StarCityGames, 2011 to 2012
Concierge: the system large events ran on
I started at StarCityGames running events and taught myself to program to fix what slowed them down. Concierge was where that ended up: the system staff ran registration, seating, staffing, badges and cash on, at events of a thousand players and more.
The situation
Registration at large events ran on shared Google Docs. At peak events, Richmond among them, the line ran the length of the building, and a player with a problem had to find the one staffer who knew their case.
What I decided
- One admin-only system for registration and check-in, badge printing and scanning, seating and pairings, staffing, ticket issuance, cash reconciliation and reporting.
- Any staffer can serve any player with the full context in front of them, so nobody waits for the one person who knows.
- Role-based access and audit logs from the start, because the system handled cash.
- Standard training, deployment and on-site triage, so the system did not depend on me being at every event.
What resulted
At Grand Prix London, its first full production event, a registration line of about 100 people cleared in about ten minutes, and wait times stayed at effectively zero for the rest of the three days.
It went on to run SCG Grand Prix and Open Series events, used by hundreds of contractors and an internal operations team of about eleven, and served about 100,000 attendees.