What the...?

The General Idea

1. The MIT Schedules Office sets aside a large number of rooms by mid-December exclusively for Mystery Hunt teams to use as bases.
2. All teams wishing to use any of these rooms register for the Mystery Hunt at least three weeks in advance and list their room preferences on their registration form.
3. Teams get assigned to bases from the pool of reserved rooms at least two weeks before the Hunt.

...and out with the old. Your Mystery Hunt team no longer needs to:

• Go through the Schedules Office to find rooms on campus that are available for the weekend of the Mystery Hunt.
• Find a student group or faculty member with room-reservation bits to interact with the Schedules Office to reserve said room, if possible.
• Squat an empty yet un-reservable room the night before the Hunt, only to be woken up Friday morning by an angry professor who is teaching a class in the room you've completely rearranged and on whose floor you are sleeping. [Not that we'd know anything about this one... *cough*]

Key Dates

• The list of rooms in the pool will be posted on this page shortly after Thanksgiving.
• If you are not entering the Base Reservation System and are submitting a room reservation request to the MIT Schedules Office, you should do so by Friday December 19th.
• If you are entering the Base Reservation System, then you should register your team for the 2004 MIT Mystery Hunt by Friday December 26th and include your room preferences with registration.
• Teams are informed of their assigned bases by Friday January 2, 2004.
• Hunt starts Friday January 16, 2004.

The Details

What does this mean? To reserve these rooms for your team, you now need to go through us, rather than through the Schedules Office. (Ray Jones (thouis) from SETEC is the official liason between the Mystery Hunt Community and the Schedules Office, so he's doing all the real work-- we have other things to work on right now).

The good thing about this is that the Schedules Office has already set aside rooms for Mystery Hunt teams. You no longer need to get someone to reserve a room for you, you can do that directly through us by registering your team.

The neutral thing about this is that you won't officially know your base's location until 2 weeks before the Hunt. This should be a complete non-issue. If you care, don't.

The bad thing about this is that you aren't guaranteed a particular room. This is a definite minus. Sorry.
The reason for this is that as we won't have a finalized list of available rooms until just before the end of term, it doesn't seem fair to force people who register early to keep rooms they took before better ones became available. As such, we're taking all the rooms and all the teams' preferences and matching up as best we can, much like the EC room selection process.

Registering early helps us gauge how many more rooms we need to request from the Scheduling Office, if any, and what size, so please register as early as possible. You can always register now and then submit your room preferences later.

Answers

We won't know exactly where our base is located until 2 weeks before the hunt?

Are we guaranteed a room?

If you register early, then we get a better sense of how many total rooms we'll need and can work with the Schedules Office to get them. So, register early!. You can always re-rank your rooms later.

Bear in mind that if *we* can't get Mystery Hunt rooms, *nobody* can.

So completely non-MIT-affiliated teams now have a way to reserve a base?

Is this Mandatory?

In fact, teams that normally base themselves out of a room that the MIT Schedules Office doesn't administer, such as teams based out of nearby dorms or student-group lounges (like ESG), will find that we're trying to fix a problem they don't have. These teams should continue to do what has worked for them in the past. However, we hope that teams based out of isolated places, such as most West Campus dorms, will use the new system to get a more centrally located base on Main Campus.

Teams wishing to just squat a room and hope for the best can still do so, but we don't recommend it. The odds are very much against your picking a room that is totally unused during the entire weekend, and having to move your base once you've set up camp, while not difficult, is irritating and really sucks. Trust us.

Teams wishing to base themselves on Main Campus but that want to reserve a room without entering the Base Reservation System (so through the Schedules Office) can still do so. However, the Schedules Office would really rather you didn't. There are a few caveats:

• You cannot reserve any of the rooms in the pool, as the Schedules Office has already set them aside for us. If you want to use any of the rooms in the pool. you must use the Base Reservation System.
• If you want to reserve rooms on your own, the Schedules Office asks that you submit your requests before the end of term (Friday Dec. 19).
• As the Schedules Office has already granted us a large block of rooms, you might simply not be able to get a room you want on your own. This depends on what kind of room (equipment), what size, and where you're asking. Also, a request from us pretty much automatically trumps yours. It seems that it's easier for us to request a particular room be added to the pool that it will be for you to reserve it on your own.
• Buildings 1 and 2 are non-reservable during the Hunt, per the request of the Schedules Office. Please do not use them. Additionally, the entirety of Building 5 is in use Sunday from 1100-1400h, so you should avoid using it as well.