By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 10/19/2015
We screened the pilot episode of Marvel and Netflix series Jessica Jones at NYCC 2015 to see if the show has the potential for Daredevil-level success.
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 10/16/2015
Brought to you by Publishers Weekly, it’s More To Come, the weekly podcast of comics news, interviews and discussion with Calvin Reid, Kate Fitzsimons and The Beat’s own Heidi MacDonald. This week, we have a wide array of interviews from and about 2015’s New York Comic Con! More To Come 174: An Interview with NYCC […]
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 10/13/2015
A con tradition, ReedPOP schedules a final panel at New York Comic Con where the main staff gathers to listen to concerns from attendees. This year, the panel consisted of Lance Fensterman (Senior Global Vice President), Mike Armstrong (Event Director), MK Goodwin (Content Manager), Jackie Williams (Marketing Director), and Kristina Rogers (Event Manager). (Shown, right to left, above.) […]
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 9/30/2015
As in year’s past we are lucky to present to you a complete TEXT listing of the panels for this year’s New York Comic Con. Although ReedPop’s site has them all listed in various editable and serachable ways, it’s still impossible to see everything with all panelists listed in one go. So here […]
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 8/27/2015
New York Comic Con has made a tradition of its annual exclusive beer and here's this year's 2015 Brooklyn Defender IPA, with a label of the beer's eponymous superhero by Khary Randolph.
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 8/19/2015
New York Comic Con has released the show floor map for their October show, seven weeks before opening day! (49 days, according to the widget on their website.) Although some kids are already back to school, summer doesn’t end for another two weeks for most of us. I had hoped to avoid thinking about my […]
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 5/15/2015
As reported the other day, ticket sales for New York Comic Con started at noon on Wednesday and ended in agony for most of the aspirants, who spent hours waiting for screens to load and waiting rooms to process. While VIP, three-day and four-day tickets quickly sold out, you can still get a ticket for New York Comic Con 2015 if you don’t mind going on Thursday. Frankly it’s the least crowded day and you would probably have the best time if just seeing booths is your goal. Hurry up! These tickets will not last.
ReedPOP, NYCC’s governing body, put up a statement about the ticket sale and revealed that demand for tickets was four times what it was last year.
Let that sink in for a minute.
According to the statement, by the time tickets went on sale at 12:01 there were already more people online trying to get tickets than there were VIP, 3-Day, 4-Day and Saturday tickets combined. So, this was a lottery, essentially.
While teeth were gnashed and hair torn out, don’t give up entirely. If you are truly desperate to see the Dave & Buster’s booth at NYCC, there are still a couple of ways to get tickets.
• Attend Special Edition: NYC, where A LIMITED NUMBER tickets will be on sale. At the first SE:NYC in 2014 people made a beeline to the ticket booth and stood in line for a while. I suspect there may be camping out or line holding or whatever for this. But the upside is that you can also attend a bodacious comic-con with guests like Scott Snyder, Annie Wu, Brian Bendis and Simon Roy. Only $45 for the whole weekend. Bargain.
• There will be an event later this summer at Midtown Comics where you can purchase tickets. They’ve done this before and there was lining up and sleeping bags and what not, and expect that again. Midtown is the EXCLUSIVE retailer for NYCC tickets.
So it won’t be easy….but it will be possible. If you have courage and will. Think of it as starring in your very own aspirational Miyazaki movie.
Now, there’s another aspect of ticket sales that had people in a tizzy. As soon as tickets went on sale they were being resold on StubHub and Ebay. This is against the rules, and ReedPOP is trying to stamp it out:
• Now let’s talk about those ticket resellers – we don’t like them either! We know you see tickets available on reseller sites and we know how frustrating that is (especially if you did not get the tickets you wanted) and please know that we continue to be aggressive about doing all we can to deal with those resellers. We further limited quantities this year. We will comb through those sites and attempt to get tickets removed. We review the data of ticket purchasers and cross check names, addresses, email, credit cards and then remove and ban where we find people trying to buy tickets over the maximum allowed. In short, we are as frustrated by people selling tickets at an inflated price as you are.
NOW, you may be wondering, as I did, why they don’t just outright BAN sales via StubHub or Ebay? You won’t find a single San Diego Comic Con badge for sale on either service, although you will find empty badge holders from 2014 selling for $5.99. So why?
I did some digging around and was told by someone knowledgeable about the secondary ticket market that in New York State all event tickets must be available for resale. While New York used to have some of the most stringent scalping laws in the country, in 2010 they were loosened up to allow StubHub and their ilk to pretty much have free reign. So it may not even be legal to ban resale of the tickets.
One other thing about NYCC badges: they are treated very much like concert tickets (complete with RFID chips) than badges to a conference, the tradition—inherited from SF cons—that San Diego follows. Which is to say that SDCC badges have your name, or least A name, on them, and NYCC badges all look alike unless you write your name in marker or stick on a label. Although the RFID technology makes each badge as individual as a snowflake to Reed personnel or Harold Finch, they are seemingly interchangeable to the naked eye and easily interchanged.
