all together.

PikaPuff

Nah, I think the better idea was to divide up the prize set in three, and release one set each day. maybe around 2pm each day.

super...

Fall wrote: »

In previous years, tickets were only given to tournament winners (top 4 finishers), but this year thousands were given out to people who won random contests, and in some less... awesome... situations, given out just for participation.

This year, the easiest way to earn tickets, by a hilariously massive margin, was to just hang around the tabletop area all weekend and play in random events. We ran into a guy at the prize booth that had piled up 900 tickets in his time in dice and card land, not one earned for placing high in a tournament.

To put that into perspective, my team won COD4 (16 teams) and BF Heroes (32 teams) and I walked away with 200 points and a spiffy framed BF Heroes poster. I was happy with what I won, mainly since I showed up to claim prizes right after stuff was restocked, but I was pretty annoyed to hear how many points were handed out en masse to folks who probably didn't deserve them.

you know i had a fairly angry post about this but I'm just going to bite my lip, no i was not agreeing with you.

b0wser

PikaPuff wrote: »

Nah, I think the better idea was to divide up the prize set in three, and release one set each day. maybe around 2pm each day.

That's another major thing I'm going to try and set up next year. I don't know why, but I love working Prize Redemption. As the manager, I want to make it as highly efficient and functional as possible. I don't want to run out of awesome prizes like this year, because then I've got tourney winners coming to me on Sunday and having nothing cool to take home with them.

Also, we think that an entire box of cool prizes may have been misplaced somewhere during setup, we really don't know. I assure everyone that I'll be working on making sure there's a well-stocked bunker of prizes up for grabs next year.

FyreWulff

It'd probably be better to just have fixed prizes for the tournaments, and have tickets for all other prizes.

edit: winner gets first pick, runner up gets second pick, if neither likes the available fixed prizes they get a number of tickets.

Viscountalpha

Fall wrote: »

In previous years, tickets were only given to tournament winners (top 4 finishers), but this year thousands were given out to people who won random contests, and in some less... awesome... situations, given out just for participation.

This year, the easiest way to earn tickets, by a hilariously massive margin, was to just hang around the tabletop area all weekend and play in random events. We ran into a guy at the prize booth that had piled up 900 tickets in his time in dice and card land, not one earned for placing high in a tournament.

To put that into perspective, my team won COD4 (16 teams) and BF Heroes (32 teams) and I walked away with 200 points and a spiffy framed BF Heroes poster. I was happy with what I won, mainly since I showed up to claim prizes right after stuff was restocked, but I was pretty annoyed to hear how many points were handed out en masse to folks who probably didn't deserve them.

I felt bad for the winners of the Halo 3 and Starcraft tournaments who ended up walking away pretty disheartened by the lack of anything at the prize booth late Sunday, more so knowing Mr. Bad With 900 Tickets grabbed half a dozen games, a pile of shirts, and a lot of the cooler remaining stuff early-Saturday.

That pisses me off since I didn't hang around tabletop at all. I wish I had 50 tickets for something neat.

FyreWulff

I actually tried to check it out, but couldn't find it. Apparently they lost the arrows that would have guided people.

apotheos

FyreWulff wrote: »

I actually tried to check it out, but couldn't find it. Apparently they lost the arrows that would have guided people.

It was across the street.

They had a giant sign.

It was really, really hard to miss.

BigRed

Plus there was the whole map thing in the program :P Or you could have asked someone.

PikaPuff

i saw the giant sign. never once read what it said. even after learning it was the annex. i would have liked to visit it.

collinc

DTS winners got 150 prize points. The lowest amount of pins needed this year was 20. I used my 150 points to get Warhawk with the bluetooth headset, the PAX 07 dvd, Flight Sim X Deluxe, and a pair of socks.