The Darkmoon Fiasco
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- čas přidán 10. 06. 2024
- Clickbait Title: grown man gets owned by a line of people
Taliesin & Evitel invited me to be on a panel and talk about video games while I was in Anaheim, and you can watch that here: • Was The Worldsoul Saga...
Blizzcon 2023 was an interesting experience. I personally had a lot of fun, but maybe not for the reasons or in the ways that the organizers intended.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Crowdfunding: / foldablehuman
Twitter: / foldablehuman - Zábava
Finally, the long awaited sequel to Line Goes Up
Line Goes Long
This is the kind of joke where a late night host shuffles cards for a while to wait for the crowd to stop laughing.
A little “heyooo” if you’re from the seventies or something
Looooong loooooong liiiiiiiiine
@@personzorzI read this in the Sakeru Gummy voice lol
@@amberhernandez Followed by that horny af sax riff.
But if the line goes up, is it not also becoming longer by extension?
Considering his last few topics and recent events I was worried this was gonna be how Dan got blinded by blacklights infiltrating an Apes party
That's exactly what I thought and I got so excited
I spent the first 4 minutes waiting to find out about the Darkmoon coin.
"Darkmoon" sounds so much like some crypto bs, it took me a moment to adjust, too.
I thought it was that too!
Given the sensory overload, I got just watching this I don't want to Imagine what I would l feel actually being there
To be completely fair, this is essentially the most fully realized version of an IRL MMO: Walk into a pretty room and then stand around doing tedious amounts of nothing for an extremely long period of time to earn the privilege of purchasing a useless toy, and somehow someone is ruining everything because of a developer oversight
I've heard of a Day 1 patch, but this is ridiculous!
@@phineas81707Jesus Christ this is clever lmao
*because of slot machines, whales and fomo.
@@GerBessabecause wow people are the same kind of people who do this shit. Only the kind of person who pays 150$ a year MINIMUM to play a game that’s 50% waiting 25% cutscenes, and 25% actual gameplay would have the sheer stubbornness and stupidity to wait in line for hours for gacha balls. Thank fuck I got a trades job finally snapped me out of mmo haze.
@@phineas81707 **laugh track**
"The gacha people didn't account for the whales"
The only time this sentence has ever been true.
Insane because in years past we had a hard limit of one token per purchase and they were given out by the darkmoon store
They knew, the money made them blind to the issues.
Or they explicitly accounted for the whales, like they do online, and this outcome was exactly what they wanted.
1% of people bought up 90% of the stock on day 1, and then forced everyone else into a panic into buying it too, even if it was literally worthless.
And now they get a bunch of press too because everyone is going to be so excited about the artificially inflated rarity of the handful of "good" prizes
@@kezia8027 correct
@@kezia8027Even if that was the plan, they didn't account for the physical reality of dozens of people pulling several hundred gachapon capsules out of the machine and redeeming prizes for half an hour each. Virtual gachapon machines handle whales better.
Line management is surprisingly fascinating. This makes me want to go watch Defunctland's FastPass video again.
Damn now I gotta go check out another video!
That’s a great video
That was an insanely great video.
Exactly what I thought. They basically put fastpass everywhere and ended up with ballooning demand.
Exactly my thought
As a wheelchair user, I don’t go to cons or large concerts. I’m just so worried I will end up with three people on my lap, followed by literally dying. Accessibility isn’t just about ramps, it’s about crowd management
Furry conventions have for the most part been making extreme strides towards accessibility and acceptance, FWIW. But your typical business-oriented convention is definitely not guaranteed here.
Furries, the new bastion against reactionary capitalism
I never thought of how crowds and cons would be for wheelchair users. Thank you for sharing. Eye opening.
@@godzillanightmare Thanks, I appreciate that you took the time to think about it. I totally get how it isn’t immediately obvious if you don’t know a chair user, but it can be a real issue. Going to anywhere crowded without an assertive, able-bodied companion to run interference can be genuinely terrifying. And so many strangers like to touch (or even move) my chair without asking or even introducing themselves. I think of my chair as an extension of my body, so it’s like a stranger randomly grabbing you around the waist and either leaning against you or shoving you out of the way. It’s a small violation, but it feels gross enough to cause me some real anxiety. Plus there is no avoiding well meaning, but unintentionally super dehumanizing remarks from strangers in the “you’re such an inspiration” or “what happened to you” categories.
Edit: clarity
@@godzillanightmare also, thank you for saying “wheelchair users” rather than wheelchair bound/confined, or assuming I am paralyzed. That alone tells me you are one of the good ones. If you have any other questions about accessibility feel free to ask. I mostly just know about mobility/dexterity issues, but I also have a bunch of blind friends, so I know some about that too, even if it isn’t first hand
I had no context for the word Darkmoon, so I just assumed based on the timing of this video and my knowledge of the channel that it was going to be about that NFT party with the UV lights that damaged everyone's eyes and skin.
lmao
I assumed the same thing 🤣 when I saw him at the opening i was like "huh I know he's dedicated but thats an insane flight for research"
Wait, what?
