PAX East 2014 April 11-13 2014

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WHEN: Friday, April 11th 2014 to Sunday, April 13th, 2014
WHERE:
Boston Convention & Exhibition Center
415 Summer Street
Boston, MA 02210

Event Website

THREE DAY PASSES SOLD OUT
SATURDAY PASSES SOLD OUT

Slap & Tickle
Saturday at 4:30 pm
At the Tamo Bar at the Seaport Hotel

OFFICIAL GWJ PODCAST LIVE Friday at 7pm in the Badger Room.

Gamers With Jobs Saves Gaming
How does Kickstarter actually work. Why is the industry’s relationship with women? Is Early access awesome or annoying? Is Free 2 Play sliced bread or raw dough? These questions and more are answered by this wise, infallible members of our esteemed panel, or alternatively horribly bungled to comedic effect. Join the cast of weekly podcast The Gamers With Jobs Conference Call and Ken Levine (Irrational Games) as they deliver the wisdom of the ages. Or yell at each other a lot while the audience heckles.

PANELISTS:
Shawn Andrich [Co-Founder, Gamers With Jobs], Sean Sands [Co-Founder, Gamers With Jobs], Julian Murdoch [Writer, Gamers With Jobs], Cory Banks [Managing Editor, PC Gamer], Ken Levine [Creative Director and Co-founder, Irrational Games], Elena Siegman [Lead Developer, Irrational Games]

Snagged a pair of passes for Demyx and myself before heading to lunch.

At least they have a queue system in place this year. Plus the news sites were running stories with the date yesterday. Didn't have to read twitter or their forums to know it was coming.

Had to wait maybe 10-15 minutes before the order form appeared.

I'm still sitting in queue. I had to use "back" and add another pass, though, as my roommate gave me cash for his, so that could have made my wait worse.

EDIT: And they're already sold out of three day passes, and I'm not paying that much for individual day.

Wow, that site's showing the weekend passes as already sold out. Guess that's that.

Now I'm getting 404 errors. I spoke with my roommate and decided on getting passes for just Fri. and Sat. This page is NOT handling the server demands well, which is odd considering three day badges are now out. You'd think it would lighten up a bit after that.

That's insane, and a good indication this is probably our last time we'll be doing the 3-day pass.

Honestly, I feel like they need to create one PAX East per timezone in order to let demand up.

Oh hey, 504 error! Gateway timeout! That's a new one. And then a 404.

This is gonna take a while.

EDIT: I can't even complete the transaction without hitting server errors and crap.

#thanksobamacare

Tanglebones wrote:

#thanksobamacare

Well played

Let's get MacAfee on the case, stat!

Alright, my roommate and I are confirmed for Friday and Saturday passes. This means Sunday I'll just be enjoying the city or board games in the hotel lobby. We'll see what happens.

I know PAX has a lot of demand, but cripes, don't outsource to companies that don't have the resources to handle your demand. They KNOW it's going to sell out at lightning speed (I'm pretty sure the three day badges were 30 minutes tops), and if they're really going to limit 3 day badges so much they need to come up with deals for individual day (or, if someone is buying three individual day, just convert it to a friggin' 3 day badge).

I dunno, I just feel like this could be done better. I know they're using the biggest convention center in Boston as well, but maybe it's time for another East Coast city with a larger convention center or something.

ccesarano wrote:

I know they're using the biggest convention center in Boston as well, but maybe it's time for another East Coast city with a larger convention center or something.

My understanding is that the BCEC is the largest convention center on the East Coast. Part of the reason they're expanding the building is due to PAX.

Sorry all. Our family financial situation will preclude our attendance this year. Play some cool games for us.

I think I'm gonna give it a miss this year, but I'll show up to Tamo at least. Also thinking about organizing a GWJ trip to Pinball Wizard.

Also giving it a miss. Debating whether to Amtrak up for a day of hanging out in the city, though.

Not going to be able to make it this year either, my wife and I plan on moving in Jan/Feb and my wife needs a new vehicle.

Doc will be going! Hotels sold out equally as fast as well...I was thinking of possibly coming into town with the kids, 3 year old twin boys, and doing fun kid stuff. Is anyone else bringing a family and some of them aren't going to Pax?

