Ticket and Badge Relaunch
Badges, tickets, and merch will go back on sale next Tuesday at 8pm ET.
Tech Update
Tabletop.events successfully launched another large convention this Tuesday and is confident and prepared for NOVA Open's re-launch next week. Last night the NOVAOpen staff team stress tested the system.
Clearing Existing Carts
After reviewing the data, talking to our volunteers, and reading over the many comments on social media, NOVA Open will be resetting all carts in TTE before our new sales launch. The existing carts are too riddled with duplicates and corrupted data to provide a fair purchasing experience for all attendees. For example, more than 200 SuperNOVAs and over 11,000 weekend passes ended up in carts during the system glitch.
Don't worry, if you were one of the lucky few who were able to successfully purchase items, you will be able to keep them. For everyone else, starting fresh will ensure all attendees have a fair chance of buying badges and tickets. If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at customerservice@novaopen.com.
Badge Discounts, SuperNOVAs, and Giveaways
We are excited to announce that we are doing several things to ensure Launch 2.0 is the best it can be!
Launch Day Badge Discount
NOVA Open will discount all badges on launch day to offset the Tabletop.Events portion of fees. This discounted price will be available until 11:59PM ET on April 22. This is a great opportunity to grab your convention access pass and our way of thanking you for your patience & understanding. You can see the updated badge pricing today by visiting the badges page.
SuperNOVAs
We are increasing the number of SuperNOVA passes from 150 to 160 to ensure that everyone still has an equal shot when sales re-launch next week.
Additionally, every person who had a SuperNOVA in their cart before it was wiped will be included in next year's SuperNOVA presale drawing, regardless of whether they are able to get a SuperNOVA pass at re-launch.
Artist CAP Giveaways
As a special treat for Launch 2.0 weekend, we are partnering with several of our artist instructors to give away a Convention Access Pass to NOVA Open 2025! Follow Eric Swinson, Oscar Lars, Aaron Lovejoy, Myles David, and NOVA Open's social media for more info.
Techie Corner
We know the NOVA Open community is filled with a lot of technical folks, so here are some more details about what happened last week.
The Tabletop.Events and BoardGameGeek teams (yes, TTE is owned by BGG!) investigated what went wrong and traced the issue to what appears to be a flaw that has existed for quite some time but only exploded under very specific circumstances last week.
Whenever you visit the page to purchase badges, the site looks up whether you already have any badges so it can display them in addition to the list of badges you can buy. It turns out this lookup was scanning the whole table of all badges across TTE instead of filtering to just the NOVA Open. This is that tricky kind of bug that very slowly gets worse over time as the number of badges across conventions increases. For NOVA Open, we had a confluence of three factors that made it a fatal bug for our launch: (1) There have been many thousands of new badges created since NOVA Open 2024 across all TTE events, (2) We brought over 900 people in the first 5 minutes (Wow! You all rock!), (3) Scaling out to more web servers may have actually exacerbated the problem by multiplying the number of hits to that slow query.
The Tabletop.Events tech team has now applied the right filtering and indexing and has done a top to bottom scrub looking for slow performing queries. We are confident that this issue is fixed before Launch 2.0.
We are thankful for how transparent and proactive Tabletop.Events has been in working to rectify this issue and communicate with our team.