ReaperCon 2021 feedback thread..

[Jeepnewbie]

 

44 minutes ago, SamuraiJack said:

 

Hey now.. I love my 16k mouse pad.. I had it with me all weekend for it's legendary power 😉 And to be honest, it was the last item and we needed to do something with the pool of reaper bucks 😉

 

Wasn’t that at the 2017 Con?

 

I do love that the MSP was in another room. 

Edited September 7, 2021 by Jeepnewbie

[howdyhamster]

One small thing the board game area could have used is some "Players wanted" signs. On two different days a friend and I sat in the gaming area for a couple hours with a game half set up hoping to draw some more players in, but only one person even stopped to ask about it.

 

And an event many other gaming cons do I would really like to see is a scheduled swap meet. This would be a dedicated room/space during that time slot where people could trade unwanted board games, minis, swag bag items, or anything else related to the hobby. I know there's the metal table for metal minis, but this would be a great way for people to trade their "pile of shame" plastic minis.

[Chaoswolf]

RE: meeting artists---my feeling is that this may have been an issue of timing all around. I can't speak to the availability of the 'heavy hitters', as I wasn't seated in that area. I was sitting in the other half of artists alley, and there were several large chunks of time where there was very little, if any, foot traffic. I'm not suffering any delusions that there was any great interest in seeing ME, but there were several much more well known artists along the same row who didn't receive many visitors.

 

I liked the food trucks, it was nice to have a relatively quick and easy source of food. As has been mentioned, extended hours of operation for them would be nice if it can be arranged without too much fuss.

 

The expanded Hobby Hijinks area is a great improvement, good job there!

 

MSP open being in a separate room was also a big plus!

 

I like the auction from the old days, but I really liked the Brinewind store, too. This one is probably going to be a sticky point going forward. The auction is a lot of fun, but there is always a lot of dissatisfaction with it as well. It can be kinda hard to have 5000 Reaperbucks and get consistently outbid on every item by the table of 10 people over there who have pooled their resources. On the flip side, it's also not fair to penalize folks for doing that. If there's nothing I want, but my buddy wants that shiny widget, I'm absolutely gonna toss him some money so he can get it. The best solution that I see to this has already been mentioned above; do both. Put all the t-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, mouse pads, leftover ghoulie bags or Christmas bags from last year, and whatever other Reaper branded stuff in the store for a set price. Keep the resin masters, vendor donations, and other rare/more unique stuff in the auction. I really think this would be the best option. More people would have the opportunity to get some neat/cool/interesting stuff, there would (hopefully) be less upset/dissatisfaction, and you'd still have the auction as a 'final event' to wrap up the con (more on this in a minute). Also, having only say 50 items versus 200 items in the auction would keep it moving and prevent going over time.

 

Regardless of if it's the auction or something different, there NEEDS to be some kind of scheduled 'final event' to wrap up the con with. This year was kinda weird; the whole day Sunday had a kind of impending doom feel to it. Like everyone knew it was Sunday, knew it was the last day, but didn't know what was going to happen next. Everything just sort of slowly ground to a halt like a car that ran out of gas on some deserted back road somewhere. You need to have something to end the con on a high note to stoke excitement for next year.

 

Something to improve: put a map of the hotel in the program, please. Yes, I was able to find the map on the wall by the elevators to figure out where I needed to go, but having it in the program would be much more convenient.

 

 

BTW---most of the stuff I 'complained' about is mostly minor inconveniences or suggestions for improvement. I realize the amount of work that goes into this, and I absolutely appreciate the efforts of everyone involved. Thanks for being a high point in the midst of some not so great times, Reaper.

 

 

Edited September 7, 2021 by Chaoswolf

[SamuraiJack]

I think we were missing the big final event because the 'Future of Reaper' panel got canceled.. and I only knew that because i asked on discord.. so an announcements board might be helpful too

[edz16]

Pro's:

- Bigger MSP area, preregistration.

- Bigger hobby hijinks area.

- Shorter class time.

- The idea of the brinewind store instead of the auction - this is great, but has its own problems, which I will hit on in Cons.

- The venue is always a huge plus.

- Metal Trade.  This is always a favorite of mine and TBH I was afraid it would be gone with COVID, but I was very happy to see it still going strong.

 

Cons:

- Brinewind store - specifically there wasn't enough stuff and it was all gone by Friday.  That and it is still too overpriced and out of the reach of the normal con-goer.  Even a bucket of reaper paints and a bucket of bones miniatures that you could select from for 100-300 bucks a pop would have made it much better.  The thing I miss the most is having a chance at the classroom paint sets.  Wish they could figure out a way to get those into this as an option somehow.  Generally, just needs more selection.  The action was great for its hype and seeing all the super cool stuff, product and branding together.  That part was completely missing.   All that said, I believe the store idea IS better than an auction, just needs tweaked.