Got tickets for the wife and I for the Saturday. Crazy that the 3 day passes were already sold out. I wonder if we'll be seeing tickets for resale on stubhub or something.

We got our 3 day passes just in time today.

Well, a co-worker managed to get me a full pass when she bought passes for her and her boyfriend but PAX's hotel reservation partner OnPeak is a f*cking joke and I'm livid at them. Their site melted as soon as reservations opened up. By the time I managed to get through, all the good hotels were booked already and the ones I could find that were further away but still decent all had a $200 Guarantee Fee. I don't even know what that is, I can't find anything on Google about it and the OnPeak site doesn't explain it. I can't afford to put $200 on a credit card right now. I try to use their Live Chat support. Offline. I try to call them. Busy the first half dozen times, then I spent half an hour on hold to hear a phone constantly ring and no one pick it up. I really hope since my girlfriend is such a travel ninja, that she can find us a decent hotel not too far from the site through other means. In this day and age, how have people still not learned how to f*cking scale, especially when your entire company is based around booking large events as OnPeak's is? What a joke.

Got the all-clear from my wife; I'll be coincidentally vacationing in Boston this weekend, and will definitely hit the Tamo and extracurricular gaming activities with Goodjer folks, though not the con itself.

I was put in charge of snagging 5 passes, and the wife said she'd handle the hotels. (ETA: all 5 passes are spoken for, before anyone asks. Me, my wife, our roommate, and two friends)

I saw Khoo's tweet to the PA forums with the links and had my 5 passes by 12:09. Meanwhile, we didn't have a room secured until about 12:45, with both my wife and I hitting the OnPeak site and my wife on the phone with their call center. Wound up with a double queen room at the Renaissance for the weekend.

I totally agree with you PxA about OnPeak being crap, but I have a feeling PA is somehow locked to them.

The good news is that people rush the hotels, and then they start to trickle cancellations all the way up until weeks before, so there's always the possibility of going back to OnPeak at an off-peak time (har har!) and be able to pick up a room someone else cancelled.

On top of that, there's still other ways to get badges - volunteer to be an [E]nforcer (which also has its own block of hotel rooms), try to score a Media badge, sign up to staff a booth to get an Exhibitor badge, or even submit a panel and get a Speaker badge.

ccesarano wrote:

Honestly, I feel like they need to create one PAX East per timezone in order to let demand up.

PAX Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast? There seems to exist sufficient demand.

Hotel booked; if anyone wants to roomie up and split costs, I'm at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge from the evening of 4/11 to 4/13.

WALLOFTEXTTRAVELTIPS
@Parallax, I know this may seem like a stretch but one of the goodjers two years ago rented out a condo for the weekend and had multiple people stay there with him. Some people for 1 day, some for all 3. It worked out really well- I believe he said something to the tune of $50 or less per night for people and of course the more people you can find to go in on a deal like that the less it is for everyone. And, it could save you money on dining too. Pack light snacks but if you have a kitchen to come home to for the night-- even ramen on the stove would be cheaper (or you could all go in for pizza or something).

Again, the hassle is all about finding people to do this, but its a shot.

Also there's the options of a hostel. Generally speaking they're always in downtown major metropolitan areas and close to convention centers. If you're worried about sharing a room with random non-goodjers most have options to book a private room with a door/lock for a bit more than the usual 'rent-a-bed' fee.

Lastly, deal sites like groupon occasionally have 'city get-away' deals and again, if you set it to display Boston type stuff, you could come into a 3 or 4 star hotel in downtown Boston for $69 a night if you get lucky.

Or you could always ask if any goodjer's live in Boston and would take you and your girlfriend in for the weekend for a small fee. All the goodjers I've met and stayed with in the Seattle area were saints, polite, clean and generally full of awesome and win.