@andrewollmann304 Basically, at a party for those ugly monkey jpegs, they likely used UV disinfecting lights for some decorative lighting, instead of just a normal blacklight, and ended up giving people eye damage
It's a Hearthstone expansion.
3:13 As someone whose friend was almost crowd crushed (at the same Twitchcon a girl broke her back because of organizer's negligence, btw), I do appreciate bringing attention to this. It's not just about attendee experience, it's about people's safety.
Wait what? How did she break her back? And when was this? I'm curious about it now.
@@chadmasta5a year or 2 ago, there was a foam pit that wasnt nearly safe or deep enough, she jumped in and broke her back
@@chadmasta5 I think he is talking about when a girl jumped in a foam block pit but it wasn't very deep and on top of concrete. In the clip, she struggles to climb out then later she ended up getting back surgery from the incident
Everybody out here saying "a girl" because they don't want to admit they know who Adriana Chechik is
I can't recall the streamer's name who broke her back but she was a former Cornstar. It's a really brutal video how she jumps into the pit thinking it's way more padded.
I ran across the line midway through hall D on the afternoon of day 2. I asked a random guy in line what the line was for. He didn't know. I repeated this with a few other people in line. No one knew for certain, but fan theories as to what the line was for abounded. The line had developed its own ecosystem.
That alone might have been worth the price of admission.
🫥
I appreciate that Dan just calls it gambling, instead buying into the idea that stuff like this is somehow seperate.
Right! I hate it so much. So many companies do Blind Boxes, which means you know there'll be duds collecting dust. Just let me pay 3bucks for the little velcro things i actually want.
Yet he still supports Blizzard. Hard to take his criticism seriously when he's obviously still paying hand over fist just to be at the convention. Then tries to monetise the supposed horror of having to wait in a relatively short queue.
Relatively short when you compare it to say, the months or years people have to wait for Healthcare.
But hey, this is more important, right?
@@beardedbear9901 I don't think Blizzard has any power over healthcare?
@@Diamond_Ultra I don't think I made that point either.
My point was that Healthcare wait lists feels more like something Dan could or should cover.
Rather than his personal issues with queuing at the convention for a massively harmful corporation I would have hoped he had the strength to set aside.
it's dan's channel, he can post whatever he wants. get out of your house and organize if you want to change the world
I'd wait in a 5h line to hear Dan talk about an incredibly niche nerdy non consequential topic.
Yeah, me too
you mustn't have a lot going on in your life.
*inconsequential
@@TheRealLachlan, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a troll. Go touch grass. Let nice people be nice. Keep the assholery to yourself. It’s not constructive.
Same
“At the fire marshal’s insistence” is such a glorious line for so many reasons, but one of the is that it almost sounds like something from WoW and I had a nice mental stumble trying to figure that out.
It's actually a high up position in the fire dept. that told them people would die if there's a fire/panic. From the terrible crowds alone. So they need to reorganize.
Not exactly the epic bazinga title+tabard wow mythic+ achievement u thought it would be
I remembering wiping on Fire Marshal raids day 1 back in 2007.
Fire Marshal is just a building/event inspector
Fire marshal is the most "cool dad" job title there is.
"At the Grand Marshal's insistence, everyone was directed to Iceblood Garrison"
...Part of me was really hoping that Dan had gone of the deep end and somehow whipped up another 3 hour documentary in a month.
If he did that, the Calgary police would be getting a thousand calls asking them to do a wellness check on Dan
😊
😊
We can only dream
I'm sure he could have, if he wanted to.
To be fair, in universe the Darkmoon Fair is a circus run by Eldritch horrors, so standing in a labyrinth of infinite lines to eventually get nothing and lose your sanity is pretty on brand
it's lore accurate!
I work on the volunteer staff for PAX in the expo hall every year and avoiding situations like this is our entire job description. Seeing other cons do it so wrong is oddly uplifting since it kinda justifies the amount of micromanaging and planning we do to keep our hall running smoothly.
FWIW that blizzcon employee with the sign failed hard - you should never ever ever permit a line for a line. That's how you get crush scenarios.
back when pax south (rip) was still a thing i remember it being at least slightly organized, which is weird since most cons in texas are organized like a middle school class' first school council meeting.
Thanks for all your hard work!
Out of interest, what would you have done in that Blizzcon employee's position?
Not an event organizer, but I'd probably have consolidated both stands into the same booth. You queue up, buy a number of tokens and then the machines are in their own space right behind the booth. That way there is a clear line of travel and you'd have much greater control and awareness how many token are actually in circulation.
PAX is a testament to competence and conscience.
A great reminder not to take the ease of our everyday lives for granted. Out of all the systems, infrastructures, and devices that we interact with on a given day, we only reliably notice the small subset of inconvenient or frustrating ones. But all those other interactions, the ones that go the way they're supposed to, are only smooth because somebody did their homework and accounted for things that we'd never even think of unless they went wrong. Like the effect of event streamlining on event management.
