An alternative to hungry shark night

Auckland Chimera
#1

The problem with hungry shark night is that its over so quickly. One evening - hell, one hour - and all the good games ™ are full. If you miss it, your chances of getting into a game you’d like are fairly remote. And then, its over, and you’ve got nothing to do but make costumes for three months.

The US’s Intercon has a solution to this: they split their signup across multiple weeks. On the first hungry shark night, you get to pick one game. One the second, you get another. And so on, until everything is full. Details here:

interconlarp.livejournal.com/290584.html

Oh, and they make you pay to get to select games. Up-front money. Ouch.

I wonder how well it works in practice.

#2

I have a lot of people express concern over how I run game selection for Chimera.

Of the 100 people that registered in the first week following ‘hungry shark night’, 75% of them ended up with all first choice games. The remaining 25% ended up with one second choice game and five first choice games. There were thirty overall registrations in the time following that first week and the convention - we had a waiting list system and a lot of flexible GMs so people were able to be shuffled into the games they wanted and we filled up all the games.

I hope that’s sufficient to allay people’s concerns that there is some segment of the larping population that ends up in the “crap” games. There isn’t - most people actually get what they want :slight_smile:

Sign Up Systems in New Zealand?
#3

Would it make a difference to you if it were hungry shark week? Give people seven days to make their game choices before you crunch through the numbers?

#4

Good to hear. Clearly there’s enough variety to cater to everyone’s tastes.

#5

How long does it take to assign the games ? Seems to me this could be done quickly with some snappy software that ensures an even distribution of 1st choice games. Would that be useful ? Happy to write it, BTW, to whatever spec is needed.