It’s All Over Bar The Shouting: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Registration Over; Sold Out

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sdcc_logoSo public registration for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con occurred today, and luckily, we did not need to be a part of it. As attendees last year, we were eligible for the pre-registration that took place in early February, and were fortunate enough to be able to score tickets for the full convention in fairly short order.

So today I was able to watch the madness, desperation, excessive glee and futile cursing happen by way of watching the #SDCC hashtag feed on Twitter, and it looked like a very similar experience to the one we went through for the pre-registration, albeit this time, the entire free fucking world could be involved. I saw a healthy number of tweets from people in Australia and New Zealand complaining that they needed to be up at 4 a.m. local time… and yet no complaints that they needed to Raid away swarms of hairy poisonous spiders to get to their computers to try to register. You will see me dead before you see me in Australia wearing less than a beekeeper’s suit and a Ghostbuster’s proton pack is what I’m saying, but that’s not the point right now.

The point is that we saw the normal complaints that one sees on Twitter during SDCC registration:

  • The Web site told me not to refresh, but I did, and now I’m at the end of the line! SDCC sucks!
  • The Web site told me not to refresh and I didn’t, but I think if I did, I’d be at the front of the line! SDCC sucks!
  • I tried to register from an iPad at Starbucks and my Internet quit! SDCC sucks!
  • I forgot about registration until 9:02 Pacific Time and when I logged in I was at the back of the line! SDCC sucks!
  • I’ve never tried to register for Comic-Con before, have made no plans on how to succeed at this task, and can’t understand why I can’t just do this in ten seconds even though there are thousands and thousands of other people trying to buy the same ticket as me! I should receive preferential treatment! SDCC sucks!

The fact of the matter is that attending SDCC is, and has been since at least 2009, serious fucking business. I have written before that my co-Editor Amanda and I book backup hotel rooms in August of the year preceding SDCC. When we need to register, we do it from two separate locations, both with independent power supplies and wired Internet connections, and maintain constant communication to increase our odds of success. And we have made the pact that, so long as we can obtain at least Thursday and Sunday passes, we will attend SDCC, if only to make us eligible for whatever pre-registration is available the following year, so we get two bites at the registration apple. And I have said before that this might sound obsessive, but there are two types of people in this world: people who scoff at making paranoid, obsessive and redundant plans regarding SDCC registration, housing and transportation, and people who actually attend Comic-Con.

But regardless of preparation, registration is over, and ended as it did back in the pre-reg period in February. The gates opened at noon Eastern Standard Time, and for about an hour, Twitter alternated between people rejoicing that they’d gotten passes, and people cursing at the Blue Ring of Frustration and the Yellow Bar of Messaging Doom. but after that hour (and these Tweets simply represent the first ones of their kind we saw in the #SDCC timeline):

At 12:57 Eastern Time:

At 12:59:

At straight-up 1 p.m.:

At 1:20 p.m.:

And at 1:23 p.m.:

And there you have it: within about 70 minutes (subtracting the ten or so minutes up front where the Web site’s computers sorted everyone into random order), something around 300,000 individual day passes sold out. Which is about the timeframe in which they went away during pre-registration.

With that said, all is not lost: there is always at least one additional sale of badges that people cancel at the last minute that will occur before the convention actually happens… but that is of limited use to people like us, who live far away from San Diego and need to plan expensive travel and lodging to even get there. But there is still a chance.

And with that said, now we can all move on to hotel registration, which is a completely different experience of pants-shitting terror.

Categories: Geek Culture Tags:
March 15, 2014 by Rob
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