Two Hours In The Tank: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Pre-Reg Is Over

Pre-registration for the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con started at noon Eastern Time today for those who attended last year’s convention. It used a pretty radically different methodology to handle the sale than in previous years, but ended with the same result: with some people thrilled with the results, some people disappointed with what they were able to get, and yet others screeching with rage and hatred over glitches, technical roadblocks, and complete and utter frustrating failure.

This is the second year that SDCC ran an online pre-registration for the prior year’s attendees. Until 2010, attendees who wanted to pre-register generally picked up their badges for that year’s convention and then immediately got in line to pre-register for the following year. It was a simple system that worked for years and years… until the convention began consistently completely selling out, leading to a situation where there was a very real possibility that the following year’s convention could almost completely sell out before that year’s convention was even over, turning SDCC into an exclusive club where one could only get in if a previous attendee died or married someone who liked to vacation somewhere less likely to attract furries.

So in 2011, SDCC tried a system where a small, fixed number of badges were put up for sale at the Hyatt next to the convention center each morning of the convention. The idea apparently was to clear pre-registration traffic away from the convention center, and to throttle advance ticket sales to make sure there were plenty available to the general public during general registration. This was a great idea… right up until lines to the Hyatt started forming the night before, stretching all the way behind the convention center, leading people to wait in line for four hours to get pre-registered. Or at least I waited in line for four hours, from 5 a.m. until 9 on Sunday that year.

For last year’s convention, SDCC held their first online pre-registration about two weeks after the 2012 con ended. They used a first-come, first-served system similar to the general registration system they used for years, which meant that as soon as the servers went live, they began to puke and pass out under the strain. My co-editor Amanda was able to connect after only two minutes… and was still about number 7,500 in line. I connected two minutes later, and was somewhere in the 14,000s. Combine that kind of demand with the usual complaints of browsers crashing out or locking up, and you’ve got a lot of unhappy customers.

So for this year, SDCC doubled down and spent a lot of time with their sales service provider to put together a new system. Here’s how it worked: if you were eligible for the presale, SDCC sent you an email with a long identifying code. Starting at 10 a.m. Eastern time today, you could log into a “waiting room,” which was simply a virtual pen where you could hang out for a couple of hours. Starting at noon, the computers took over, spending about ten minutes randomly assigning places in line to people regardless of when they arrived in the waiting area. They then started allowing people to buy tickets, in order, until everything was gone.

So how did it work? Well, I can only relate our experience, and for us, things went relatively smoothly. As for last year, Amanda and I attempted to obtain badges from completely different locations and computer networks – the theory we go under is, what happens if the power goes out when you’re trying to register? Or if there’s an Internet outage? Or if the zombie apocalypse starts? If you want to attend Comic-Con and you keep all your eggs in one basket, you are a Goddamned fool.

We were each able to enter the Waiting Room right at straight-up 10 a.m., with no lag at all. Sure, the people at SDCC said it didn’t matter if you were in the waiting area two hours or two seconds before noon, but why buy trouble? What happens if you try to get in later and the servers have been Slashdotted? Or if some software developer decided it didn’t want to read a bunch of tweets from people who spent longer waiting, and subtly weighted people who were waiting longer to have lower numbers in line? Sure, it turns out that probably wasn’t the case – I saw plenty of people complaining on Twitter that they did exactly what I did and then waited in line for another two hours before their turn to register came up – but this is Comic-Con. And there are two types of people in this world: people who let things slide and don’t do everything possible to weigh things in their favor, including preparations to the point of paranoia… and people who actually go to Comic-Con.

So right at noon, the Waiting Room’s yellow message box advised that people were being sorted into random order. By about 12:05, it advised that it was almost done sorting and sales would begin directly. By 12:10, it said that people were being slowly allowed into the sale to make sure that their servers could handle the load. So Amanda and I, communicating via speaker phone, settled in to wait – after all, in the last sale, it took Amanda about 25 minutes to get into the sale from number 7,408…

And by 12:12 p.m., I refreshed into the pre-registration sales page. By 12:14 I’d ordered us four day passes plus Preview Night, and by quarter past noon, I had the confirmation email that my sale had gone through. By 12:45 I was at Five Guys picking up burgers for lunch. By 1 I was home eating, seeing people on Twitter complaining that Preview Night was already sold out. I was napping by 2, and at 3 I learned from Twitter that the whole shooting match was over, and if you wanted to go to SDCC, you’d have to wait until the as-yet unannounced general public sale.

Now, I don’t know that anything we did to prepare did a damn thing to help me get in as quickly as I did – again, I saw plenty of people on Twitter complaining that they logged into the waiting room just as early as we did, and then spent much longer in line than we did before they could buy anything.  Frankly, I’m taking on faith that I was just extremely fortunate – after all, Amanda logged into the waiting room the same time I did, and she was still there after I’d finished my transaction. And further, while people started to complain that Saturday and Friday passes were selling out by about 1 p.m., it seemed like a large percentage of people were able to get four-day passes.

So for all I know, all I did was prepare for a meteor strike or volcanic eruption that never occurred… but the fact of the matter is that, in order to attend a comic book convention, I felt the need to attack the process from two completely different electrical and Internet connections, requiring me to collect my hungover ass and leave the house on a 20-degree Saturday morning to spend two hours watching a Web page refresh itself.

That is the state of San Diego Comic-Con these days: you take extreme measures to attend an extreme event. And because we took those measures, we will be covering the entirety of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con for the third year in a row.

You know, assuming we can get a hotel. That’s the next unholy Internet nightmare to be conquered. I am considering using Adderall and killer robot drones.