When Good Conventions Go Bad

My most recent trip was to the first ever New York Comic Con in my very own backyard. Well, it's not exactly my back yard, but it was in the Javits Center on the Hudson River and that's close enough. Originally I was just going to go and hang with TMac and Triple G as they run their FMAtasticness. However, my WotC tournament organizer said we'd be running Wizards stuff and asked if I wanted to work Saturday, get paid, and get a free weekend badge. How could I refuse?


I spent most of Friday afternoon wandering around the exhibit hall wearing my nifty WotC Exhibitor Badge (I love all access). Oddly, the hall was the same hall where I promoted my soccer club during last year's Expo. The notable feature of this hall is that it is only a fraction of the total number of halls in the Javits Center, a very small fraction. I didn't think too much of it and wandered around. The hall was packed with booths, most of which were anime and comic related. Sadly, I was unable to find the one comic I really wanted (X4 #2). Yeah, it's a year old and part of a 5 issue series, but still - it's Comic Con! So, that was a disappointment, but a small one compared to what would happen later in the convention.

Any sadness I felt from not finding X4 #2 was soon forgotten as I met up with TMac, Triple G, and Mike G. after the convention and we headed off to Carmines for dinner. Carmines is a fantastic family-style restaurant which is so popular that you have to book your reservations about a month in advance, which I did. Some of Trevor's FMA players/volunteers joined us as well, which made for some interesting dinner conversation - a standard fare of gaming talk with a smattering of mockery and insultation was served. Hydro Alchemist loves insultation!!

When I arrived at the convention on Saturday morning I noted that there were still an 1.5 hours until it opened and the line for people to get inside ran the entire length of the Javits center (3-4 blocks). I went up to the gaming area and proceeded to get things in order. Events were supposed to start at 12, but we waited a bit longer because attendance was poor (13 for the JSS and 34 for the DuelMasters Qualifier, the latter of which I ran). These turned out to be the final numbers and we learned from several severely late would-be-players that there were so many people trying to get into the convention that the lines were moving at a crawl. Shortly thereafter, security began blocking off the stairway to the gaming area (which was deserted in comparison to the exhibit hall). Ultimately, this was part of a much larger problem. Apparently the convention organizers anticipated and booked for 10,000 attendees and 10,000 people bought badges in advance. What this meant is that they couldn't handle the actual number of people who showed up (some number larger than 10,000). By early afternoon on Saturday the sheer number of attendees created a serious fire hazard and a bizarre sort of lockdown occured where they weren't letting people into the building at all until a certain number of attendees had left. Sadly, they did this as a blanket policy which meant that people like Jim Lee, Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada couldn't get into the building. Yikes! Things really never got back to normal after this - they had to stop issuing badges completely. So, if you didn't get there early (regardless of whether or not you had a badge), you were screwed. As evening set in, those of us in the gaming area discovered a new problem and that was that the lighting had a fractured design and only a handful were on. So, it got real dark real fast. Apparently they couldn't just turn on the other lights. Instead, they had to set up portable floodlights so my players could see their cards during the single elimination portion of the event. Fan-tastic.

Sunday wasn't quite as bad as Saturday, but that's largely because so many people were turned away and pissed off on Saturday, that they just didn't bother coming back. Still, the number that showed up was too large and they kept everyone outside in a monstrous line and only let them in a handfull at a time so that they could keep track of the number of people entering the hall. This policy resulted in large numbers of people standing in frigid, wind-chilling weather for hours. To help ease the pain, the convention provided coffee/tea stands for people outside, but that was little comfort I'm sure.

With fewer people on Sunday and more restrictions on entrance, there were virtually no people in the gaming section of the convention. So, the people that were on call to work there pretty much just sat around and played games themselves. I was off that day, so I went back and forth visiting my friends working for Wizards and those doing FMA stuff. I did manage to play in a FMA sealed deck tournament, but by the end of the day it was so boring that Triple G and I degenerated into playing baseball with a Poland Spring bottle for a bat and a glove as the ball. Good times!

Well, this has been a long enough entry for sure. The next stop for me is Pro Tour Hawaii on the beautiful island of Oahu. Until then, aloha means goodbye!