Tigermegatron wrote:On the Botcon FAQ it says that the live panels are open to everyone,even those who pay the General admission $20 fee. I can almost guarantee that the fun pub crew isn't going to allow the General admittance people to take seats away from those who paid over $300 for those admittance packages. Since the General admittance people have to wait outside for two hours each day on saturday & sunday while the $300 package atendees get in two hours before. it's a given that those who pay the $300 will run to the panel seats & sit their the whole day or take turns with other $300 package people filling the seats.
Panels don't work that way. You can't just sit in the room all day and take up space. Many conventions will mandate a room-clear either before or after a major panel in order to combat this, and many popular panels will line up for up to an hour before it, but usually not any more. (Exceptions to this are usually things like concerts. Which, by the way, why don't we get any cool concerts? Let's get Botch The Crab's band up there, fuck it. Or me!)
There will occasionally be times where you can duck into a panel towards the end of it to get a spot for the next panel, but it's usually only if the next panel is a middle-of-the-road thing that doesn't matter much. For example, at Otakon last year I wanted to be at the Q&A panel for Johnny Yong Bosch, who played Adam the Black Ranger on Power Rangers and voices several popular anime characters like Vash the Stampede from Trigun. I think the panel before that was a Q&A with the creator of Modoka Magica or some other anime I don't care about. But I had nothing to do before the Bosch panel, so I just ducked into it in the last 15 minutes or so, picked where I wanted to sit, and then just hung out there. The Bosch panel didn't get an overwhelming amount of people so it didn't matter.
However, that night I attended the Voice Actors After Dark panel (because they're always kinda funny) where we had to line up for about an hour beforehand. I forget what panel was before it (I think it had something to do with vampires or zombies or something) but before we could go into the panel room, everyone who was there for the vampirezombie panel had to leave. The only way to attend both panels would be to get out of the room, possibly early, and then hurriedly get back in line and hope that you were early enough still that they hadn't reached capacity for the room.
And also, I've never heard of Botcon--or any convention--ejecting people from a panel unless they were causing problems. If you get in line like everyone else, then it doesn't matter how much you paid to get in. You're there.
(I also think it's kind of bullshit that Friday is excluded for general audiences, but then, I think it's bullshit that Botcon apparently has no middle-of-the-road $40-50 option that includes admission for all the days, but not any of the perks like the exclusive toys. Even a small, 3000-5000 person convention like MAGFest charges $50 for a three-day walk-in, so that's acceptable. MAGFest curbs this by offering registration for $30 and then $40 depending on how early you register. Plus, if you get in on a group rate of 8 or more people registering at once, then you get each badge for $30.)