- Missing vendors - Badger, Frontline Games, Darksword.  I know it was probably COVID related, but still, they were the ones I was most excited for and were not to be found.

- No swag at the con.  Like I mentioned in the other thread, there is just something super special about getting a pile of loot and sorting it out on your hotel bed.  I miss having a pile of swag at the con itself and really felt like losing that hurt the feel overall.

- The reaper store seemed to have less than normal stock and options.  I was missing browsing all the options that have been there in the past.

- No ending event - agree with points above.  I actually left Sunday morning and didnt go at all because there wasnt anything scheduled as a sold "end cap" to the con.

 

Edited September 7, 2021 by edz16

[Pegazus]

1 hour ago, SamuraiJack said:

I think we were missing the big final event because the 'Future of Reaper' panel got canceled.. and I only knew that because i asked on discord.. so an announcements board might be helpful too

Again, not aware that it was scheduled.

[Dicey]

We stayed until around 2 PM on Sunday. One of my judges was leaving before I got to talk to him and we just didn't have anything left to do. It was really hard to know what the streaming/main hall events were. I thought I read through the program and was always surprised to get notifications on my phone (edit: from Twitch) that something else was going on. Sometimes the schedule was up on the screen for what was coming next, but often, I had never heard of those things and I had no idea they were even happening. I also looked through Sunday's schedule and we had classes until 12:30, picked up our MSP entries, and got feedback in Artist Alley (mostly as they were trying to get lunch and disappearing), but besides having the vendors and MSP area closing at 2 and everything overall closing at 4, we didn't really see much going on after 2 PM and elected to leave, and apparently missed closing remarks because of it. Plus, it feels like you're supposed to be leaving when everything is starting to be torn down before it's "closed".

Edited September 7, 2021 by Dicey

[Dragoneye]

Likes:

Brinewind Store. The auction is fun as a social event, but this allowed me to get something I wanted within reason. The auction gets way to 'serious' sometimes.

Scheduled time between classes.

MSP Open in a separate room

The displays and doc cams for classes.

 

Dislikes:

Shorter classes (especially as the teachers had short notice about that) - yes I know I also like the time between... I'm contrary like that.

No con wrap-up. I agree with ChaosWolf on the feeling of just running out of gas.

I miss vendor swag too

No center aisle (or any aisle) during the awards ceremony.

 

[WolfLord]

My one complaint would be not being able to register for games and/or classes for people that I bought admission tickets for. 

[Dicey]

2 minutes ago, WolfLord said:

My one complaint would be not being able to register for games and/or classes for people that I bought admission tickets for.

I know it didn't work the same for games as classes, but I wanted to mention that I bought both my and my husband's tickets and I registered for all our classes. So, I was definitely able to register for both his classes and mine. It was easy to change the name on the ticket, though it didn't print. Registration pulled up all tickets associated with my email and printed them all. I sorted through them after we got to our room.

[Inarah]

10 minutes ago, WolfLord said:

My one complaint would be not being able to register for games and/or classes for people that I bought admission tickets for. 

 

You should have been able to reassign the class tickets in Growtix.  I bought both our admission tickets and all class tickets and was able to put DH's name on his before printing them.

 

[WolfLord]

I didn’t register for any classes, just games.  I didn’t see anyway to add games for my wife. I may have missed it. 

[Dicey]

Games were definitely different. As I understand it, each person needed to register with their own email. One person's game schedule also couldn't overlap with itself, so purchasing multiple tickets for the same game on a single account wouldn't work. I don't know why the system was different between classes and games, but it definitely is. Just another of the "joys" of Growtix.

[corbie]

5 hours ago, howdyhamster said:

One small thing the board game area could have used is some "Players wanted" signs.

Seconded! I ended up having a lot of down time because of the reduced scheduled gaming options and better facilitation for pickup games would have been helpful.

[ragados]

This was my first Reaper Con so I think my perspective is more comparative to other cons than post years.

Generally there is a wealth of accessible activities and everyone is super friendly.

Stock levels for most vendors and the bucks store were a bit of an issue but I think this was a product of it being 2021 more than anything else. The vendors I spoke to seemed to be selling well beyond expectations.

 

As an artist in the alley I have to say it felt a bit of a weird space. I don't know of any other con that runs this in quite the same way. Many of us artists are not pros and not using the con as a business venture buy rather teaching for love and so being seated at a table in a relatively quiet section of the hall is often less appealing than hanging out with our friends. Many of the artists this year also added extra classes due to how quickly things sold out. so were even busier than usual. I actually loved having a dedicated space to sit and paint but also felt weird about feeling tied there - like going to a paint and take or chatting with friends was against the spirit of the thing. I don't really know how to address that. Maybe have a smaller alley with artists there for scheduled windows? But then I don't know if the pros want a permanent presence... 

 

I definitely missed a big closing event. Not sure an auction appeals to me but something to close out would've been great. 

 

A map in the booklet would've really helped as would more communication outside of twitch but these are fairly minor for me.