How many people would attend?

[DanS]

I'm seeing numbers in the ~100-150 range on the other thread, but it strikes me that this could get out of hand on the upside, considering that Civ 4 will be new on the shelves and Hunt Valley is within daytrip driving distance of several metro areas (Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City) and has easy train/light rail access. That's like 30 or 40 million people within driving distance.

Could somebody with experience on these smallcons clue me in on what to expect? Is Quakecon not a normal model of how these things work? What happens if the convention gets Slashdotted?

[duke o' york]

Sell tickets and call in the hired goons/Pekka. Easy!

[Zopperoni]

Re: How many people would attend?

Originally posted by DanS
Could somebody with experience on these smallcons clue me in on what to expect? Is Quakecon not a normal model of how these things work? What happens if the convention gets Slashdotted?

Based on the location rent costs and the location capacity, we will determine possible attendance levels.
We'll need to see if there's an optimal price/capacity area that we can focus our efforts on.

So, until we have the actual financial and logistic data of the location, we cannot really make any concrete statements.

[Adrian Hon]

I think it partly depends on how it's marketed. If people see this as 'CivCon 2006, featuring Sid and Brian and a tour of Firaxis', then you could see a lot of people coming along , especially since Civ is overrepresented in people who have lots of money. However, if it's pushed as an Apolyton Community event, despite the Sid/Brian/tour factor, the psychological barrier to entry will be much higher, even if it only takes a minute to register here.

[Zopperoni]

The event is being profiled as an Apolyton event, so that could put the threshold higher. However, depending on how far we can go, we might promote the event wider (but still under the Apolyton flag).

[Adrian Hon]

Oh, I know it's being promoted as an Apolyton event, which is fine. The interesting thing is that it should be possible to control numbers by tweaking the form of the promotion, such as promoting it more or less heavily to CivFanatics (who will no doubt either want in on this, or organise their own con for 2007).

[Zopperoni]

I'm working on the promotion plan this month, and we'll tweak the main issues in November. We'll start promoting the event on Apolyton starting somewhere in December and take it from there, I suppose.

If there's a strong interest from other Civilization fansites, then a multi-site collaboration for 2007 will not be excluded as option. It'll be tougher to organize, but there's no immediate reason to become competitors rather than partners

[JohnT]

Dan is not at all interested in cross-promoting this on other sites. ApolyCon '06 is an Apolyton meeting celebrating the work of Sid and Brian, Mark and Dan, not a Civ meeting hosted by Apolyton.

Now, if members of other sites are interested, they are perfectly free to register here, discuss it here, register for the convention here, and attend... but as a member of Apolyton, not the other forum.

As far as # of attendees, the 125 number mentioned in the other thread sounds high... but might not be. We won't know for a while, but as far as I'm concerned, a convention of 50 attendees would be a rousing success.

[JohnT]

Re: How many people would attend?

Originally posted by DanS
Could somebody with experience on these smallcons clue me in on what to expect? Is Quakecon not a normal model of how these things work? What happens if the convention gets Slashdotted?

To prevent slashdotting the Committee could make the simple expedient of limiting potential registrants to registered members of Apolyton Forums as of MM/DD/YYYY. To accommodate other forums, we would require they impose the same restriction. If they don't, we'll refund all non-Apolytoner's donations/convention fees and wish them a happy day.

If people don't want to be accomodating, I don't have to accomodate them.

[snoopy369]

Even simpler, can't we take registrations ahead of time? If we have an early registration deadline, say april, and take some/all money by then, wouldn't that allow us to pick the necessary size of the convention rooms etc.?

[JohnT]

Registration is currently scheduled to start January 1st, online. We'll probably close it at the end of May, 6-8 weeks before the convention starts.

[OzzyKP]

I agree with JohnT, the estimates of 150 or so seem really high. I don't think we're gonna have to worry about having way more people than we can handle, though that'd be a nice problem to face . Even if it does happen, I wouldn't think we'd be turning people away. There aren't any real restrictions that would prevent us from going bigger and bigger. If the hotel fills up, people can just go to another hotel in the area.

The only two events that would have size limitations would be the tour of Firaxis and the Golf game with Sid (if those happen). You can just close those out for special guests on an invite only basis, or make them fundraisers and price them high enough that not everyone would do it (poor folks like me), or have some other criteria.

The rest of it seems like the more the merrier.

[JohnT]

The original estimate of 125 people at the banquet was made assuming that a significant percentage of us would possibly bring spouses - it was made before it was officially determined to be an Apolytoner's only meet.

[Chieftess]

Re: How many people would attend?

Originally posted by DanS
That's like 30 or 40 million people within driving distance.

I do hope Governor Erlich can handle you guys...

[Straybow]

Call FEMA now...