Saw the thread about Origins Game Downloads and was reminded that I usually post one of these threads every year - the Origins (unrelated) Game Fair’s event registration goes live later today! Any other StraightDope folks going to be in attendance?
I’ll be there - for the 18th time, if I counted correctly, and only about half of them in Columbus. My first ten were in:
San Mateo, CA (1981)
Towson, MD (1985)
LA (1986)
Milwaukee (1988, hosted by GenCon - and you thought Indy had hotel problems)
LA again (1989)
Atlanta (1990, hosted by DragonCon)
Baltimore (1991)
Fort Worth (1993 - not Dallas, which hosted in, IIRC, 1984)
San Jose (1994)
Philadelphia (1995)
The permanent move to Columbus was in 1996
This appears to be as close to an “Origins message board” as there is; GenCon has an “official” one on its main website.
Early reports of a problem: according to the schedule, the Smithee Awards is listed as a $6 ticketed event.
I’ll be attending – I’ve been to most of the past 10 Origins or so.
However, the continuing amateur nature of how GAMA handles things like registration drives me around the bend. How would you know that event registration starts today, at 1pm ET (or that it had been rescheduled from last Friday)? Either someone in the know tells you, or you might find it on Facebook, if you know enough to follow the Origins group. Nowhere on the Origins web site had they ever given an exact date or time, until within the past 24 hours. This is not a piece of information that people should have to hunt for, nor is it something that should be left to the 11th hour to announce.
They don’t seem to grasp that many people need to be able to plan ahead of time for being able to register for events – especially since many events sell out within minutes, and that they open event registration on a weekday, when many people are at work and unable to easily access the Origins web site. GAMA’s consistently last-minute, poorly-publicized announcements of event registration does nothing but anger people.
Origins itself is a much more gamer-friendly convention than GenCon – particularly over the past five or six years, as attendance at GenCon has exploded. But, GenCon is run so much more professionally and smartly.
Anyway, rant off. I’ll be playing mostly smaller RPGs, and hopefully an X-Wing miniatures event.
Missed edit window:
At least they are actually getting event registration done in a timely fashion this year. A couple of years ago, it didn’t open until 3 weeks or so before the con itself. So, that’s progress. 
I found out from an Origins E-mail, which did include the 1 PM start time. I was surprised the main website page didn’t list the date (other than “sometime in April”), much less the time.
Had it not been for the E-mail, I probably would have discovered the change when I would have tried to register for events on the 15th and noticed that it no longer gave a specific date.
Yeah, I never get any official Origins emails. Not sure why. And apparently I’m not the only one that runs into this.
So event registration is live, eh? Good to know. Not that it really matters. Liz and I pretty much only do LARPs, and unlike at GenCon, Origins rarely sells out LARPs. Plus the game masters of both of the groups we LARP with are all friends of ours, and we’ve been regular players of their games for many years now at both Origins and GenCon, so even if we actually got closed out, we can usually get in anyway.
So Liz and I will register for events tonight.
As far as to the unprofessional way Origins is run, well, a few years back GAMA decided to lay off pretty much all their paid help in order to save money. When you have a mostly volunteer corps of workers, there’s less incentive for people to actually do a good job, and you’re more apt to take what you can get since many people don’t want to work for free.
I received no such e-mails, either, despite years of attending Origins, and still using the e-mail address which has been on record with Origins for a decade. Which just sort of proves my point from the earlier post. 
For the record: I got about 2/3 of the events I was looking for; I got shut out of some, in part because (as I discovered to my chagrin, partway through registration) their event registration system doesn’t play well with Firefox.
In addition, the same team which runs Origins runs the GAMA Trade Show, which was, IIRC, last month; set-up for Origins typically gets back-burnered until after GTS.
I had no problems with it using Firefox.
I got everything I wanted, except for the Star Trek Ascendancy pre-publication demo, all of which were sold out. Of course, it’s a lot easier to get into events when most of them are seminars or the Smithee Awards.
Then, let me clarify: it sure wasn’t playing nicely with me (and I was running Firefox on my work computer, a Mac). While registering, I was chatting with a friend who was using Chrome, on a Windows machine, and he was having no problems at all.
I repeatedly ran into problems in which I’d submit a request (to see a particular event, or to select a ticket for an event), and the Origins system would give me a “spinny wheel” for three or four minutes before finally resolving (an issue which my friend wasn’t having at all). As a result, by the time I got my first two events selected, it was about 15 minutes after the start of registration, and the next few events I tried for (which were single tables of 6 to 9 players) were already sold out.
This is my 18th Origins; I’ve missed only one since 1998. All in Columbus.
There is an unofficial Origins facebook group that people use, that might be a little closer to the ‘Origins message board’, and there’s usually a thread on the rpg.net boards about it.
I caught the Smithee error too, but it appears to only occur on the downloadable event list, not the actual registration system.
Correct - there is no charge for the Smithees. Also, it is smart enough not to charge me for events that are part of the War College since I already have a War College ribbon.
As for Columbus, I for one wish they’d consider moving it back to around July 3 so we could see Red, White & BOOM, but I have a feeling that clashing with the event (and the resulting combination of crowds) had something to do with moving it to earlier dates.
My understanding is that the primary motivation for moving the convention to earlier in the summer was that it would save GAMA quite a bit on facility rental. A secondary motivation seemed to be that they wanted to maintain some separation on the calendar with GenCon, which had formerly been in mid-August, but is now in very early August.
When GAMA originally moved it, five or six years ago, they put it on the weekend immediately after Memorial Day, which proved to be an unpopular choice with attendees (due to many students not yet being out of school); that seems to have been what led them to put it where it is now.
What I meant was, it was on, or just after, July 3 in five of the first seven years in Columbus, but after 2002, the only times this happened were in 2005 (ended on July 3) and 2009 (started on Thursday July 5), although it was always on the last weekend in June or first weekend in July. The “early” Origins you are talking about didn’t start until 2012, and it wasn’t just the gamers who had problems; Andy Looney (of Fluxx) had to skip Origins because his kids were still in school.