Staff isnt even here yet to consider that lol. The 12 hr wait for disappointment will happen. Yesterday the people that were at 5am in line got sorry were full texts at like 4.15 pm
People were here literally at 12:30am waiting. We got here at 3:00 and are worried we won’t be able to get our cards signed.
PFM, Edison, Chrispy, Grabchu and I went to Saitous hotel last night to wrap up panel since the convention center was kicking us out.
Saitous translator told PFM and I that the next signing Saitou comes to will not allow customs and he will just stick with a top 6 or so and that’s it. I imagine would make things way easier for him.
The level of commitment and detail Saitou gave us was unreal. He was so damn nice.
PFM and I got to speaking with @Alec late into the panel, and the hustle, grind and unwarranted comments that he has to deal with just to get something like this rolling is unreal. Most would not be able to handle it. We love you man.
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A 2 year dry period does a lot for the collector psyche
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From the people attending, did it seem like those waiting in line for signatures were excited to add them to their own collection, or were a lot of them there solely to try and make large stonks?
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Same…this is unreal. People started making a line at 12am today apparently…capacity was basically reached for the day by 3/4am.
I haven’t seen any kouki autos pop up on eBay yet. There was an Arita sig from the ocala signing that sold right away.
This seems like a really busy event. Unfortunately, None of the people I asked were able to get my cards signed. They weren’t even able to get their own cards signed…
For some reason those two don’t show up for me when searching eBay
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They were taken down after we berated the poster
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14 yo or so kid right behind me, when the time to sign up for the main event came, told his dad he just wanted to stay in line and try for the signing. I guess he forwent the main event.
He was flipping through celebrations Saitou Ho ohs.
Shoulda played in the main event, feel bad for him
People who aren’t as plugged in and/or money motivated probably weren’t the ones rolling up at the crack of dawn
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Emotions are high right now when people have spent time and money to not receive anything, I’m one of those. But I think this proved to be a good experience for the organizer in general and hopefully in future events there will be a better solution to make this less chaotic. This sort of thing reminded me of the sneaker/hype beast community and that could get ugly.
Hope to attend more regionals/signing events in the future.
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Would only allowing 1 per person be a good solution? I imagine it’ll bleed out time shuffling people around so wouldn’t necessarily let 3x the amount of people through the line but seems more equitable.
Not sure much can be done about people who have others buy panel tickets or stand in line for them and then come away with 30 but at least this would cut that down to 10.
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but wasn’t the que system supposed to away with early lines?
The thing is, besides for a lottery that’s truly random there is no “fair” way. Queues will always be abused. Whether it’s people legit just getting up at the crack ass of dawn and camping out or the more shady shit like paying off people, fudging texts, signing up multiple people at once, staff not queuing, line cutting, you name it, it happened this weekend. The ONLY reason me and a handful of others even got anything on Friday is because Saitou is an absolute BOSS and committed to staying until everyone in the current line was done. An extra 3 hours of sketches for the general line, and then he kept going until like 3AM for the panel folks.
If you abused the system this weekend. Go fuck yourself.
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Someone in discord joked that they would be drawing from the SMS line randomly.
Actually doesn’t seem that bad assuming the randomization is actually random. Set a registration window for in person sign ups and then draw randomly. As long as you are on line by X:00AM you get in the drawing. You can process registrations much more quickly if you don’t need to preserve the order in which people sign on. Just have 3 people with iPads sweep the line. You could even resolve the drawings immediately after sign up time window so people not selected aren’t left in the dark all day.
Additionally a fixed number of selections would allow you to better plan your operations/set limit on sigs/time spent per person. We plan to award 100 sigs so we need to limit each sig to X minutes. Everyone including the artist can have this expectation ahead of time.
No system is perfect and I’m far from an experienced event planner - this is just an idea I heard someone joking about.
I also think there could have been more effort to enforce TCPIs personalization requirements. There was a lot of smoke about how the rules are strict and that efforts were made to disincentivize reselling but that all seemed to be for show. Maybe personalization is determined based on SMS registration + ID/payment method match.
At the end of the day, as bad as all the line cutting or whatever else was, at the end of the day the only solution to this is the same as it’s always been: more supply.
Optimize the process in favor of speed and you’ll start to fix these issues.
Also to respond to your comment directly, absolutely 1 per person is a no brainer solution. It reduces the value of each successful call up to get a sig and thus reduces the return for each call up produced by system abuse.
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I just got back home after attending the signing this weekend. It was crazy, but so much fun to meet so many amazing people from E4 and the community. First off, a massive thank you to Alec for organizing this and bringing it to us. As much as we may be frustrated with certain aspects of the signing, the fact that there is one in the first place is wonderful. I also want to second @pfm’s earlier post about how Alec and the organizers were open to any and all constructive feedback about the event. When it was brought to their attention that people were presenting fake texts to get back into the signing line after already getting cards signed on Friday, it was immediately remedied. I can’t speak for how Sunday went in practice as I didn’t go, but from Friday to Saturday and Saturday to Sunday, there were significant improvements in management. It is impossible to predict how these things will go and in my opinion, the organizers did the best they could with the hand they were dealt.
I don’t know what you do in order to make this better to be honest. Making a lottery system and having people travel all the way for a chance at signatures is in my opinion worse than a first-come, first-serve line system assuming line issues are addressed. If you do an online lottery so people don’t travel unless they win, it will be botted. Regardless of what you do, the flippers and whales will always be there until demand is satisfied. Coming out of covid and with the massive increase in signed card interest, I am not surprised that this weekend’s signings went the way they did.
With regards to the Saitou signing, I think the single most important factor this weekend was Saitou simply wanting to make each card unique and memorable. He took on average 6-8 minutes per person. As I’m sure people know by now, you could get any Pokemon sketched on any card, the sketches were multiple colors, he would do English or Japanese signature, he personalized each one, and dated them as well. He was not in a rush. It’s clear he prioritized quality over quantity, and to be honest I don’t think any of us can tell him he should have done differently. However I can almost guarantee I’d have the opposite opinion if I paid for travel, a hotel, waited 8-12 hours per day, and walked out with nothing. And if I had shown up 15-30 minutes later each day, I would have nothing.
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They should dramatically raise prices. I’ve never seen more strategic personalizations. A price increase would eliminate a lot of the secondary profit margin. I feel for Alec and others who organized the event. Another episode of no good deed goes unpunished in pokemon.
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Continuing on the theme of “I don’t know what they can do to fix this,” a price increase is absolutely warranted but then screws “regular people” out of a signed card. The market price for a Saitou signature would be something like $200-250 right now. I feel like what Arita did a few years ago with a tiered pricing system for personalized vs non-personalized is best, but now with Pokemon requiring personalization on all cards and the “personalization” being avoided so frequently and efficiently, I don’t know how effective it would be. I also don’t know if Pokemon would let Saitou or any other artist charge the actual market price for their signatures.
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