And importantly, in the vast, VAST majority of such cases of careful design, it was the product of extended iterative processes and accumulation of experience. This is relevant because it should teach each of us that proper understanding of how things work is required to make them better. Balance both principles, Chesterton's Fence and the Scream Test, and your contributions to the world will be appreciated.
Genuinely this is for so many reasons such a good attitude to internalize
I can't say I'd be happy to travel to a con just to experience the same "Stuck behind someone who wants to pay in nickels and coupons" that I can get from my local grocery store.
It's always the fucking old people. And they never like estimate how much it's gonna be and have the coins ready to go. They let the poor worker scan everything and show the total before they even reach their decrepit skeleton fingers into their pocket to pull out their coin bag thing
Welcome to *far, far* too many conventions, especially ones built around singular companies or properties with no community based show content or in person play experience (i.e events like BlizzCon or FFXIV's FanFest, not Magic conventions or PAX)
@@wavesofbabies LineCon Best Con
At least grocery stores don't randomise the contents of your shopping trolley.
I know Dan mentioned the convivial atmosphere and the minor thrill of low-stakes gambling, but I can't imagine being so emotionally invested in an IP that I'd want to queue for a _gachapon machine_.
@@wereoctopus Yeah this seems almost like a meeting of addicts. Several hours in line for some random pins? What? Even for in-game items this is too much.
People will say this is their choice and their time and their money. Yes, it is. And it's my choice to question it.
I love that after every deep financial video Dan does, he follows it up with the niche politics of expiring a blizzard product
Just a little palette cleanser so nobody forgets what this channel is actually about
One for them, one for him 😅
I find it odd he still pays for/plays blizzard games, but then again we all have that thing that is problematic that we still consume because like...goddamn, let us have just one thing, we gave up all the others...
@Sarah-zv6nd I mean, at this point is there ANY product that doesn't come with side serving of problematic-ness?
I hope he riffs on Overwatch next, even if he hasn't played it
The logistics of proper line management and queuing is something I never realized could actually be this interesting, at least until the Defunctland video on Fastpass. This is an excellent little exploration of a smaller version of this sort of issue, because... yeah, shit just be like that sometimes! :D
It's a cool area of math too. I've taken a semester long class on it. You encounter very similar queuing problems in supply chains and factory production lines. It's a lot of fun to balance the probability of overloaded lines with the expense of opening another stall etc.
I think what this (and that) put a focus on isn't so much that "queuing logistics and math" is low-key interesting, but rather that LITERALLY EVERYTHING you see and interact with on a regular basis has been or can be optimized using engineering and math. It's the reason why 21st century technology seems to be innovating on basically everything, there's not much about the human experience you can't abstract into a computer science, math, or engineering concept.
Find a software engineer, ask them "so what do you think about message queues?"
If they say "oh yeah, they're pretty interesting", they haven't touched them since they got out of school.
But if they respond with "what?!" and a subtle twitch, follow that up with "I heard they're pretty easy to use".
Then once your friend is out of the hospital from having an aneurysm, they'll explain how much of a nightmare they can be.
@@OhhCrapGuyI said "oh, nooo..." then involuntarily twitched 😂, can confirm this is correct!
Right?! I wish I had realized I had these weirdly specific interests when I was a kid. I could have pursued them and maybe got rich. Weirdly specific specialties sometimes tend to pay well.
I ran into Dan at Blizzcon and got a selfie, and then found myself wondering if he was planning a video...
And he did! It's like you got the best prize at the gacha machine
I imagine it's like getting lunch at a restaurant and seeing Gordon Ramsey leave the kitchen with a camera crew.
I used to work at Blizzard. The people planning Blizzcon aren't event planners, they're ordinary employees, 95% of which are unqualified for their position and only got the role through nepotism. So none of this surprises me.
This is the first blizzcon they didn't have employees on the floor, it was all contracted out to the lowest bidder
Every year I went was pretty solid in terms of management and crowd control.
@@Vanity0666 I was only there for the first two, they just pulled us from random departments and told us to plan stuff out. It was definitely jarring for me, lol.
This year they hired a company that’s why it was a hot mess
Dan's just so good at his documentary style he can just meme on us by telling wacky stories like they're pivotal events on a whim
It's sorely missing critical cat events though.
There's not much I wouldn't listen to Dan talk about at this point.
He has created and produced 5 of my favorite documentaries (with traditionally produced documentaries thrown in there.) It's a shame CZcams videos cannot be rated on IMDB, cause Dan's filmography would sit high in the pantheon if they could.
To be fair, the line between wacky story and pivotal event is usually down to context. All of this is a wacky story because a bunch of other things went right. If they had gone wrong, this video would be the introductory segment of a video about why three people died at the WoW convention.
