I attempted to alleviate this by breaking the party into two days. Some people noted that coming to the second day gave you the feeling that you had "missed out" on the main event (which you basically had, but which I don't think was actually dramatically worse than "everyone went to see a good movie and/or play a really good game yesterday, and they were all excited and talking about it.")

It was noted that having the ritual on the second day might address that issue. It may not be possible for logistical reasons (people need to be able to stay up late after the ritual because they'll want to do that, so you can't have it on Sunday evening, but then the non-ritual event needs to be on Friday, which may be harder for people to make when they're coming from out of state)

More on this problem later. But basically - I think people are overly critical of group consent when the word ritual gets tacked onto an activity, but the general concern of "how to hold megameetups that are valuable and encourage many people to come but don't alienate and/or annoy people" is an important one.