I reached out to NYCC to get more info on the resale problem and will report on anything I learn.
In the end, this is just supply and demand. The population of the NY metro area is 17 million people or so, and a lot of them want to go to a big comic-con. With lessons learned from the horrible crowding of years past, ReedPOP has no choice but to stringently limit the number of tickets available. It’s the only safe and responsible thing to do.
If you are really desperate to get your con on, as suggested, go to Special Edition, or even Eternal Con out on Long Island on the weekend of June 13-14 Tickets are available, you can meet guests like John Romita Jr, Billy Tucci and even The Beat, and plenty of nerdlebrities, including Eric Roberts and a bunch of Power Rangers. It’ll be fun and you will have teeth and hair left afterwards.
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 5/13/2015
#NYCC Ticket Update: Just got through the queue – 3 Day Passes and VIP tickets are SOLD OUT.
— Tuesday Night Movies (@TuesNightMovies) May 13, 2015
Calling it. Three-day passes and VIP tickets sold out in less than an hour. Four days still available?
New York Comic-Con tickets went on sale at noon EDT, and the server is having a hard time coping with demand, as a random sampling of tweets from a ten second window show.
Waiting to buy #nycc tickets, and I feel like I'm going to end up crying.
— Arabella (@AlesandraYun) May 13, 2015
@NY_Comic_Con I had it my chart now your giving me error page and it's taking years to load again #NYCC
— NYCKpopfan (@aleyas69) May 13, 2015
in the #NYCC ticket Queue. I did refresh three times in twenty minutes because nothing was happening. Now I think I'm screwed!
— FUNNYBOOKS Comics (@FUNNYBOOKSComic) May 13, 2015
" In the unlikely event that you get an error page…" LOL OK. #NYCC
— Barbarella (@youthinkmemad) May 13, 2015
So, this is awful… #NYCC
— Pat Aldo (@paldo624) May 13, 2015
This is the worst hell on earth. HOW did I manage to get #SDCC tickets in a faster, more timely manner than #NYCC tickets?! #NYCCTix
— Joe Edwards (@JoesGonnaTweetU) May 13, 2015
Show runner Lance Fensterman is trying to help.
Ticket site is alive and well but slow due to demand, just the NYCCsite is froze. Go here: http://t.co/Rt4YpO1A7U
— lfensterman (@lfensterman) May 13, 2015
As is the general NYCC twitter:
@malpertuis Hit refresh and it will bring you back to your place in the virtual queue.
— New York Comic Con (@NY_Comic_Con) May 13, 2015
@torisaurusrex We will be actively checking for scalpers again this year.
— New York Comic Con (@NY_Comic_Con) May 13, 2015
FWIW, I hit the link and have been seeing a white screen (plus one 408 error) ever since.
My guess is that people are just going to have to hang in there and hope that they get through. No word as I write this if there are actual tickets still available, however.
Last year had a similar profile of woe. Tickets for the fall’s big East Coast show will be available two more ways: you can buy them on site at Special Edition: NYC in June, or at Midtown Comics, which will be the exclusive retail partner for ReedPOP.
In the meantime, hang in there and godspeed.
UPDATE: Apparently the second quoted tweet from the NY-Comic-Con account is in regards to this—tickets are already on sale at StubHub, with prices ranging from $296 to more than $1000.
In the past ReedPOP has tried to crack down on this, but I think they have more pressing matters on hand, so I wouldn’t buy one of those if I were you.
Maybe they should consider Stub Hub or other such service as an official reseller of their tickets. Allows them to have a lower cost solution and still allow fans to get the tickets legally. The two MI Big Ten college sports teams use it as the official second hand seller of their tickets.
>>>There was criticism over the “Blue Entrance” for VIPs, press, pros. The times allowed for entrance in the morning were not properly maintained. Those attendees could have used the normal “Green Entrance”, and RP will work to better communicate that in the future.
There was a VIP entrance?
1. The app really does suck. I punched in a bunch of stuff on my NYCC account on my desktop and it wouldn’t sync with the app. Waste of time.
2. They really do need to fix registration. Malicious activity or not, they clearly underestimated how many people would try to register. Not everyone can get in, I think people understand that. But there’s no need to make it a cruel and torturous process , like making people think they had a pass, only for an error message or a timeout to cause you to lose it (I lost a VIP pass that way). Doing all the passes at once just caused chaos.
3. They need to get rid of those booths in the hallway to Artist Alley. Yes, making people go outside on Saturday and Sunday eased the problem, but it’s dependent on good weather. Good luck telling someone who spent thousands are artwork they have to walk outside in the rain to get back to the main hall. Yes, you lose money by getting rid of those booths. You also lose money if the fire marshal shuts you down, which nearly happened on Friday.
4. I thought the main hall panels were well handled. You can’t sit in there all day and catch everything, but you can catch one or two things you love. So that’s cool.
5. This was my third NYCC. The crowds were unreal. I’m not sure what they can do about it, short of expanding the Center. People were shell-shocked on Thursday by the size of the crowds. I had someone asking to buy my pass as I was leaving on Sunday at 3 pm. The floor closed at 5.
