Old news, just for the record
I'd forgotten I had written this. It's old news but it came up as "Restore from saved draft?" when I logged in so I'll publish it. The main point is that I have been in the BMORG's shoes and have true empathy for them. Plus rage. As a business exercise I've tried to understand their decision to go lottery better and wondering if I would've recognized the faults in the plan had I been on the committee that was making this decision:
So the BMORG had a lottery for tickets and (by anecdotal reports) fully two-thirds of big theme camp members didn't get any tickets. I don't know anyone in our group who did either (ourselves included). Plus there are already tickets up on Stub Hub for much $$ and there's nothing BMORG can do about that, apparently.
Disaster!
I actually have gnosis of what the BMORG is going through. My designers and I have pushed things into our live games that have gone TERRIBLY wrong. Some unforeseen or poorly thought out side effect completely hijacks our intention. Our extremely passionate community takes to the forums and spends hours and hours typing posts of all sorts, reasonable, logical, self-serving, incoherent, illogical, and so on. The message they are trying to deliver is all the same: FAIL.
In some cases they've been right, sometimes they're just being selfish whiners.
But the start of all the brouhaha in our games is our attempt to solve a problem or improve an experience. Something is out of control or is ready to be tweaked and so we make a change. And, in the bad cases, an unintended consequence rears up.
That's where I'm trying to start with the BMORG situation. What problem were they trying to solve and/or what improvement were they trying to make by switching to the lottery?
I have some theories and want to know what others think:
1) The old ticket system always resulted in two days of pain. People spending up to 8 hours just trying to get through the virtual "line" and purchase tix. A lottery would mean people only had to sign up at their leisure and then they'd be distributed easily.
2) The tickets sold out last year and they wanted to make sure everyone had the exact same chance to get a ticket. The lottery prevents people from being "punished" for having a bad connection, getting dumped out of their place in line, etc. The playing field is even.
So the BMORG had a lottery for tickets and (by anecdotal reports) fully two-thirds of big theme camp members didn't get any tickets. I don't know anyone in our group who did either (ourselves included). Plus there are already tickets up on Stub Hub for much $$ and there's nothing BMORG can do about that, apparently.
Disaster!
I actually have gnosis of what the BMORG is going through. My designers and I have pushed things into our live games that have gone TERRIBLY wrong. Some unforeseen or poorly thought out side effect completely hijacks our intention. Our extremely passionate community takes to the forums and spends hours and hours typing posts of all sorts, reasonable, logical, self-serving, incoherent, illogical, and so on. The message they are trying to deliver is all the same: FAIL.
In some cases they've been right, sometimes they're just being selfish whiners.
But the start of all the brouhaha in our games is our attempt to solve a problem or improve an experience. Something is out of control or is ready to be tweaked and so we make a change. And, in the bad cases, an unintended consequence rears up.
That's where I'm trying to start with the BMORG situation. What problem were they trying to solve and/or what improvement were they trying to make by switching to the lottery?
I have some theories and want to know what others think:
1) The old ticket system always resulted in two days of pain. People spending up to 8 hours just trying to get through the virtual "line" and purchase tix. A lottery would mean people only had to sign up at their leisure and then they'd be distributed easily.
2) The tickets sold out last year and they wanted to make sure everyone had the exact same chance to get a ticket. The lottery prevents people from being "punished" for having a bad connection, getting dumped out of their place in line, etc. The playing field is even.