This is the most calm and articulate "This con sucks" rant I've ever seen.
"The faire didn't account for whales."
And right there tells me two very sad things: that Blizzard doesn't care about customer experience so long as the sale gets made, and Blizzard hasn't learned their lesson from everyone else who had this exact same problem
04:40 Even as someone who had never heard of this, I am utterly unsurprised to learn that Blizzard failed to plan for something so basic even though this is the exact type of customer they've been targeting for a while.
ah blizzard, courting whales and then being very shocked-pikachu when the whales do what a whale do
Well, presumably this wasn't like, Blizzard [the corporate mega-entity], but blizzard [the subgroup of people assigned to plan this section of the con], who may have lost some institutional knowledge since last time (people quitting) and then were systemically harmed by the shrinking of all of blizzcon since last time. I imagine they didn't have like, external event organizer experts assigned to this specific aspect of the convention.
@@scientistbird Perhaps, but either way, yeah, I'm blaming the people who run and ran the company('s reputation and morale into the ground) more than the people running the con, whom I wouldn't be surprised were shortstaffed. It's hard to say as someone neither keeps up with cons nor was actually there though.
@@MusicoftheDamned Blizzard contracts other companies to organize Blizzcon. The planning likely wasn't done by people at Blizzard.
@@lost1headnah, at every blizzcon prior the actual developers would man and staff the floor, I ended up knowing quite a few of them over time as well as having been in the recruitment process with them only to recognize the people who were recruiting me at blizzcon the next year
Dan, I do line management/park capacity for a huge theme park company and you hit this right on the head. Traditional queues are one of the most efficient ways to hold people and also allow guests to make a decision about whether they want to wait that long for that thing (assuming the waits are accurate). However, making a virtual queue is actually worse as it distributes guests in less space efficient ways and actually results in much longer waits since guests don’t have to make the decision to sacrifice other time to wait in that line. Personally how I would have solved the issue, would have been to allow guests to pre-pay for their tokens and then assign them a time to play and redeem. This would allow the team to manage how many tokens are currently outstanding and allocate time based on the number of tokens purchased.
The fact that buying shit is an attraction horrifies me
buying shit is almost always at cons, but it normally doesn't feel like an attraction. I think it's the combination of a line longer than ten minutes to get in and the gacha design of it--making getting your stuff into an "experience" via the slot machine
Those kooky blizzard fans and their love of lootboxes
Welcome to late stage capitalism; you can buy medicine to make it not horrify you. 🙃
Always has been
yeah buying stuff being an attraction is fine it's paying to get a random thing you might not even like being an attractions that's sad,
I experienced this at a concert recently. There was a HUGE line to get into the merch booth. I’m taking, like, nearly going back out the entrance of the venue massive. But, you have to pass by the merch booth to get to the seating area (or standing area, in this case) and we realized that, for some reason, this gigantic, completely unreasonable line dead ended at one side of the merch booth while there were several smaller lines going along the length of it…. And nobody from the big line was getting into the smaller lines when they got up to the table. So, we got into one of the five person lines, got our stuff and got out of there. People were just linining up, simply because they thought they had to and because this massive line was a natural phenomenon and not something the people at the merch booth had actually created and were monitoring, there was nobody to redirect the big line into the smaller lines, moving traffic along in a sensible manner, instead, for the entire fucking show, there were still up to 100 people snaking around to the end of the merch table. Very silly and an immeasurable waste of time.
I find that simultaneously sad, infuriating, fascinating, and hilarious
Was this the Eras Tour?
was this at the ghost tour this past summer? this exact thing happened to me and my partner in MKE lmao
Isn't it actually faster to have one big line feed into multiple lanes at the end point than it is to subdivide and just have like five smaller lines? Cause then you have people like trying to figure out which of the small lines is the shortest and it all becomes a clusterfuck?
In Canadian culture, you committed something akin to a crime
One of my guildies already submitted his feedback pointing out that there was a third as much scheduled content as previous years, people are...not happy.
lemme guess, the tickets were the same or even more expensive too despite this
@@cassinipanini They were!
lmao I'm sure blizzard will take the feedback on board and change for the better 🤣🤣🤣
I'm sure that having fewer attractions improved crowding at the remaining ones. That, or I'm holding the graph upside down.
@@cassinipanini Way more expensive. And they also scammed people into paying hundreds extra for a VIP pass that ended up being practically useless.
I was there, I was in that line. We were told to disperse and a Blizzcon employee told us that they were understaffed and that they had people buy tons of capsule tokens and not use them, and try to sell them online. Security came by and yelled at us to disperse. We were told they couldn't have a line that long.
