DeathJester

Convention staff are already at checkpoints such as dealer's entrances / panel rooms / autograph areas checking for badges, wristbands, and the like. I won't pretend that its not stressful to enforce because of attendee pushback, but we never complain about having to enforce badges throughout the convention center either. Besides, by your own example you consider Katsucon a failure in enforcement but even you admit that it was a minority of attendees that disregarded the rules. As an attendee, if I am concerned about health exposure I would rather see clearly when someone is brea

Huge disagree on this statement. The vaccine check is the toothless requirement at this point since you can flash a 15 cent cardstock printout from Staples and get your Covid bracelet for the whole weekend. Masks on the other hand are very easy to visually inspect at all times. Besides, after two years of requiring vaccines its not like the Otakon demographics are going to flip overnight and suddenly the repeat attendees are going to be outnumbered by first time anti-vaxxers.

Its that time of the year again I'll be ordering the Asian Kung-Fu Generation Guest Request please!

Clearly the Help Desk and Facebook messaging did not work in coordinating the Saturday entrances this year so Otakon needs a better system to rapidly address mass groups of attendees. It was a really bad look when all the convention socials were blowing up over the long lines and the only official word out of the Otakon Twitter was a scheduled post advertising the Masquerade happening in the evening. Having volunteers with megaphones trying to shout out up-to-date information can only go so far when everyone else is relaying unofficial info across socials. Even something as basic as the 20

Yeah, I'm not suggesting that they do away with the actual website since that is the primary source of information regarding the con. The problem right now is that Otakon.com is only capable of one-way communication. If attendees have questions or comments they are currently spread out independently among Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discords, etc which resulted in bad information being spread like wildfire this year (See the conflicting information about the Saturday afternoon entrance queues). It is a dangerous game of telephone when an attendee posts information they overheard from someone

I love this place and it always fires up in activity during the summer when the Otakon crowd is rolling in... but other than archive posts is there really a reason to keep this as the official forum platform? There is only a handful of us actually posting here which means it is no longer any very good at answering questions or disseminating relevant information to the general attendee base. Is it time to retire the BBS and make another platform the social media forum of choice?

Add a big win on the GOOD SIGNS column: New York City announced that it will fully reopen (no restaurant, venue, or business restrictions) on July 1st. Given that we were the hardest hit last year, this is optimistic news for when we can expect the attendance limits to be dropped.

I can't think of a single example of where the virtual convention did bigger business than the traditional con so I highly doubt that will become the new norm going forward. ... except maybe for E3 since that show was already in a bad place prior to the pandemic.

GOOD SIGNS: - Blerdcon is going full speed ahead with their event in July so Otakon is no longer the COVID reopening guinea pig. As long as that event is not forced to cancel then Otakon will be able to operate. - The DC vaccine sites are switching to walk-in distribution which is a sign that vaccine supply is greater than demand so I doubt they will be still using the convention center for too much longer. - Most states are proceeding with their reopening plan because now that the vaccine supply is growing there is less concern about regional hospital system meltdowns. Government is

RIP PAX East 2021. Although they still plan on going forward with PAX West in September. Otakon is looking more on the borderline now. On one hand even the conservative projections show 80% vaccination rate by July but its not like Otakorp can wait until the last 30 days to start planning an entire con in earnest.

Certain states are already pushing for full capacity events right now so its really going to be DC's call again on whether Otakon can happen. I am going to be cautiously optimistic and hope that the vaccine rollout goes as planned and we can have a proper Otakon this year.

The Good: I was shocked that the Carole and Tuesday panel was live since it means those guys were in a studio at like midnight, so it was great that they took questions from the twitch chat. Twitch moderation was also great- the staff did their best to address issues on the stream. The Bad: The usual technical mishaps- audio issues, video drops, etc. The panel lengths were too short at 30 minutes. The Ugly: I'm not about to complain about you guys pulling an event together when the entire world is on fire. You guys turned chicken poop into chic

Stream is live now

AMEN BROTHER. I think visibility was my biggest problem with the initial batch of online conventions. Being 4th of July weekend I had already made plans to catch up with my family on video chat, cooking way too much meat for a single household, and then marathon gaming with my friends online. By the time I remembered that these cons were going on I tuned into whichever one was running on youtube and saw they were just showing anime episodes so turned it back off. So if I as an avid con-goer bounced off of the stream then I doubt they did any traffic with the general youtube / twitch / ot

You likely missed it. The room block tends to be smaller for the days before and after the con. The good news is that in general the waitlisted rooms almost always get confirmed once they clean up glitches and duplicate reservations out of their system.