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Blue Raptor:
I didn't want to moan at first, but since "Any feedback is greatly appreciated!", here's my take.

First of all, I am not just "angry because I did not get a room". It's not the first time I failed the initial run. I am even confident I may still manage to get in with a friend somehow. And I have no problem not getting a room if I insert my request into a system where I have a fair chance and just end up unlucky, because with the numbers as they are, some people have to.

But my gripe is this.

You tell people to get up at a sleepy time to use a web thing, that you absolutely must use because it creates something personalized to mail to the hotel.
When it crashed (*because just everyone retrying all over, or someone using scripts, which was highly foreseeable?), you left everyone retrying with no information on like the Telegram EF-Notification channel whatsoever for a long time.
Then at 7:52 you tell them to "hold on tight please".
On 8:13 you write the method has changed, (not will change but has, at whatever time in the past), and that they now need to hastily type in as little information as possible to be as fast as possible to send a mail to the hotel.
Which is in itself very stressful for everyone, prone to result in typos and badly filled out information, worse for people not good at English, and a death sentence for everyone who just happened to be in the bathroom for a few minutes.

But at that time, from what I can gather now, even if you saw it the very second it popped up and quickly pasted together a mail, hundreds of people already knew of this long before because some people either were told so in their registration when it worked for blink, or somehow figured it out, and word of mouth over a lot of channels was MUCH faster than your official information, so that by then pretty much noone had a real chance anymore anyway.

So you once again defaulted to a system where you have to do something really quickly once you get a key knowledge, but instead of announcing that first, with a fair warning when you will give this key, you apparently just swapped to it, and did not give out this key to everyone on official channels even while it already spreaded more or less secretly anywhere else.
This is bewildering to me.

And you ran into a mess again that was highly forsee-able (and foreseen!), and then just roll with an don't fix it.

You could fix it. Even now still. You CAN say "Our method failed, all reservations are cancelled, please instead fill out <this>, add the code we will give you at <time> via <these channels> and then e-mail it to the hotel."

But you don't. Instead, you once again punish people for trusting you and your information, and reward bypassing and dirtiness.

Blue Raptor:
PS: my recurring raffle / room waiting list suggestion:

Make room booking a raffle. Give people time to apply for it and then process all the applications in a random order. You can write down in advance what you want, because there's not THAT many options for first choice, second choice, third choice... when you can also specify in which order to change room type up, room type down, persons, and duration of stay when none of your choices are available.

Or assign everyone registered until the dealine a random room waiting list number in which order the hotel processes the requests. If it goes into the e-mail subject, they can just sort the unanswered mails by subject to do so.
(You could additionally declare that only everything below number Rxxxx will be processed at a given time, like 50 more each morning and each afternoon, so people can even settle things with the hotel without many rooms going away at the time.)
And when you did not make it, it would become your waiting list number and you could show the lowest number in the waiting list so they can estimate if their chances are good or not.

Ninu:
I feel your pain.

Similar situation here. We have a small group of maybe 25 furs coming from Hungary, we were on at least half an hour prior to reg opening. Everything crashed, nothing loaded, and for an hour nothing.
We got the information late that the method suddenly changed. Even people who got the info at 8 13 and pasted it for us in our group Only 1 out of 25 got a room...

This whole ordeal collectively wasted countless hours from everyone, then we got an unfair registration as icing on the cake.

Thanks.

Chari:
Same response from Austria here.
Never before have I witnessed so many people from my country who sent the mail exactly at 8:13-8:14 as soon as it got released officially to everyone and did not get a room and not even the chance for a waiting list spot.
They all just got denied.
I only know like 3 or 4 ppl who actually got a room this way.
Oh and: I got a room. Because I could get my hands on my token and therefor could send an email way before 8 o clock and got lucky this way.
Make a fair system, or I'll make sure that next year I also spam 100 mails to the hotel to get a higher chance of getting a room. Pff

Equinn:
Hey all,

I will not go into the rant part of things as many others before me have done so so...I'll just express my support for a lottery system, as suggested above.

In the FAQ that has been recently posted you state that it's "already like a lottery system". Then why make it appear as a first come first served system, which does nothing else but introduce stress and grief and encourages cheating/spamming/etc. You are just making your and everybody else's life that much harder.
So here is how I'd imagine the solution (a possible solution):

1. Attendees should have 1-2 weeks after the registration date to choose what type of room they want and who would be their roomies (by name/reg number, not just number of roomies)
2. Once that time is up run a script that goes through the preferences, (similar to how it was suggested above), and randomly distributes the room as best as it can according to those preferences
3. Send an email (not manually but automatically) to each attendee informing them of the result (for their particular booking intention), and at the same time send email templates filled with all the data that has been entered, for each attendee (who requests a room, and got a room through the lottery obviously) in that 2 week registration period , to Estrel, over the course of some reasonable time, thus they are able to process the bookings in their own way at a decent pace. No need for a rush since only the amount of available rooms would be distributed.
4. No chance for exploits from the fandom, no rush, no server crashes, no questions about fairness (everyone has the exact same chance), and everyone who gets a room will already have their roomies registered in the booking as well, thus negating that whole weird section in the FAQ about why a lottery would be somehow less fair than this current disaster.
5. Profit
6. If people cancel reservations in the following couple months (for example to may or june), another lottery run could redistribute the accumulated free rooms, if any.


Cheers,

Equinn

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