Okay, I didn't want to start my own thread on this, but TopDog closed his thread on the topic. And this is not intended to be a "piling on" thread. If you have a problem with GenCon and how HeroClix was handled, and quite a few people did, I want to hear solutions as well. It's only fair, after all. What would you try and do differently?

Me? I said it in TopDog's thread, which I'm repeating here.

thoughts? suggestions? changes? Too much 3am Steak and Shake?

Have me be able to afford the trip! Guarantee that me being there will make things better.

I only wish I could get my hands on the con-exclusive Horsemen, Wonder Woman, and Moonstone...

Good points!

Were there plenty of Starter Sets (Blackest Night/ Fantastic Four) available either in the vendor hall or wizkids booth?

Were there extra rulebooks/power-ability cards available for new players?

Were there a ton of extra Free-Comic-Book-Day figures to give out at the wizkids booth?

Were they demo'ing the game at the Wizkids booth?

Those would be my questions for next year.

What he said. I'd probably be judging all four days too.

How about some WK sanctioned West Coast love? Hmm?

While I understand WK's not signing back on board Wizard Worlds convention scheme, there has to be some opportunities made for the left coast players to get into the action.

Getting more judges is never a bad idea, but "compensation" could be an issue.

Another problem is that they don't know who we are. A random person could volunteer and be completely incompetent.
I think that there has to be some control there. They can't just ask people to judge and expect good results.
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As far as the cardboard elements, sure.
Play a game? Here, have a card.
Didn't make the finals, here, have a card.
Been waiting on stand-by but didn't get to play? Here, have a card.
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Fellowship... Ideally, yes. Sportsmanship should count for something.
But that's sportsmanship. Just playing a less than competetive team should not automatically mean that you get a consolation prize.
If the most sporting player had a very competetive team but didn't win then they should win fellowship.

There is also the fact that it is entirely a judgement call.
You can go the entire tourney without playing, or even sitting next to, player "X". You think that you have been gracious in victory and defeat, and when you let that first player "take back" a move and let that other guy apply perplex out of sequence you thought sure that fellowship was yours.

Only they gave it to player "X".

What if player "X" comes from one of the judge's venues? What if player "X" is at the event every year and has been chummy with the judges?

It certainly doesn't mean anything, but it could look bad, right?

That looking bad is an issue.

As much as someone is complaining about a lack of fellowship, someone next year could be complaining about the judges giving fellowship to "their friends".

And certainly no one wants them to use a random drawing from the field and award a prize to the guy that no one enjoyed playing against.

Yeah, fellowship is nice, but don't expect it to be incident free.

At your local venue it is small and you can manage it better. You can work the system to make sure that every deserving player gets something over time.

But hey, if they give something to everybody, then they kind of do have fellowship if you don't care that everyone won.

I think those advices are preatty reasonnable and can be usefull for future gencon

Depends on the level of compensation. I'd settle for a set of con LEs for helping out for 2 days.

Hey, you know, there's still quite a few judges out there that were certified and still keep up with the game. It wouldn't be too hard to tap them on the shoulder and say, "Hi, are you going to be in Indy for a few days? Think you could help for a bit if you were?"

Not saying it should. But they didn't give out any fellowship prizes for any events. Battle Royales and Grinders, or King of the Hill, I wouldn't expect it. But they didn't even have it for their scheduled special Constructed events, which is a bit... weird, to put it mildly. The fact that it wasn't in the After Hours was also surprising.

There is always a question of bias, but hey, I actually DID win Fellowship at the Anti-Monitor tourney a few years ago in WWLA, and there wasn't a huge stink about that. Of course, then you have multiple judges give their input in the bigger tourneys so it is a consensus decision.

Con LEs for part-time judges would likely be a good incentive.

I'm actually a fan of many aspects of the looser Organized Play system we currently have. However, with the previous system it was easy to see who had at least met some standard to qualify as a judge. There was even a database of who had and had not worked conventions previously, and since the same group of WizKids folks (and a couple L5s) were generally traveling to conventions they knew who had experience, who could handle what well, etc. so vetting an experienced core group was fairly easy. With the current system that's not so much the case, and I wonder if an unintended side effect of that smaller and looser OP system is a smaller pool of judges to pull from and more difficulty vetting them.
I know in the past limiting the pool to those who could work most or all of the convention made coverage planning much easier, but that may not be a a screen they can still afford to employ. And I at least have no idea why the crew was so small: even "you have to volunteer for all 4 days" should have yielded a substantial pool to pull from, so I would suppose there were other factors leading to the team being so small.