6. I heard the #7 train referred as the Nerd Train. It amused me.
7. The concession stand were busy and Starbuck was ridiculous, but you could at least eat there, unlike 2012 (last time I went), when it was Starbucks and some sandwich place on site that was it.
8. I love NYCC, but I can’t help but wonder if it was my last one. Just the size of the crowds…it’s exhausting and overwhelming. Plus, the registration system this year was just cruel. I only do a con every 3 years or so because of where I live. Maybe I’ll pick one a little more sensible like Baltimore next time. We’ll see…
As an exhibitor, I think Reed deserves excessive praise for their panel room support. I’ve never had a two-person AV team AND a two-person line management team at any other show. It might have been just a perk with the larger rooms, I don’t know, but those guys took care of us so well I was expecting them to have dinner ready for me when I got home.
The main floor traffic was a total disaster. We just need to set aside a couple designated cosplay/photo taking areas and mark off a separate browsing lane in front of the booths so traffic can still move past while people stop to browse/chat/shop. You will lose a few thousand bucks in booth rental if you designate picture taking spots but it will completely change the experience on the floor.
“Blue = Pro, VIP, Press, Speaker, Guest, Medical and Exhibitor Show Floor Entrance and Queuing Area”
https://www.newyorkcomiccon.com/RNA/RNA_NewYorkComicCon_V2/2015/docs/nycc-entrance-map.pdf
I was on the show floor Thursday (the big booths), Saturday, and Sunday.
The only places where traffic was bad were at the smaller vendor booths towards the back and sides, where the aisles were narrower. Four people could move down those aisles, which means only the middle handled traffic, as shoppers stopped in the other two aisles.
Photo spots won’t help much. Say you’re walking one way, and the cosplayer is walking the other direction. Are both of you going to navigate a crowded show floor to get to a designated space to take a photo which takes… a few minutes to stage? Better to remind people to take photos at the intersections. But then, the intersections will attract hordes of photographers…
People do need to be reminded to only stop at the intersections, and then preferably by the supporting tree columns. Me, I’m not above going into “New Yorker” mode with people who block aisles, or stop moving in the middle of an aisle with heavy traffic.
Torsten just because you can find something with google doesn’t mean anyone knows about it.
“Torsten just because you can find something with google doesn’t mean anyone knows about it.”
NYCC has always been great at telling people where that entry is. There’s always a slip in my ProPass letting me know where to go. But it’s really all for naught once the show is opened and the main queue line has been let on the floor.
“Could attendees reserve [panels in advance, online? Not really, as the Con and content providers want a full house. RP did allow people into panels as other people left. [This was my experience at the DC Super Hero Girls panel.]”
I don’t get this answer. They could still have advanced reservation for panels, while also having a standby line in case the panels still have extra room. In fact, to be more fair they could always have a set percent of seats specifically for standby. I’ve suggested before that they could use the RFID badge technology so that attendees can reserve for panels online, and then staff members could scan their badges as they entered the panel room. Disney World has a similar system for their attractions called FastPass+, where park goers can reserve up to 3 FastPasses in advanced per day. There’s also a tier system, so that you’re limited to only reserving one E-ticket attraction, so that not all E-ticket attraction FastPasses get booked as fast. I guess the main complication is that all other panel rooms aside from Main Events do no clear inbetween panels, so they don’t know how many seats they could allow people to reserve in advanced. I think they could at least test out an RFID badge system for Main Events as a replacement for the wristband system, as that would cut down time waiting for wristbands and also clear up space that is currently used for wristband distribution. One big drawback with the first come/first serve wristband distribution each morning is that it prevents attendees from waiting for early panels and autograph sessions elsewhere. If an RFID badge system ended up working well for Main Events, then they could expand that to other panels.
The Blue Entrance and the holding area near the 3E and 3C entrances has been in use since (at least) 2012, when I included it in my survival guide:
http://www.comicsbeat.com/nycc12-survival-guide/
I also included it this year:
http://www.comicsbeat.com/nycc15-getting-around/
Yes… I know… just because I post stuff online doesn’t mean anyone reads it…
Matt:
How do you redeem your reservation? Do you scan your badge upon entering Javits, and get a wristband?
Do they scan your badge as you enter the event space? How much longer does that take when 3000 attendees are eager to get good seats?
BookExpo (in the past at least, dunno about currently) would have ticketed events for the more popular authors. Some you paid for in advance (like author luncheons), others were distributed freely each morning, starting a few hours before the show floor opened.
ReedPOP could easily do that at the ticket booth set up in near the Blue Entrance., which is outside the “clean zone” of NYCC, and generally underutilised. The badge is scanned, and then you are limited on how many tickets you can pick up for yourself and friends. Or you get wristbanded, which makes crowd control a lot easier later.
I’d actually like to see an author luncheon, or breakfast, like at BookExpo. Stage it in a hotel ballroom, you eat while the guest talks, you get a gift bag upon exiting, Everybody’s happy.