TOPIC: Gen Con Wish List best practice

jedibcg wrote: Also unless it has changed buying tickets for a friend also puts the tickets in their packet. So if some reason someone doesn't show up to Gen Con (maybe because they had unexpected heart surgery that week) that ticket never gets used. This happened the first year I bought tickets for my group using the for a friend vs "another for me." I have never done that since.

As a counterexample, a few years ago I had a few friends cancel on me after I bought tickets for them using their name (NOT the "another for me"). When I picked up my packet at Will Call, I asked them if I could take the tickets out of my friends' packets, since I was the one who actually paid for them. Maybe I just lucked into a friendly attendant, but he opened the packets, saw that the tickets had a "paid for by Andrew Knoll" label on them, and let me take them.

A few tips if you are working with a friend.

1) When buying TD tickets, both of you should choose a "ticket for myself" and "another ticket for myself". Never choose your friend by name when buying TD tickets, because then your lists will conflict with each other. After both wish lists are processed (you have an hour I think), then decide which events to keep and which to drop from your cart.

2) Since wish list maxes out at 50, I typically put different runs in each person's wish list. The idea is that between the two of you, you can try to get as many as 100 different runs. This is particularly important if you are trying to buy full runs of 10. For just 2 tickets it is not as big of a deal. So if I really want to do the N1 run at around 10AM on Friday morning, I would take the 5 or 6 runs starting between say 9:30AM and 10:30AM and alternate them between the two wish lists. So one would have 9:36, 10:00, and 10:24, where the other would have 9:48, 10:12, and 10:36.

3) Put your preferred items earlier in the wish list, and try not to get strange overlaps. For example, let's say that you are trying to get two runs in and you have 1PM to 7PM available. Generally you shouldn't care too much about the order, but let's say you want N2 before N3. I would list all N2 runs starting from 1PM to 2PM, then all N3 runs from 4PM to 5PM, then N3 runs from 1PM to 2PM, then N2 runs from 4PM to 5PM. If I have the space in my wish list, I might then list both N2 and N3 with start times between 2PM and 4PM, but after all of the others, because if I get one of those I'll only be able to fit one run in that window instead of two.

Based on the advice of everyone here, I've come up with the following strategy:

I'm adding the first 12x N1 time slots of the day for Friday. Wish List slots 4-15
I'm adding the first 12x N3 time slots of the day for Thursday. Wish List slots 16-27
I'm adding the first 12x N2 time slots of the day for Saturday. Wish List slots 28-39

My group is three players. I've added all of these events as tickets for Myself +2 for myself.

I'm going to ask my friends to do exactly the same thing, but flip the runs / days around. So Friend B would add:

First 12x N3 time slots of the day for Friday. Wish List slots 1-12.
First 12x N2 time slots of the day for Thursday. Wish List slots 13-24.
First 12x N1 time slots of the day for Saturday. Wish List slots 25-36.

And friend C would do the last combination. Hopefully the friend who gets in first will be able to just book all 3 days and the other 2 can just release whatever they have.

I think this is better than all 3 of us having the exact same 36 events in our wish list, but I'm not sure.

Sounds like a solid plan to me.

One other idea: let's say that for each dungeon run you have one single run that is your preferred option. Consider putting those three most ideal runs at the top of each person's wish list.

The reality is that one person might end up early in line, but you won't know which person that will be. So you could get lucky and any one person could get all three runs at your most preferred time if they end up early in the queue.

Thanks, Kirk!

Kirk Bauer wrote: Sounds like a solid plan to me.

One other idea: let's say that for each dungeon run you have one single run that is your preferred option. Consider putting those three most ideal runs at the top of each person's wish list.

The reality is that one person might end up early in line, but you won't know which person that will be. So you could get lucky and any one person could get all three runs at your most preferred time if they end up early in the queue.

My group got all the events we wanted.

We got trigger happy and bought one of each run after our friend (wait listed at ~1400) had his wish list processed first.

Then our other two lists processed (~5000), and we had access to more desirable time slots. We ended up refunding at the 5% penalty. Next year, we'll be sure to wait until we can access all of our options.

The advice to buy tickets "for myself, myself, & myself" was clutch.

Thank you to everyone who chimed in and offered help - jedibcg, Fiddy, Boilerplate, Wade S., dsypher, Matthew H., binia, Andrew K, & Kirk B.