Blizzard, why in in the hell can’t you figure out how to plan and schedule a Con in this day and age? It’s not like this is a new event, and you weren’t sure of the particpation.
Blizzcon tickets went on sale today, and by all accounts were for all intents and purposes sold out seconds after they went on sale. I say this since I was refreshing the page every few seconds, and entered the queue in the time it took me to do 2 mouse clicks, and had a fairly low queue #. By my estimation, the stock of tickets were pratically alotted within about 4 seconds based on this.
Queue lengths minutes after the 10am deadline were 21,000 PLUS, and yet the entire amount available for sale were gone by about 3,000 in the queue.
And yet, flipping scalpers minutes afterwards have them on EBay. :rolleyes:
Obviously you need to either find a larger location, or extend the timing of this event. Either that, or limit it to 1 per registered account so you don’t have asshats scalping. This whole thing just seems to generate a lot of frustration each year. The certainly improved the checkout system this year over last, but I guess that doesn’t help if you’re out of them immediately.
I was looking at grabbing a couple myself, never had a chance. I can see where being able to purchase 4 at a time and such are good things for big wow playing families (they do exist). But of course they could just as easily force you to enter player handles at purchase and make the pass be something that is account bound and has to be printed from your player account or make you aquire a code from your account that allows you to buy tickets and binds them to your billing info or something so that the purchasing player has to be present at checkin.
I can’t decide if a convention based around a game developer is more or less sad than anime conventions. It’s a step up from furry conventions at least.
Mmmmh, somewhat less sad, since it’s intended to showcase new stock and raise interest in new product. And since there’s such a huge social and competetive element to Blizzard’s products (and they’re effectively boycotting E3) it makes sense to throw open the doors and let the people come to them.
Of course, tickets should be given a staggered release. Blizzard doesn’t care, of course; why would they? The people who got tickets will be there and happy and the ones who didn’t, won’t.
Well…I actually thought that compared to last year, this year’s Blizzcon ticket sales was an absolute dream.
Yeah, they didn’t have enough tickets. They should get a bigger venue and sell more tickets. But I arranged with my spouse, my guild leader, and his spouse that we would all try to get in, and whoever got in first would buy tickets for all of us. We all live in California, so this might have helped.
When the site went live, here’s what happened:
GL’s wife got in immediately (no queue) but got some kind of error checking out. She called Customer Support and got in immediately.
GL was position 800-something in the queue.
I was position 3400-something.
My spouse was position 3500-something.
We watched the estimated time to beginning of queue update in real time, watched the stock of tickets go down in real time…GL got in and bought us 5 tickets (4 for the 4 of us and one for another friend of his). Transaction went flawlessly. I stayed in the queue just to see if I’d actually get in (at position 3400-something), and I did. Once I found out, I left the queue so somebody else would get a chance. All of this took maybe 10 minutes. Maybe not that long.
The tickets sold out in 28 minutes. That’s actually better than most popular concerts I’ve seen. And remember, there’s another batch going on sale on May 30, so just make sure your Battle.net account is set up, your credit card number is on file, and click the hell out of that link shortly before 10 a.m.
It worked this time. Basically flawlessly. I thought I might faint, given how much of a clusterfuck it was last year.
We are going to try & score tickets for my husband and son during the next drop (May 30 or 31, I think it is), but I am also going to hit up a friend’s SO who works in tech support for Blizzard. I don’t want freebies, I just want the opportunity to get the frigging things!