It seems as though this entire thread goes like this:
Person who got a downtown room: "The lottery is great!!!"
Person who didn't get a downtown room: "The lottery is completely unfair!!!"
The fact is, there were probably 50K (or more) people vying for the 6K rooms. Every year, somebody who really wants or needs a downtown room does not get one. Those who have been getting a downtown room for x number of years... you may be proud of this, but the truth is that your "success" in getting one has denied someone else and perhaps not getting one possibly made someone decide to not attend at all as a result. SO... if you were lucky enough to score a downtown connected hotel this year... GREAT! If you didn't... there will be more Gen Cons and rooms may still become available.
Personally, I always plan on attending Gen Con and staying at an out of block - non-connected hotel and I always assume that I will not get a downtown room. This year was the first time I actually got a connected hotel but I don't think my opinion on how the housing works has changed at all. I just consider myself extremely lucky.
It isn't a simple matter of "person X got a room that person Y wanted, so now person Y is whining". It's that people who didn't want a room to begin with are being handed rooms, and those rooms are being taken away from people who actually wanted them. That actually is objectively unfair.
Give the rooms to people who actually want them and you will actually end up with less upset people. This should be a no brainer for Gen Con. You can't please everyone but you can please more of the people who care about this issue.
Historically, what actually deterred people from taking rooms out of greed was having to log into the housing portal at noon on housing day.
The only thing that was different this year than last year, from what I have seen, was the mailing out of portal access times on Saturday rather than everybody logging in at noon Sunday to see what their time was. Are you suggesting that we go back to that?
Something still doesn't pass the smell test here. Why would the downtown rooms sell out that much faster? Were there more people allotted to the earlier times? (This wouldn't make sense - why bother with spreading the times out in the first place if they weren't balanced?)
Two approaches:
1) rely on the system
2) adapt without a system
I'm wary of systems; many smell tests later :p
I absolutely am saying we should go back to logging in at noon. Sure, it will require a server upgrade that Gen Con should be making anyways but we do know that having to log in at noon to take your chances on housing, as much of a pain as it was, weeded out the chunk of badge holders that already had downtown rooms or were not intending to stay downtown in the first place. Basically it prevented greed and double dipping. Lower participation rate, better odds for the people that actually wanted to participate.
If you already have reservations downtown or want to commute in there is a big difference between waiting until the day of, logging in at noon, and spending an hour knowing you may very well get nothing out of it vs being told the day before that you randomly got a low number, all you have to do is log in for 5-10 minutes and claim your room.
So if you are like the vast majority of people who will be using the Gen Con lottery for a room downtown next year it comes down to a simple choice- do you want to spend an hour logging into the housing portal at noon to have a significantly better chance of getting a room or do you want to just sit and wait for an email the day before, knowing that your chances of getting a room are much lower doing that?
I do think the process could benefit from an "opt out of the housing lottery" button if you have already decided that you were making other arrangements for your stay. This would decrease the number of people with names in the hat, but I am not sure the number difference would be that great. It seems to me that the majority of the people who are posting here that had made arrangements prior to the housing lottery still put their name in the hat for the chance at getting an in-block hotel. Even though I didn't get a downtown or in-block room the last several years, I still think the lottery system is working the best it can with the number of hotel rooms available.
I was going to suggest something else - do what they did this year, but send out the E-mails at 11 AM on Sunday morning - but by your reasoning, just being told when you can log in, rather than having to access the portal to see what time it is, will severely decrease the chance that others will be able to get a downtown room as you are far less likely to miss your time.
What is your opinion of going back to the 2016 system - keep the lottery, but just don't tell anybody in advance what their portal times are, and have everybody have to access the portal in order to find their times?
That is exactly what I am proposing.
People are more likely to take things if they are offered to them vs having to actually go after something with a big chance of failure. Checking a box to stay in the lottery so you can stay in the lottery and get a shot at an extra reservation is a no brainer for a lot of people.
By being handed rooms I mean people who already had their housing reservations made were sent email the day before housing went live that basically said "log in at this time and in five minutes you can have a guaranteed discounted downtown hotel room". All they had to do was claim their room, and people will take these rooms even if they didn't need them to begin with. That is the problem with the lottery this year.
I am not sure just how many of these rooms were done this way and since I am not involved in the behind the scenes thing and perhaps if it were just for major sponsors and such, that they were told to participate in the lottery anyway if they did not want to stay in the sponsor provided room with others. Similar to volunteer badges. If Gen Con is providing you with a hotel room, you will probably not have a say as to who your roommates will be, so if you don't want to stay with someone else, then you have to try for your own room.
gharris, the existence of people who are taking downtown hotel rooms but didn't actually want them is entirely mythical. The realistic, and more simple explanation is that usually not everyone is able to log into the portal right at noon. Being busy, their connection being slow, the entire system crashing, or even the system itself being too confusing to decipher. GenCon, however much it may frustrate people who have had good luck in the past, does not actually have any motivation on its part to give people who can log in at noon an advantage. Such an advantage ever existing was a byproduct of the system, not its intent. They, in fact, have only a motivation to have as equitable a distribution of shots at downtown hotel rooms as possible.
In reality, no matter how you try to justify it, any advantage you're getting is shutting someone else out who wanted a room downtown. Your gain is someone else's loss. To say that out of 60,000 people the few thousand that got downtown hotel rooms didn't really, really want a downtown room is preposterous. Thinking that people were trying to get outside downtown but just ended up there despite their intentions is something that has zero basis in reality. Everyone who has a room downtown had as much right to those rooms as everyone else, and to try to box them out isn't motivated by a desire fairness but by personal greed.
I get that people don't like the idea that their misfortune is simply random chance and not someone else's malice or carelessness. But someone's cancelled vacation is another person's vacation not cancelled. Tricking people into not getting hotel rooms downtown with an extra checkbox or ambiguous login times isn't going to "solve" any problems for GenCon's end. You continue to think of ways that would make you more likely to get a hotel room, but have yet to create a reason why GenCon would ever want to do it.
GenCon wants its housing portal to be stable, equitable, and simple. Anything that makes it more unstable, more biased, or more complex is just not going to happen.
Well said, ryanjamison.
The idea behind a "housing desired" checkbox wasn't to trick anyone. It was simply to indicate if one wanted to be included in the housing lottery or not. I'd think that this would cut down, even slightly, on the number of those included in the lottery who are assigned login times they're not going to use. It seems like this would help streamline the process by eliminating those who already have a housing plan in place, either having reserved rooms out of block or those who are locals. That's it. No trickery or hidden agendas other than *gasp* attempting to simplify things.