Friends and I went back later in the day and we were told the capsule stuff was closed because of a lack of tokens, they I guess couldn't just pull the plastic capsules out of the machines. We did the Pet Adoption thing, and everyone in line with us, including myself, got the same few Overwatch stuffed blue fox. Just like 20 people standing at the exit holding blue foxes hoping folks would trade their cool other item for their blue fox no one wanted. (Pet adoption gave you a random stuffed animal for $25). Not enough room in DMF but half a hall for the empty Overwatch 2 demos no one was playing
I had never thought about the idea that long lines attract people because they indicate the most wanted thing, that's so interesting. Running events must be a nightmare, I can't even begin to think about the stress involved in integrating the work of so many different people while having to consider all these kinds of stuff, all for something that will get dismantled after a weekend
Wasn’t there that whole Soviet experiment where a guy lined up in front of a door and people joined him because they figured if there was a line there was something good?
The thing is: This didn't have to end up this way. There are tons of long running conventions (ComiCon, AnthroCon, PAX) which have mastered the game of organization and crowd control.
It's not _that_ hard. I mean, it's hard for a layman, but rocket science is pretty straightforward to a rocket scientist.
However, problems can arise if Elon Musk starts putting constraints on the rocket that sound good in a marketing blurb, but don't work out so well on paper, let alone in reality.
What I'm saying is, marketing execs should leave convention organizing to the convention organizers.
i miss when darkmoon faire was just a thing in the game you'd leave after 3 minutes after realizing there was nothing to do
The main attraction of the space being a glorified gatcha machine is pretty true to the gameplay experience at least.
"No you don't understand, I need to fish here for seventeen hours over the next week or I won't be able to get this water mount until next year."
just like the one in real life, from how Dan tells it
I was in there for like 30 minutes to talk to all the npcs and do all the lil mini quests 😎
Now you have the exact same experience, but in real life!
this was a perfect video to watch over a bowl of chips and salsa. not so fast paced or visually involved that i lost the plot while wrangling tortilla chips into my mouth, while still presenting an interesting experience to go along with my snack, and the video took exactly as long to finish as the bowl of salsa. bonus that it was low stakes enough that i didnt feel silly listening to the sound of my own crunching along with the words. thank you 👍
Watching Defunctland’s video on FastPass convinced me that crowd control is probably one of the most difficult problems to solve in modern society.
I especially think that the issue is worse now because organizers underestimate people’s patience by assuming our attention span is only a few minutes long because of technology and social media.
Reminds me of gencon this year where people started waiting in line for the disney TCG and stayed in line for ALL FOUR DAYS
6:16 "...which makes the lines-"
Me: "-go up!"
Dan: "-longer!"
The things Dan did to my brain LMAO
My worst queuing experience was Boomtown 2017, for 7 hours we just marinated under a hot sun, people had seizures and sun stroke. Water bottles were "deployed" i.e. thrown to random people in the crowd.
The organisers blamed "increased searches and delays opening the site gates caused by bad weather." It was a clear day and we were unmoving, nobody was being searched cause the gates weren't open. It is baffling to me how much beauracracy can shield people from reality, you only needed to look at the crowd of baked, flagging people to know that whatever security risk you think is being brought in by some shit ketamine is probably outweighed by the thousands of people currently at risk of serious injury on your doorstep.
An active problem can be sued for.
A passive problem cannot.
This was really interesting, Dan. I'd never thought about cons basically being traffic planning and management, but now that I think about a few of the worst conventions I've been to, they were definitely clogged up and claustrophobic-feeling vs the better ones (like Origins) where people were moving more freely and no space ever felt full or crowded.
Meanwhile, Dashcon was neither 😂
I went to a few animecons in my life and all of them I could not go anywhere at all as it was filled with people. I had to use a wooden katana to get people to stop cutting infront of me with my brother holding the tip end of it to act as a barrier lmao. Thats what happened when they sucked at managing traffic of people. Granted, it was done by a hodgepodge of people who just liked anime, but it still sucked.
Any time this channel posts something WOW-related, I get the same feeling as when I read Burroughs' writing about opiates.
Because you were addicted to both?
@@FFKonokobecause the kind of people who have the time and willingness to indulge are cube farmers.
That is SO true. The discussion of the thrill, the knowing romanticisation combined with frank discussion of various problems in an interesting dichotomy
Imagine waiting 5 hours in a line to buy irl lootboxes. Consumerism is a nightmare.
So many conventions have such poorly managed crowd control these days. There were a few near-crush situations at Gen Con this year thanks in part to a badly planned for Disney trading card game launch, and I feel like it was pure luck that no one was seriously injured or even killed. It was scary. I felt glad to be an exhibitor because it mostly meant I was out of the scariest parts of the crowds, but it was harrowing.
Amanda Golka (Swell Entertainment) talks about poor crowd control and potential crowd crush at just about every single event she attends and reviews, especially since she's I think 5'2 and genuinely struggles to breathe in dense crowds
The fact that there's not been more disasters at cons is absurd, so many of them seem to be planned with no consideration for safety at all
Fascinatingly similar situation happed with FFXIV NA FanFest this year where the lines to basically everything were always capped. On day 1 the food was especially bad because they lined up all the stalls next to each other with no clear markings for the boundaries of each stall, so there was just a gigantic blob of people getting food and nobody was sure where the lines to any of the stalls started. There was tape on the floor the next day, lol.
