It's not a con, it's a fest! I know.
MAGFest ("Music and Gaming Festival") is pretty much the best gaming convention ever conceived, and is held every winter in National Harbor, Maryland, USA. The big differentiator of MAGFest from other cons is that in addition to having cool merch, indie developers showcasing their titles, and panels from big names in the gaming industry, there is also a big focus on musical performances - from some of the biggest names in the 'game music' field, such as The Protomen, Mega Ran, Nobuo Uematsu, etc. Basically, it's like a regular con mixed with Glastonbury/Coachella/Insert Other Music Festival here, only smaller.
At least, it used to be smaller.
That MAGFest has been ballooning in size is no surprise to anyone. The event used to be held in a small hotel in Alexandria before moving to the massive, $900 million Gaylord Hotel & Convention Center across the bridge in Maryland. Weekend passes hit the 20,000 attendee cap and sold out last year (although not until like the first day of the convention proper iirc). And of course, this should be expected and even welcomed; after all, a "secret" as good as MAGFest wouldn't stay low-key for long, right?
Enter MAGFest 2018. MAGFest Inc. (the group running the show) announced for the first time that reservations for all MAGFest-area hotels would not be immediately available when passes went live (in addition to the price of said passes going up ~$20 again). Instead, they would roll out a "system" for bookings soon thereafter. Despite being an extremely pricey hotel, rooms at the Gaylord did always sell out for MAGFest weekend - but only two or three weeks after they were made available. And even then, stuff like the crappy Holiday Inn two miles away never ever sold out. So it seemed like they were trying to solve a problem that didn't exist. But okay, whatever.
Weeks go by, stone silence. Emails saying they'll let everyone know when they've decided when the booking site will go up with another email, but still nothing. All of this, of course, is useless communication that can only overhype the booking process and cause people to panic-buy rooms early when they otherwise wouldn't. But okay.
Last week, we finally get word: bookings will be live at 7PM EDT on Tuesday, October 17th for those who pre-registered (e.g., me), and two days later for everyone else. Click this link and wait and then at 7PM we will start randomly letting people through to reserve rooms at area hotels. Wait, what? There's a "line"? And a lottery system to determine who goes first? Something is starting to feel off here; there has literally never been a need for such rationing before. But okay, this is their first time doing this, and maybe the server infrastructure just sucks. Don't want the site to crash, or whatever.
I'm on the page at 6:45, waiting. 7:01 PM comes. Nothing. 7:20 passes by, still nothing. Uhh, what's going on? At 7:35, my spot in line finally comes up, and there are no rooms left available. Yes, you read that right. Every single blessed room in every hotel in the whole area sold out for that weekend in half an hour, with people being randomly let through one at a time. This is like a SNES Classic situation, but for $200/night hotel rooms.
Understandably, a very large number of people did not get a room at all as well, and are currently fuming about it on Twitter (complete with ironic screenshots direct from MAGFest.org that "we won't sell out of rooms", underline theirs). Surprise surprise, no word from them yet. People on the official subreddit are sadly selling their passes because they don't live in the area and have no feasible way to attend the con now. And, somehow, some idiot got my university's wifi IP banned from the official MAG forums, but I have to imagine there is a similar response there as well.
I have gone to MAGFest three years running, but never had the money to stay anywhere near the actual event. It has always been a last-ditch type thing, getting a room at a Red Roof Inn several miles away, or even directly commuting back-and-forth from my university (until they changed the dates to avoid PAX South and it no longer fell during classes). This is my last year at school in the area, however, and a particular circumstance happened to me that changed things; a relative died and left me $1,000, with the express wish that it be "spent frivolously". After thinking about it a while I decided what I do: go out with a bang and spend my final MAGFest at the Gaylord proper. That hotel is worth the combined economic output of my hometown several dozens of times over, and the first year I went there I spent several hours just sitting there marveling at the difference in wealth between it and me. It is literally magical being in there. I never thought an almost $600 weekend at a hotel in Maryland in January would be a scarce resource; but here we are.
Yet as I sit here hate-typing this summary of events, I realize that it is not merely about me or about the others who got screwed over by this poor handling, but about the logistics of running and scaling a convention in general. Everyone complains about PAX, for example - how it's so crowded, the lines take forever, people smell, etc. - but it is also highly well-run and administered logistically and people get out of it pretty much what they expect. You can have a small, intimate con like MAGFest used to be - but what happens when demand grows exponentially and your small volunteer team is sent out of their depth, like what happened here? Do you start paying people money and form a for-profit entity? Get help from sponsors/other events? I know people who were really upset when NY Anime Fest got absorbed by Comic Con - but the Anime Fest organizers were never quite up to demand, even literally having the event closed by fire marshalls their first time. And Comic Con, to my knowledge, never has these types of problems.
tl;dr - What do you do when a convention gets "too big"? Pass it off to someone else who can handle it? Split it up into smaller events? Is there a solution that would be acceptable to all/most stakeholders?
