We are constantly looking for ways to improve Auto Assembly. We know that that convention is far from perfect and while most of you seemed to enjoy Auto Assembly 2011, we know that there were things that didn't go according to plan or there were things that we could have done better.

At the same time, we know that there are things that many of you would love to see, guests you'd like to see at future events or ideas that you may have for general improvements for the convention so we've decided to give you all a chance to have YOUR SAY to help influence what we do here at Auto Assembly.

We are running this virtual "suggestion box" here and on a number of other forums to get your thoughts on the convention so we can start work now on Auto Assembly 2012 so we have plenty of time to make plans and to help us make Auto Assembly 2012 even better than ever!

Simon

Definately more organised, in all areas - control desk and volunteers especially

Already got one volunteer signed up - one of the better ones who helped Martin out with the guests and they're back doing the same job again! Think we're so far ahead with a lot of areas compared with last year that we shouldn't have the same problems anyway!

Can we have Stephen Baskerville do a postcard himself? I think it would be in style like Andrew Grimlock postcard with the way Stephen did his UK covers.

We've already got quite a few of the ideas in place for the postcards already but how many we produce is all down to sponsors. The more sponsors we get, the more postcards we can produce (assuming the artwork is in place to go with it) but we do have certain artists in mind already for what we want to do...

That Grimlock postcard Andrew did does match in with Stephens art style if you put next to the cover he did around #253.

This is just an idea my dad shot at me a few days ago and I thought I may as well post it up anyway. He was thinking about maybe having pin badges either for sale or as part of the goodie bag with each image relating to the past winners of each cosplay competition with the corresponding year on it. So this year would be an image of Blackarachnia with 2011 written somewhere on it.


His other idea was to make metal casts (or even plastic molds) of some characters to sell each year rather than exclusive toys like Botcon. So it's kinda like taking models the same size as Games workshop's smaller characters (soldiers mainly) but using Transformer characters instead, so the idea is that they are sold in packets so the buyer actually has to build it and paint it themselves.

I can see the second of the two ideas being the harder one, I was tempted to leave it out but my father was being pushy about it.

We did do pin badges a few years ago but they took us several years before the entire production run sold (and in the end we included the remainder in our goodie bags because they stopped selling) so we barely broke even on them.

Selling figures of any kind, even in kit form would mean that they would need to be licensed from Hasbro. We certainly wouldn't go down the third-party route and anything that would require custom moulds to be made would also prove to be very costly, certainly for the sort of low production run we'd be talking about for the convention. The only sort of figure-based exclusive that I honestly think would sell would be a figure, and to do that we'd really need to be able to work with Hasbro to make it an official toy.

What about pen sets? That Titan get them done up for the comics - don't go with the toy guns, we dont want those. Square erasers with an image printed on them [of guests - ie for this year would be Prowl, Sen Prime, Perceptor, Swoop etc]- be too costly to do shaped ones.

How about creating a mascot character for Auto Assembly? Could be a completely original character, or you could go the cool route and just adopt Bob...

We had a rough design for a mascot done by Liam Shalloo a couple of years ago which I still have on my PC and it is something I'd like to think about at some point in the future once we've settled down in our new home at the Hilton. The transition from 2011 to 2012 is a pretty big one for us so we don't want to try to do too much this year and over-stretch ourselves.

We do have access to a supplier who can produce pens and pencils but they're usually limited in terms of what artwork can go on them and still keep them affordable to us to produce. Certainly something like that would have to be a goodie bag item rather than something for sale as I really don't see that people would pay for a pen or pencil, no matter what was on it and we'd have to place a minimum order of 1,000 for any design if not more so being realistic we'd be limited to single colour artwork / logo.

Shame to hear the last time you did badges it didn't go so well, I wish I could have been around to get one but nevermind. I can also see the problem about making models and such, I was sorta suspecting such a problem would occur anyway.

Thinking about the pen and pencil idea I would say that could be quite successful, my friend collects pens so she would happy. I would say a simple design would probably have to be just the Decepticon and/or Autobot symbols on it.

Even using the symbols will cause us problems as they are Hasbro's copyright so we have to be careful with anything that we intend to sell or give away. Our own logo is safe but it's yet another thing we have to bear in mind! Being serious though, any pens or something similar would have to be given away and the cheapest we would be looking at is around £350 to get basic pens produced for every attendee with a single colour image, and around £150 for pencils.

I do like the idea of a pen set - but with it being pens it would be in same style as the postcards - apart from the postcards can be collected in sets & sold later on. But red pencil with AA in black would be nice. Or somethign for storing your postcards from past conventions? not single storage slots - just like a wallets that can hold about 10 postcards.

Here's a suggestion in regards to a convention exclusive toy, rather than getting a new character made up for this first time how about getting Hasbro torelease a previously unreleased in the UK figure as a sort of exclusive for the convention (like TFA Arcee, ROTF Bludgeon or something) or one that was never released by Hasbro, but was fully developed, but was just not released for some reason in the end (like TFA Blackout or some of those last wave Scout figures for RTS or something)