That's good that they at least learned a lesson pretty quickly
Forgot about the Day 1 food line. I mostly remember the Day 1 and 2 merch lines.
Very interesting to hear that Blizzard made exactly the same mistake Square made at NA Fanfest for FFXIV this year. A lot of the same problems: lack of time sensitive things to draw people away from lines, a completely unregulated merch line that had a giant throng of people gunning for it immediately after the keynote finished with basically no management from staff. The poor volunteers had basically no way to effectively control these lines or communicate anything, and no proactive steps were taken to do anything about it until, like in your example, it was much too late. All I can say is that I hope these companies learn from these mistakes, cause pretty much all the fun I had was in spite of the even organizing, not because of it.
It could have been avoided if they had hired people who do con management/consulting. The staff were just SE office staff and a lot had not worked a con before.
I really appreciate how the combination of whales, crowds, FOMO, bag holding, and half-constructed systems leading a situation where regular people lost money BLIZZCON was able to offer an experience that resonates thematically with your latest vids so you were able to drop a lil nugget soonish after your last big project. See ya in five months!
You could say the blizzard employee holding the "line closed" sign was a *puts on sunglasses* token gesture
Listening to Dan describing the layout like he's preparing for a heist
People logistics of large events are just fascinating. Once you get into the math there is pretty much no end point in the level of complexity you CAN go into, if you wish. I also find it brilliant from a human psychology perspective, as it allows you to narrow the entire human experience down to a series of incentives, stimuli, motivations and needs and thanks to large numbers, the predictions can get scarily accurately.
…why yes, I would absolutely watch a 3 hour documentary on the topic from Dan. Just let me get on the popcorn.
If you haven't seen the Defunctland essay on the Disney FastPass queue system, I cannot recommend it enough.
defunctland fastpass
This is Dan's shortest video, and can be summed up as; Whales IRL, and I'm gonna make this video because my day was ruined, and my disappointment is immeasurable
🤓 actually his shortest video is "How to Play Pokemon Go With Depression" at 0:53 🤓
@@extremepayneWhats with the emojis? Thats just a nice piece of info. Or is this just a case of "I wanna make this innocent correction but I fear that a random stranger on the internet is gonna call me a nerd if I do so, so in that case im gonna make fun of myself first before anyone else has the chance to do it"?
This was my first BlizzCon, and the couple times my friend and I stopped by that area, we were (a) surprised at how long and disorganized the lines were, and (b) interested in participating, but didn't know where to start, or what we'd ultimately get to do. That area was just one of the many things that made me realize attending BlizzCon virtually was better than attending in-person.
This year is a wild outlier
@@Vanity0666more like setting standards for the future.
@@arthurpicket3505 I wouldn't disagree
Getting some faint "coronation of Czar Nicolas II" vibes from the approach to crowd control here.
Can you imagine getting in a line cause of fomo and then 5hrs later you find out it's to buy tickets so you can gamble for 50 cent patches
Maybe it's the autism in me, but I personally can't imagine getting into a line if I don't know what the line is even for. Why would you do that? You don't even know if the thing at the end is something you'll like or not! What if it's something you don't care about? You'd spend hours waiting all for jack shit. Go do something else that you know you'll like! You're here to have fun, not wait in lines for potential fun. Maybe I'd do it for, like 5 minutes out of curiosity and for the lulz, but I can't imagine being the kind of person to wait in a line for 5 hours for a complete unknown. Maybe this is why I don't play gacha games.
They should have offered an extra hour in the ball pit for people who didn't get to redeem their tokens.
(Cue five-hour queue to the ball pit)
As someone who was at FFXIV's Las Vegas FanFest, this gave me flashbacks to the merch line. They had no cap on items sold Day 1. Someone bought 75 plushies so they could resell them on eBay for less shipping than you'd have to buy the item from Japan. The line moved so slow, they started handing out tickets for people to come back at an assigned time later in the day. They eventually had to trade those tickets for Day 2 line tickets because the line still moved so slowly. The moment the doors opened Day 2, traumatized Day 1 merch line people started making lines. There was no answer from staff (or conflicting answers from staff) as to where to make the lines, so multiple lines formed. A part of me thinks I may still be in a line, but my mind has made its own reality to escape it.
This reminds me of an Otakon debacle involving a single, poorly explained event. Several hundred people read the schedule, saw "DIY B****ke" and started lining up hours ahead to figure out what that meant. I'd been waiting for around 90 minutes, cause Otakon After Dark is always a spectacle, when folks started dispersing as a volunteer had to walk through the line telling everyone it was a drawing panel. I never found out who was actually there to meet the artists, but a whole lot of people were mildly disgruntled at the rave.
