Rhode Island Comic Con and the Importance of an Attendance Cap

So Rhode Island Comic Con was this past weekend, and apparently it was a bit of a mess. You see their venue was only capable of holding 17,000 people yet they sold well over 20,000 registrations. And they kept selling admissions.

This led to the Fire Marshalls having to step in, and as people left the event, they found themselves barred from re-entry.

Needless to say, attendees were a bit miffed, and the con staff has absolutely bungled the response. Anime Herald has some solid coverage for those curious. This brings up an important thing though: Attendance Caps.

While most of us don’t like finding out an event is sold out, attendance caps ensure that cons are fun for everyone… and you don’t have to worry about the authorities suddenly taking over your event. If you can only support X number of attendees, only sell X number of badges. Anime Detour used to have crowd issues until they instituted an Attendance cap, and now while the event sells out, you rarely hear complaints about the quality of their event.

Attendance caps are just good con management, and if an event’s staff can’t understand that, they maybe shouldn’t be operatiing a convention.

Via Anime Herald, Thanks for the tip Korfan!