Otakon Line Snafu Enrages Attendees (Update 2)

One the bright side, at least no one has been offered time in the ball pit.

Last night hundreds of people, possibly more than one thousand, waited in line for three hours or more to pick up their pre-registration badges at Otakon, and the vast majority of them left empty-handed. While that would be enough to anger anyone dehydrated and sore from standing in line so long, it was made worse by the con reportedly closing off the line an hour early with no warning, then shutting down all badge pickup at 10:30 p.m., even though only a trickle of attendees made it through.

Worse, there was apparently no official notification that the badge pickup station had closed that was heard by anyone not immediately near the Baltimore Convention Center doors, or already inside. So people reported on the Otakon Facebook page they were standing in line until 11 p.m. before someone told them registration had closed 30 minutes prior.

Seemingly rubbing salt in the wounds, Otakon gave some of those people who were inside the building when it closed the registration booths a “Jump The Line” pass that allowed them to get into the building again without having to get back in the outside line, essentially holding their place in line.

Otakon posted on its Facebook page that it closed the registration line due to “technical difficulties” which seems to be interpreted as WiFi problems by the commentors on the post. Unfortunately, it made that post at 11:07 — more than 30 minutes after the registration booths closed. There was no notice, apparently, of the fact that Otakon closed off allowing any more people into the line at 8 p.m., one hour earlier than it had been saying.

The general consensus among the Twitterverse and on Facebook is that Otakon pre-registration computers at the reported 26 booths were using the convention center WiFi to access the registration database. If the many hundreds of people lined up outside also used the WiFi, it seems logical to assume the network choked hard on the demand.

While many people commenting on Otakon’s Facebook post called the organizers out for not staying open much later until everyone in line was satisfied, it may not have had any option. The convention center might have had a hard cutoff on how long operations could run on any given night. Or the staff may have realized that, short of convincing everyone in line that they needed to stop using the con center’s WiFi, there was no way they could possibly have cleared the line on such a congested network.

All of that is speculation, of course, and the two people who were in line last night that I have been able to reach both said they were not using WiFi while chilling their heels. And this morning, Otakon already tweeted out it opened the doors for registration at 7:45 a.m., well ahead of schedule, to try to relieve the already around-the-block lines that have formed.

Not surprisingly, I have not received any reply to the email questions I sent to Otakon press officials. My guess is it is all hands on deck for registration this morning — as it should be.

UPDATE — Otakon has released a detailed announcement to the press about what happened last night. As I assumed, the convention center would have put a hard stop on all activity at midnight anyway, and Otakon decided it was smarter to cut its losses and allow people some time to get back to their hotels. In addition it does seem as though it was an Internet problem, but the release says nothing about WiFi. But the release also notes that part of the problem was “procedural limitations.”

We encountered a number of Internet related limitations that hindered us from processing registrations at the speed we had initially forecast and planned for. Although we typically process between 16,000 and 17,000 members on the first day of pre-registration pickup, we were only able to process 10,000 Thursday.

Otakon goes on to offer what seems a sincere apology, one that strikes the proper tone.

Our entire staff would like to extend our sincere apologies to our members who endured long lines and disappointment today. It is not the standard to which we hold ourselves, and we sincerely appreciate the patience, humor, and accommodation they showed us despite their understandable frustration.

Let’s hope that the rest of the convention goes better for all of those frustrated attendees.

UPDATE 2 — We heard back directly from Otakon in response to our questions. Convention chairman Andy Earnhardt confirmed much of what was said in the press release, but he clearly stated the registration system was not on WiFi.

“No, at no time was the convention center wireless in use for registration,” he said. “Everything was hard lined in.”

In fact, Earnhardt said the hardwired system available to Otakon is from a completely separate provider than the one that is behind the WiFi available for free to con attendees in the convention center. The Internet problems that plagued registration is still a mystery.

Top photo, taken at about 8:15 a.m., is courtesy of Mike Kowalek, Eleventhphotograph.com.