I like this example because it feels very reasonable. People getting into the ginormous token line at Blizzcon for randomized junk is sad. But I think most people who know what that word means would read a blurb that says "DIY Bukkake" and immediately think "What the fuck is this? I have find out."
"Join a five hour line just for fear of missing out" doesn't grok with me even a little, and I guess that's why I never bought an nft.
I would love more 10 minute videos from Dan. The hours long docs are obviously the main course, but if we can get sides with it, all the better
Very funny how a company that made the most popular MMO for 20 years couldn't anticipate that removing friction in one place may cause a pileup in the other.
This is one of those videos where I can safely say that pretty much every single aspect was completely new to me. I'm so utterly out of the loop on MMO's that this was like looking at a ritual of a remote tribe somehwere in the Pacific Ocean.
It's so surreal, dystopian even, that a large amount of people see a queue and reflexively get in it without even knowing what it's for.
I guess it's a con thing.
Very soviet. If you see a line, get in and wait for hours.
It’s also a British thing. I’ve seen a line spontaneously form in the grocery store behind a person who was just like, contemplating some tomatoes.
I just click on Dan's videos to learn random stuff. I love it.
Pulitzer grade docs diving into internet conspiracy theories and their communities interspaced with niche World of Warcraft musings. Folding Ideas in a nutshell
At what point, does one consider worth it to spend 5 hours in a queue to _something_ . Im truly fascinated by peoples' motivations.
If I see 3 people lined up in front of the Sushi Hub, I'll walk on and go somewhere else...
FOMO, followed by sunk cost fallacy an hour in I suppose.
Collectibles are a force to never be underestimated
A flight ticket out of a country mired in revolution would be worth it.
Or a drinking water and food line in a disaster zone.
In addition to the fact that, as stated in the video, some people weren’t even sure WHAT they were queuing for, probably figuring it had to be a line for something cool, the tickets to get into the con were $300 minimum, and there weren’t panels to watch. So most people spent a lot of money to be there, didn’t have anything else to do, and assumed a line for SOME experience was better than nothing. And to be fair, aside from the capsules, the Darkmoon Faire area was one of the best spots in the whole convention.
I worked at the Token booth in the Darkmoon Faire at Blizzcon 2019 (and the esports booth in 2018). I really loved how spreadout the whole con was in both years -- including each game getting their own individual stage for their respective announcements and esport events
In 2019 the darkmoonfaire was in the 2nd floor, all super out of the way, with its own stage, both for music and panels
Its really sucky to see this all on the first floor, and even more disheartening how everything's in one spot, so of course the line would be so chaotically long.
When selling tokens for capsules, I didn't even see a line more than an hour, and with the abundance of staff, it was SUPER easy to make the lil 10-capsule packs, making it fairly easy to throw coins left and right, making the lines go by even faster
...Im wondering if there was ever a shortage of staff, because usually they would go to a workforce supplier, Volt, to get volunteers (that's how I got in), but this year there wasnt even a mention on either website
We all knew blizzard only cared about money but I think a lot of people assumed it would get better once they were bought by microsoft, not so wildly worse
The convention company they hired unfortunately was not they best
It’s fascinating to hear about this as an FFXIV player after our own big con (the first since the pandemic began) crashed and burned a couple months ago. It’s really remarkable to me how these huge companies with a long history of massive fanbases still just…can’t do crowd management well.
That’s because when they usually have to do crowd control they can just make another instance /j
I'm glad Blizzcon was able to... draw the line
Your garden-variety furry convention is run more competently than this, and your garden-variety furry convention is literally run by some nerds with no experience doing this.
I was part of the organizing committee for a small exhibition at my local community, crowd management and floor planning is such an overlooked aspect of planning. People just chuck stuff into the event floor without thought.
My event was only attended by a few thousand people and not more than a few hundred inside at one time so crowd management was much simpler than something like Blizzcon. It's definitely something I pay attention to now at events after my experience.
This seems like a good example to teach in operations research 101, pointing out all the mistakes and discussing what could have been done differently.
Dan has such a listenable voice, I feel like he could record 12 hours of nonsense gibber jabber and id still listen.
Maybe he should voice the Mikkelsen audiobooks.
Dan, with your experience in the physical process of film production and your expertise in narrative and storytelling, your real knack all this time has been that you make logistics seem fun. Which is one hell of a skill, goddamn.
If I had a nickel for every time folding ideas followed up a documentary on web 3.0 with a documentary about an online scam and then followed that up with a video on blizzard, I would have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
In 2012 I was at gamescom germany. The Resident Evil 6 line was so long, it was shut down 6 hours before the con closed its doors, which was at like 2 pm or so. I waited for 20 mins, realizing that I got only 3 steps forward. It was so insane, I never attend any of these cons.
conventions and fanfests have been absolute *shitshows* lately, so I'm honestly just glad it was annoying and time wasting rather than dangerous.
