GenCon's Event System Literally Couldn't Be Worse (or shadier?)
Let me take you on a journey...
The day is May 17, 2026. I'm in St. Louis for the annual Geekway to the West convention with several of my gaming buddies. We're in the lobby just before 11 am local time. GenCon wishlist submission is mere minutes away, and we are frantically organizing our wishlists.
11:00: I mash my "submit" button... and I am 601 in line. Holy rusted metal, Batman! That's an amazing slot.
11:03(ish): I receive (majority) rejections, but also a few acceptances. I feel loved, at least a little.
11:15: I've spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how any of this garbage was possible! The numbers just don't add up. How did he get me a ticket for that event, but I also got a ticket for it? Why would it let me get two of the same ticket? I give up and pile into the van to drive back home with my friends. I'll deal with this crap later...
We spend a portion of the next four hours of our drive back to Indy saying, yet again, for the umpteenth year in a row, that GenCon couldn't have designed worse software if their goal was to design the worst software ever. (Almost all of us work in software to some extent)
Some background...
GenCon is a small company, and they haven't always been the most viable. They seem to be thriving now, and that is a good thing! All that said, their event system has never been their crown jewel. Yes, they have software people on staff, but they aren't a software company. I try to keep that in mind when I feel as defeated by their software as I do today.
For those who don't know, GenCon's event system works roughly like this:
- GMs submit events for consideration (the GMs are the angels in this story... it's hard work)
- GenCon reviews and eventually approves those events
- The events are populated into a catalog for attendees to peruse
- Attendees then add events to a wishlist, which they can organize and modify
- On a Sunday in May, at noon EST, the whole world scrambles to hit the "submit" button so they can get queued into a line to have their events assigned
- (This is the really messed-up part) GenCon's system seems to process the event requests in the least equitable way possible...
- By assigning #1 in line EVERYTHING they asked for, then doing the same for #2, #3, etc...
- By the time it gets to #1200, almost no events are left because the folks at the front of the line took everything.
- So, essentially, there are a handful of BIG WINNERS, and everyone else is a loser.
- It's basically everything we hate about corrupt capitalism distilled into software that should instead be helping everyone have fun.
- (The nearly infinite ways it could be improved will be saved for another post.)
So that's how it "works." A few people are very happy, and everyone else is confused, disappointed, defeated, and despondent. But we're used to it. It's been this way for at least a decade. Likely far longer.
Some new garbage this year!
So, back to my friends and me trying to figure out our GenCon schedules. We've been sifting through the results on and off for a few days, and we've noticed a pattern... we have WAY TOO MANY TICKETS! The system has given me a ticket for an event and charged me for it, but it has also given my friend a ticket for me and charged him for it. So the system has "decided" that I need two tickets for the same event? And this happened several times in just my 5-person friend group...
It is a mess. Somehow, GenCon's software got worse this year. It did a bad thing it has never done before. It assigned all of us multiple of the same tickets. If I requested an event with a ticket for me and one for my buddy, and my buddy did the same thing, it processed both requests and gave us each 2 tickets. That then removes those duplicate tickets from the pool, so attendees later in the processing queue couldn't get them.
Are you friggin' serious!? Your system already makes life hard for people further down the queue, but now you add this new wrinkle so that they have even fewer options?
Is it a scam?
Here's what we believe happened. Just spitballing here...
GenCon has figured out that they can print money if they sell a bunch of extra tickets to things, knowing we have to return those extra tickets, and only being willing to give "system credit" for the returns. Essentially, the buyers rack up a bunch of costs they shouldn't have been able to get, then GenCon refuses to reimburse people.
When we return our extra tickets, they get put back into the system for someone else to buy. If those people don't also have credit, GenCon gets the revenue from the second purchase as well. Meanwhile, the people who returned the tickets and have credit will have limited options for how to spend it in the system, because all of the games sell out.
So GenCon is left with a bunch of "credit" in the system that no one can use.
That's just a guess... but all of the new ways in which the software "works" add up to this as a logical conclusion.
I mean, every other piece of software we use has been inshittified, why not this one too?
We have spent no less than 10 collective hours trying to make sense of the situation and rearrange our tickets and schedules. It has resulted in nearly $250 dollars of system credit (between just 5 of us). It has taken my hobby and turned it into work.
GenCon, if you are listening...
I would help you redesign your software at no hard cost (free VIP badge for life?). It would work better for event registration, guaranteed, because there is almost no way to make it work worse.