Good friends of ours that usually go missed out. Hopefully they can get tickets in the spring if people return some.
well we got tired of waiting. same thing with us, we would get tickets in cart then nothing. called the 800 number several times then said screw this. we called the local lyons number, spent exactly 15 minutes on hold, and still got the holiday price. i understand people are upset, but this should have been expected. and remember, the closer the festival gets, there are always face tickets on sale on craigslist or on this forum from people who suddenly can’t go. it’s a little early to vent so hard about passes. the last two years we didn;t decide to go untill the first of May. Last year was our honeymoon and we were able to get face 4 day passes and camping, and car passes also. all for face. and last year we also got all of the night grass tickets we wanted through various buys and trades. we got 4 yonders for face, traded two of them for peter rowan and so on. it’s all about getting creative. if you really want to go there are ways to do it without dealing with scalpers. thats the beauty of telluride. and its still early.
I wouldn’t mind at all paying a 5-10 dollar convenience fee to secure the $15.00 cheaper holiday ticket price considering the fact that I started my transaction just after 9:00 am, around 9:35 finally got the page offering holiday price tickets, ordered 2 … and then sat in limbo for over half an hour, just to come back with “empty cart” message. Ended up with regular priced tickets (via phone), which I am grateful for, however, it doesn’t negate the fact that I was “in the queue” long before holiday price tickets sold out and got screwed by the system.
Kevin
I think Craig said the preliminary line up would be out on the 21st.
Hopefully, something will shake loose for you!
I was thinking of your post this morning when I got shut out of tix for Furthur at the Ogden in Denver next Feb. It is a very high demand event (approx 6,500 will be attending the 1st Bank shows the following three nights) with limited supply. The Ogden is about 1,200 give or take … and I’m sure the allotment for direct online ticket sales was in the neighborhood of 500 or so when you back out the presale from Monday and the direct Mail Order (here’s another idea for TBF).
I knew it was going to be a tough ticket regardless, but have to admit the waiting room made me a little ancy. It was restraining myself not to click the web browser’s reload button for fear of losing my place in line in the waiting room … it was kind of like having an itch that you can’t scratch. Eventually I made it into the “purchase area” at about 10:04 (4 minutes after), but couldn’t pull up any tickets. The purchase area also made it so that upon each unsuccessful attempt to pull up tickets, a splash screen would countdown from 3 seconds … then you could click OK and try again. In other words, there was both a waiting room and a means to “throttle” requests to the server in order to mitigate load.
Part of me really didn’t like that “helpless feeling” of being in a waiting room and not being able to do anything, but I remembered your story and others who were moving in slow motion on the TBF servers only to be jilted for some oddball reason/error … or simply didn’t know the status of their request due to the server timing out on them in the final moments. As much as I didn’t like getting shut out via the waiting room, I think I’d prefer that over the slow motion roller coaster ride some of you went through on here.
The Ogden is hardly a big venue/operation, but they might be a an AEG venue … since they were running ticketing via http://www.axs.com. However, it’s possible such ticketing systems can be “rented” once or twice a year … if not developed in house vs. outsourcing entirely to Ticketmaster. In other words, I don’t believe it’s an either keep it the way it is or become Ticketmaster situation.
In a properly implemented solution, the queue would be tied to a session (or even a login), and not a physical connection to the server. Would reduce connections, and also make refreshing moot.
Wow I didn’t know that refreshing put you to the back of the line. I was jamming on that damn button because nothing was happening. Oops.
I’m not sure that’s the way it worked for PBG, though. I’m no specialist, so maybe I’m wrong, but I know my dad, mom, and brother were all locked up trying to get in and simply waiting (for upwards of an hour beginning at onsale time), and when I logged in and refreshed a few times when I got hung up, I was in and out in 15 minutes with 4 4-day passes. Maybe this is an indicator that something is not working the way it should be?
I didn’t even try, so can’t say for sure … but I was under the impression there was not a “waiting room” with the PB ticket sales. There was apparently insufficient hardware/software resources to accommodate the demand, thus an overloaded server. The
So, I don’t believe clicking refresh would’ve bumped you back in line (of a que involving other people) … but may have simply caused you to keep having to “start over” with a new request to the server. Basically, you’d just be starting over in the large free-for-all … which is almost the equivalent of a “known / accepted denial of service attack” … which apparently bogged down the server.
Imagine the three stooges all trying to get through the doorway, but they all get stuck because they’re all jammed in there at once. A que system would require Moe to go first, then Larry, then Curly (but would ideally incorporate an element of “randomness” for everyone who arrives at the waiting room at the same time vs. relying upon Moe’s idea of who should be first).
So, in that analogy I’m like Curly, but carrying a ladder. :wave