FFXIV's fanfest in Vegas was pretty rough even without that 1 furry knowingly going in sick and un-masked then making a 6 page comic about it to complain about how the hotel was mean and admitting they flew home while still stick with covid.
Cool of Blizzard to recreate Error 37 for everyone who missed it the first time
Thanks for taking the exact amount of time you needed to explain things with occasional cut-ins without too much padding. I love long video essays and enjoy padding and tangents when the person talking is saying things interesting enough, but sometimes it's nice to just get all the details straight-up in a concise fashion~
This sounds like the worst form of hell to put yourself through for a piece of $0.15 plastic landfill
Queue management, like supply chain, is both something that almost nobody thinks of, and something that makes our entire civilization run smoothly.
2:06
Uh-oh. I've watched enough Defunctland to know EXACTLY how this is gonna play out.
When I saw this video on my feed, I honestly thought it was gonna be about that Bored Ape concert. Happy to know Dan didn't burn his eyes.
I really admire how your values and your drive to propel us to betterment, how it glows through these videos. You identify problems, highlight them for greater community action, and identify solutions to make it easier for change to happen. I hope you are also inspiring so many more people to take up that community responsibility. Really huge thank-yous, good sir!! I know that sounds like some overly big sentiment for a commentary on a conference, but it's just cool to see this theme running through the videos here. I love seeing great character and people who really take part in this world. It's' rare and it makes me happier and more hopeful.
As an industrial engineering graduate, this 8-minute video so succinctly discusses principles relating to queuing theory and process improvement better than so many of my major subjects. Lol.
"A heinous bottleneck" is such a good line, it just represents MMOs in general
This alone is an accessibility nightmare, i can really see how they were inspired by disney now ugh
Watches this warily as I get ready to run a booth at a game convention
Came here expecting a sequel to *Line Goes Up* about the Bored Apes Yacht Club's UV-C lighting blinding NFT bagholders, stayed for the tribute to Defunctland's Fastpass episode.
Great video, really shines a light on one of the many issues of this year's convention. To add to everything the DMF was also in the main hall whereas in years past it was separate (on the second floor or in the adjacent building where badge pickup was this year). This caused overflow and crowding in the WoW section so those just wanting to enjoy that area were collateral damage to the insane lines.
We get to have a little folding ideas. As a treat
This reminds me of the fiasco of Disney Lorcana at Gencon 2023. The line was starting the night before at like 6pm for a booth that wouldn't be open until 10pm the next day.
I saw the black lights and for a second was really worried you went to that crypto event that gave its attendees eye damage from using the wrong UV lights D:
This was a whole different flavor of disaster though! Surprising, I'd really think a company like Blizzard would be better at managing their con structure.
Absolutely mind-boggling to me that there are people still attending Blizzcon, let alone people in these quantities.
Not only attending it but then going online and letting everyone know you went to Hell Company con and gave them lots and lots of money
Blizzard fans are cultists - it doesn't matter what Actiblizz does, or how poorly they are treated, they just keep on handing over their money, year after year after year ...
Thank you for wearing a mask! COVID made me struggle to transfer into my wheelchair for several months, so I appreciate people who take steps to reduce the risk of getting others sick.
My wife and I had a bad experience at ECCC this year trying to visit Artist's Alley. It was a new space this year and they didn't space the aisles wide enough. I've never seen it so crowded. It was so packed in you couldn't even stop to look at an artist's table without basically blocking the entire flow of traffic behind you. After a couple aisles we just decided it wasn't worth it and left.
This is one of those Folding Ideas videos where you need to get halfway through before you have any idea what the subject is.
I was at the point in the line the Fire Marshall was putting up the traffic break, and almost got kicked out after 40 minutes of waiting because we got caught between the two new queues... Fortunately a Blue Shirt saved us. I agree completely, this was not at all thought out. I did manage to grab my two plushies before the WoW Deep Dive... I never did get a chance at any capsules.
You are why gaming is awful now.
@@TheEvilCheesecake how out of pocket
@@eos_aurora a) I'm right and b) you just copy phrases that you see people saying a lot and don't actually know what they mean.
@@TheEvilCheesecake fascinating comment. Where’s the logic?
@@Ponchita101 you'll queue up to buy any slop a corporation will sling you, and thank them for the privilege. as long as people like you are buying, companies can get away with selling complete dirt.
I work in expo halls at fan conventions and every time I’m just an attendee somewhere that has just ludicrously bad crowd management I always cry a bit on the inside. Can’t say I’m surprised though that blizzard didn’t think something through
What a wonderful treat to see a shorter video pop up so soon after your latest longer one! Thank you, Dan. I just love your videos!
Love to see this channel multiclassing between tech bro scams and World of Warcraft
The irony of Blizzard selling gacha game IRL and didn't accounted for whale...
I ran line control for passes to an anime convention in 2013, the line back to front was 8 hours long.
Lol I was curious what was going on over there. It was closed off before I even looked over there. Didn't even know I should be on the lookout for you hope you had a fun Blizzcon