And as an aside: In the hotel market world- a guarantee fee is generally also called a room deposit. Because PAX is buying out tons of rooms from tons of major hotels in the area (Say at like $30-50 a night) and then putting them away in a "block" (or a set of rooms) for consumers (you) to re-buy at another discounted price- those hotels need an absolute guarantee that you are going to show up for that reservation. And yes, while that may seem slightly insane, you telling them, "Yes, I will show up, here, hold $200 of my money to prove that" is basically saying just that. Not all companies will take that money right away. Some will take it upon you checking in. Some may take it now. Some may use that money towards your total bill and refund you some if that amount is less than the amount for the end of the weekend. Some may also hold that money as a single transaction aside from your bill, and bill you separately for the total of your night (therefore causing you to have two charges. The $200 fee hold and $YourRoomTotalHere, and then release that $200 separately. This is why its good to have a credit card for hotel rooms because you won't be burdened by them possibly tying up $400+ dollars on a debit card)

I know it sucks. I had to tell people this constantly (at the hotel I used to work at).

/disclaimer I am not saying this is what OnPeak is doing.. but I have a hunch this is what you are talking about. I could totally be wrong /end disclaimer

Thanks for the tips! My girlfriend has traveled a lot more than I have and is very good about booking and organising stuff. She said she'd take a look around tonight and see what she can come up with. I have the money to stay in hotels, I just don't have a lot of free credit card room at this moment to put deposits down. The frustrating thing about OnPeak (aside from not knowing how to scale a damn web site) is they don't explain anything. They don't say what the Guarantee Fee is, when it's charged, if you get it back or anything. If the hotel charges it when we check in or even a month or so before, that's fine. I just can't afford to have it charged right now but they don't explain that. Maybe if they'd actually answered the phone when I called, they might have secured a sale. Now? No dice. I'm sure my girlfriend will manage to find something. I really wanted something close to the convention center because as I understand it, the subway in Boston stops as midnight but ce lavie. All part of the learning experience. We might get in on the condo thing if someone was doing it but that's not something I think I'd want to take on.

EDIT: So I have determined what OnPeak's Guarantee Fee is. It's the same as a deposit, though they exchange the two words around on the same page like they don't mean the same thing. So if the Guarantee Fee is $200, they'll charge that 30 days before the event. I get it back in full if I cancel up to 72 hours before the event. Closer than that and I lose it. That's fine. Maybe this'll work after all.

SocialChameleon wrote:

Also thinking about organizing a GWJ trip to Pinball Wizard.

During the Con? I'd definitely be down for that any other time of the year

With East becoming nearly as bad as Prime I think 2015 is either going to be a Saturday-only thing for us or maybe there will be enough of GWJers who can't get in and we'll just run our own mini-con.

shoptroll wrote:
SocialChameleon wrote:

Also thinking about organizing a GWJ trip to Pinball Wizard.

During the Con? I'd definitely be down for that any other time of the year

With East becoming nearly as bad as Prime I think 2015 is either going to be a Saturday-only thing for us or maybe there will be enough of GWJers who can't get in and we'll just run our own mini-con.

I'd be up for it - I'm probably going to spend at least some of the weekend touristing

Alright, I managed to book a room for my girlfriend and myself at Omni Parker House for the days we wanted! And we can change/cancel it later if we find something better or should the need arise. But we've got something! Yay!

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Alright, I managed to book a room for my girlfriend and myself at Omni Parker House for the days we wanted! And we can change/cancel it later if we find something better or should the need arise. But we've got something! Yay! :)

Don't suppose you'd be willing to let my roommate and I crash on your floor.

I'm actually keeping an eye out with some of my College friends as well. There's always a floor to crash on. However, as much as I love PAX East, I feel like it won't be the same without a good group of GWJers, and seeing how fast these passes sold out...hrm.

In regards to hotels, another thing to keep in mind is how many rooms they're likely setting aside for guests and industry people. I'm not sure about the inner-workings, but I imagine they don't exactly want Ubisoft's representatives in a hotel across the city. I imagine there are a bunch of folks that get first-pick at the ideal locations, and those rooms probably fill up fast.

ccesarano wrote:

I feel like it won't be the same without a good group of GWJers, and seeing how fast these passes sold out...hrm.

We'll always have the Tamo. But this will definitely be a weird year with so few people able to attend due to the ticketing, bad timing, or other reasons. On the bright side, we get some new people like PXA!

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