I know I'm in the minority, but I will miss BotCon and the FunPub team. While they were not perfect, and could use some updated tech, this team of 6 were deticated to the fans. Seeing Brian, Pete, and Leeny in tears during the round table panel says it all. I've only been coming to BotCon since 2010 so I was only around for 'the bad time,' but I always had fun at the convention. I found it more enjoyable then the mega conventions like PAX or the Wizard World cons. I knew at BotCon that I could talk transformers and be accepted by any group. While some of the exclusive were not perfect (they did crack jokes about various heads during both the roundtable and BotCon retrospective panels) they pulled from niche or special parts of the history that I liked seeing.

I'm less optimistic for the future then most. I don't see a large corporation wanting to spend money on multiple conventions for their properties. I also don't expect the unique exclusives we've gotten in the past, at best maybe something like the ratchet from the custom class this year where the tooling already existed. Oh, and don't expect to see custom classes or tours, the tours were a big selling point when my wife and son come. I hope I'm wrong, but I just can't get excited about the future right now.

Ultimately, BotCon was about the people, so I hope to see everyone again at whatever hasbro decides or a possible TFCon trip next year

 

Darn it Vangelus, I really thought I could skip that weird barbarian headmaster Alpha Trion, but your enthusiasm is so infectious! You owe me $24 come 3rd quarter!

 

Agreed. The FunPub team always had the best of intentions re: the fans even if the end result was sometimes lacking.

Yeah, I'm not expecting much out of Hasbro when it comes to exlusives. Vangelus, TJ, and Aaron were all right when they speculated that Hasbro can more easily communicate and coordinate with factories, but I don't see them bringing the same creative energy to the process that FunPub did.
Look at Hasbro's track record of convention exclusives. It's full of retail release decked out in chrome, clear plastic, or new paint schemes. No cool yet obscure characters. No out there concepts.
Not to say that Hasbro can't up their game if they start running conventions themselves, but given what their track record looks like so far? I'm not impressed.

I never said Aligned's failure was all his fault. It was his initiative though. It ended up directionless, uninspired, inconsistent, and dull. That's not all on him, but he was the head guy in charge. Buck stops here and all of that.

As for the tfwiki article...it mainly draws on the testimony of Rick Alvarez. I don't blame tfwiki for that, as its some of the only first hand info available.
That being said? Alvarez's objectivity, especially in light of how he presented that information, needs to be considered when reading that article.

 

Oh I don't think that there's a fear that the social aspect will be snuffed out in a Hasbro-run fan convention. It's kind of hard to do that unless you just make it unpleasant for people to be there. As much as people crapped on FunPub for the last five years? People generally still enjoyed the social aspect of BotCon.

My biggest concern is the potential loss of those creative niche exclusives. Unofficial conventions do some neat things with third party cooperation, but FunPub's ability to create entire sets using official moulds was one of the draws to the show. They really started to over-do it, and Hasbro could probably afford to scale the number of exclusives down.
It's the creativity of the exclusives that I fear will suffer. Exclusives for an official fan convention should embrace the niche. FunPub understood that. Hasbro has yet to prove that they do.

As for your call to action...I very rarely made it to BotCon. I always make TFCon Canada though, with it being less than an hour away from home. So I've got those bases covered.
I'm just concerned that one of the things that made BotCon stand out might be lost, if Hasbro is unable to up their convention exclusive game.