Rhode Island Comic Con Hits New High, Gets New Problems

The fourth iteration of Rhode Island Comic Con was its biggest by far, and it was generally perceived as a success by many, but not all. It did suffer from some problems, but the biggest one seems to be lingering anger over last year’s event, which prompted some people to immediately assume the worst when it came to the difficulties the convention actually had.

First, to set the scene, a reminder about the major problem that attendees had at the 2014 version of RICC — the Rhode Island Convention Center was closed off completely for hours on the Saturday of that convention, when the Fire Marshall’s office determined that the building had exceeded capacity. That alone caused some people to decide to take the convention off their list of shows to attend, and the crowds that caused that shut down turned off others. 

This year RICC drew an estimated 60,000 people over the course of three days, according to con officials (the exact number won’t be tallied for a few more days). That is a new record for a convention that has exceeded attendance expectations every year since it launched. And for the first time, the convention capped ticket sales every day, according to con officials.

To help prevent the doors from ever being closed this year due to overcrowding, RICC expanded into the attached Dunkin Donuts Arena, putting many of the celebrity guests on the arena floor and more vendors there and in the hallways surrounding that floor and the concourse above. This meant that for much of the convention, the only way to get from the convention center to the arena and back was the skybridge that connects the two, as the facility and the con presumably wanted to control access and prevent people without badges using one building to get into another without paying. That led to intense congestion on that skybridge, with crowds taking as much as 20 minutes to negotiate that 60 or so feet.

Despite reports from attendees on Saturday, however, at no time was access to either building closed off by anyone — Fire Marshalls or otherwise. Both RICC and the convention center have officially confirmed that not only was access never closed off, they decided to open up ground floor access ways between the two buildings Saturday afternoon to help ease that congestion.

While a number of attendees found that level of crowding too much to handle, and vowed on social media to never return, most that I have seen on social media handled it in stride and reported having a good time, getting to meet the celebrities they wanted, or getting a good deal on some collectible they had in mind to buy. On the other hand, many of the vendors and artists I know that were located in the convention center showroom floor, and not in the arena where the bulk of the guests were, reported poor sales this year versus previous years, at least on Saturday. This seems to be attributable to the difficulty of getting from one building to another during the height of the crowding, with many people choosing to stay in the arena to see more guests.

One bright point is that most of the charity groups I know that were at RICC report donations above what they expected and are very happy with the show, no matter where they were located.

Another thing RICC did this year was to add people at the middle management level of the con. The con brought on a new events and panels manager, a new celebrity guest consultant and others. This clearly helped in some ways, but wasn’t able to solve other problems. One example of that is the lack of knowledge of volunteers about where some very basic functions of the con were located. However, that was not their fault — the convention kept moving the location of functions and even guests, in some cases multiple times.

RICC didn’t do nearly a good enough job communicating these changes to either the volunteers or the attendees. While the convention did have a smartphone app, as does conventions like New York Comic Con and Dragon Con, the changes to guest locations and vendors or events did not get announced nearly timely enough. I would suggest that the con puts up large video screens (or uses any already available) at high traffic points on every floor of the con to post announcements about changes to locations or times (if that was being done at the convention I didn’t see it, and welcome anyone from the con telling me about it). Having Ron Perlman’s location labeled as “TBD” in the printed program is understandable — having it stay that way in the app is not, nor is keeping attendees in the dark without any other way of communicating it.

Perhaps RICC needs to add one more upper management official — an Attendee Ombudsman, whose sole job would be to consider the impact of any decision on the ultimate revenue source and the most important people to make happy, the attendees. Having most attendees be mostly happy isn’t a good enough result to be satisfied with.

All told, Rhode Island Comic Con did improve on some things from previous years, and that brought on some new problems. I think some of those problems could have been better anticipated — for example, roughly two thirds of the convention center was used by a Navy technology conference on Friday, causing much of the juggling of locations that happened on Saturday. But since the con knew about this many months in advance (confirmed by a con official), it seems like a better plan for both making those changes and then announcing them could have been created and then put in place.

It usually takes a few years to shake out the problems of any event. Having an event go far beyond initial plans for attendee crowd sizes every single year since launch creates fresh problems every year, and until that growth reaches a stable point (as happened with PAX East years ago) there will continue to be issues. Now that an attendance upper limit has been established — after all, there is no more space into which RICC can expand — it is up to the convention and the center to figure out how to solve the problems that arose this year.

In a couple of years I have no doubt that there will be a rush to buy the limited number of tickets for RICC when they get announced as being available, just like what happens with New York Comic Con and PAX East now. Until that happens, RICC needs to get these problems — both the lingering ones and the new ones — figured out so it convinces potential attendees that there won’t ever be another situation like 2014. Clearly it is still on many people’s minds.