waltography
Well-Known Member
Agreed.There is only a finite amount of space in the convention halls to hold people and more people that want to attend the key panels than the halls hold, so you can't just "scale out". Plus they don't know the exact panels they will have a year prior to the event, so you can't have people signing up a year in advance.
So there is no good solution here. You either have people camping out, sometimes overnight, for panels just to get a seat or you do some type of digital queue. There is going to be complaints either way.
Let's peg the daily attendance this year to be ~20,000 given that the only data point I could find for total attendance at the Expo was 65,000 at 2013 and they were probably a little more conservative than usual this year with tickets because of the pandemic. Hall D23 has a capacity of 7,000, a tiny portion of that is reserved/preferred seating (let's say 200-300), and they may set aside another block for standby (let's say 700-800 to make the math nice). That leaves 6,000 spots for the RSP process. Already we've got at least 6,000 people who simply won't see a Hall D23 panel (assuming that the Legends group is a completely unique group from the Studio Showcase group, for example).
Given that, I think reasonably they only ever had 3,000 or so StagePasses to share (since you could choose to have a +1 with you for an event). Now scaling and accounting for that situation across every panel, giveaway, and signing and weighing them all equally during the draw, I'm not shocked some people got 3 for 3 panels while others got 1 signing and 1 giveaway.
To me, the problem isn't necessarily the system but that the D23 team didn't properly set expectations for how many reservations attendees could expect to get and didn't make it apparently clear how the assigning worked.