2015 Adepticon Registration: The Good, the Great and the Surprising!

It's been nearly 24 hours after the beginning of registration for the 2015 showing of Adepticon.  I think that warrants a look-see at the improvements they've made as an event, as well as some surprises that I still have a hard time believing.



Let's talk a little history first, shall we?

Last year about this time, though I believe it was a Monday, I was in my friend's basement with another friend, all of us members of the same team for the 40K Team Tournament.  As time ticked down to registration opening, One of us got on the computer, and the other two got on our phones.  Registration was a royal pain in the arse.  Non-stop refreshing to try and get in, and when we were in, non-stop loading, and then reloading pages that failed to load.  It was beyond a cluster.  Luckily we did indeed get our team signed up, and we all got registered.  I even got my ViG for the year, but it was an excruciatingly frustrating process.

The ViG registrations sold out in about 30 minutes.
The 40k Team Tournament sold out in under an hour.  40-45 minutes I think.
The 40K Championships sold out in under 2 hours.

And all that was in the midst of the new-found hell that was Adepticon Registration.  There were unhappy posts on various social media, blogs and emails sent to the Adepticon staff over it.  Now the good news is I know for a fact that they made good on some things that they may not have necessarily needed to, but they did.  I also know that they said they would fix it for next year.

Then came the Gencon registration...  What does this have to do with Adepticon?  Well many would argue that the registration for events at Gencon was a bigger cluster than Adepticon was.  But how??  This is Gencon, and by-God, they should know what they are doing, right?  Apparently not.  What it did do was show the Adepticon folks exactly how NOT to do it.  I'm sure they already had plans for how it was going to be remade by then, but this was a huge "Don't do it this way" sign to them.

They listened.  Oh boy did they ever.

Not only did we know that they had doubled their space by moving locations (which by the way, while I'll miss Lombard and the Weston, I'm glad they did), when that location sold out they got a second hotel to pitch in with a room block.  They've since added a third!  That actually worried me about how registration would go.  Would it be worse than last year with so many people selling out the hotels so fast?

Nope.

In fact, with the new registration system, it went as smooth as a baby's behind.  Sure it may have been a touch slow in the first few minutes, but it was still nice and smooth.  I got signed up for the full Infinity Track of tournaments with one click, got my ViG package AND signed up for a 2-brush blending seminar, all in the span of less than 10 minutes, and without the awkward Paypal hiccup in the payment end that cause even more delays last year.   It was GREAT!

So there's the Good and the Great...but what about the Surprising?

As of 6:30pm on 11/25:
There are still 69 spots left open in the 40K Championships.
There are still 15 spots left open in the 40K Team Tournament.
There are NO spots left in the 40K Highlander event.
There are NO spots left in the 40K Badab war event.
There are NO spots left in the Firestorm Armada Tournament.
There are NO spots left in the Warma-Hordes Team Tournament.

...Firestorm Armada?  Yup.  Even though the number of spots for that was small, it sold out, BEFORE the big even did!  Sure, they added space, but folks, I think this is significant in the state of our hobby today.  Infinity, Malifaux, Warma-Hordes, X-Wing, Firestorm, and so many other games have become popular enough that their events are growing within the Adepticon weekend we all love, and the events that we are used to selling out quickly...aren't.

So where does that leave us?  It leaves us with an amazing array of choices in which to play with and choose from.  And I for one, can't wait.

- Tim