Gisteren kwam het droevige nieuws naar buiten dat de derde editie van de succesvolle conventie in Manchester (UK) is afgelast. Net zoals bij Galileo7, heeft Showmasters ook locatie problemen ondervonden.

Vlak voor deze bekendmaking maakte Showmasters al bekend dat de locatie dubbelgeboekt was. Samen met dit bericht gaven ze aan dat het verplaats werd naar een ander weekend. Echter bleek dit achteraf een te impulsieve reactie zijn geweest.

Echter, vaak brengt slecht nieuws ook goed nieuws met zich mee. De organisatie heeft aangegeven hierdoor meer tijd te hebben voor zaken waarvan ze eerder van mening waren geen tijd voor te hebben. Ringcon (UK)is hier één van en zal hierdoor misschien vermoedelijk aan het eind van het jaar gehouden worden.

Showmasters poste het volgende op hun forum:

It's been an interesting couple of days. As you know, yesterday we discovered that our original dates for Collectormania G-Mex 3 were double booked, and that we would have to move them to 17th and 18th March, the only other dates in March we could run the show. These dates have also caused us some concern, so we have decided to just list the pros and cons and our thoughts of running the event at G-Mex in March.

Pros and Cons for going ahead:

Pros
There are a large number of fans, including many local to Manchester, who were looking forward to attend the event.

Cons
Our new dates do not work out for many of the guests we were closing deals with to attend Manchester.
Our new dates clash with Mothers Day, which will make it difficult for some people to attend, crew and fans alike.
Our new dates clash with St Patrick's Day, which will make it difficult for some people to attend.
Our new dates clash with a Manchester United home game vs. Bolton. This has a huge knock-on effect on hotels in the town, affecting our guest and crew accommodation, and which will also hit people travelling to Manchester to attend the event.
Our new dates clash with an event run by our friends at Tenth Planet, something we wish to avoid.
Our new dates also clash with a number of other events in other parts of the country; as well as not wanting to clash with them, several of our crew and other people who would otherwise attend will be affected.

We've come to the conclusion that this event is just not meant to be for March, so we have decided that it is best to cancel this event. It really saddens us to have to do this, as we really enjoy running this event and we were looking forward to putting on an event to be proud of, but with so much stacked against it, that would be hard to achieve. Sorry to those that have been inconvenienced.

On a positive note, this leaves us free time now to develop some projects that we didn't feel we had time to run. One of these is Ringcon UK; upon talking to Dirk tonight (the organiser of Ringcon Germany) we both agreed we would have time to run Ringcon at the end of the year. We will be in discussions tomorrow to schedule dates for this year's Ringcon, and should be announcing dates for it in the next few days.

We would like to reassure everybody that we will be going back to Manchester, and in fact the dates for the next Manchester event will be 17th and 18th November 2007.

Met dank aan MiVo die ons op de hoogte hield via het Federation forum.