Real evidence that the lottery is better....

[inog]

Real evidence that the lottery is better: look at how the “old system” worked for Coachella ….

A quick review from today:

Burning Man listings on Stub Hub: 79

Coachella listings for weekend one: 850+

(I would guess Stub Hub has already sold 1,000+ Coachella tickets, maybe much much more, but that is supposition.)

Coachella tickets were first come first serve, like Burning Man was last year.

Coachella weekend one sold out in seconds. Literally – even if you were on the second they went on sale, you were dropped in a que and had to wait to find out if you still got a ticket.

The Burning Man lottery is better.

Granted, the current system can be further improved by weighting some tickets to people in key camps, or setting aside 10k tickets to past burners, but from now on, until the event is no more, not everyone that wants to go can go.

** And yeah... the Coachella people are having their own little whine party, some calling for a Burning Man style lottery.

[lemur]

[alt12]

burners, but from now on, until the event is no more, not everyone that wants to go can go.

Apples-to-oranges comparison and a ludicrously pre-mature proclamation. Who knows how many people even show up this year, much less for the next however many years... Some years, demand drops off (usually after a challenging one).... If the playa is too crunch for bikes this year (could be with so little rain so far, but we'll how spring looks), if gets normally cold versus the idyllic weather of the last 2 years, etc. etc. lots of non-dedicated only-here-to-party people won't come back...It happened before..... And then lets not forget the impact of the broader economy....

Finally, we have no idea how the supply will shake out either. It is possible BLM lifts the cap higher at some point or the BMORG LLC purchases land somewhere, etc. etc....

[Dusty McShroomface]

Well, it really is hard to compare the two since Coachella is for spectators but at Burning Man, the ticketholders ARE the show...
Coachella sold out in seconds because they had a layaway system in place that started last June way before the lineup was announced. If you wanted to go, regardless of lineup because you trusted the promoters, you plunk down your credit card and make monthly payments.

[vargaso]

Not sure how Coachella works, but as stated elsewhere on the boards, Burning Man tickets aren't mailing out until June and most ticket sites don't allow people to sell something they don't have physical possession of, so I believe that is the reason for such low numbers of scalped BM tickets online at this point. We won't really know how well the system worked until June when people start receiving the tickets in the mail.

[The CO]

** And yeah... the Coachella people are having their own little whine party, some calling for a Burning Man style lottery.

Kinda like the people that were whining last year for the burn to use a lottery style sysem...

[AbundantChoice]

Not sure how Coachella works, but as stated elsewhere on the boards, Burning Man tickets aren't mailing out until June and most ticket sites don't allow people to sell something they don't have physical possession of, so I believe that is the reason for such low numbers of scalped BM tickets online at this point. We won't really know how well the system worked until June when people start receiving the tickets in the mail.

Since last year, Coachella uses a braided fabric wristband (with RFID chip no less) that doesn't get mailed out until the middle of the summer.

[5280MeV]

Not sure how Coachella works, but as stated elsewhere on the boards, Burning Man tickets aren't mailing out until June and most ticket sites don't allow people to sell something they don't have physical possession of, so I believe that is the reason for such low numbers of scalped BM tickets online at this point. We won't really know how well the system worked until June when people start receiving the tickets in the mail.

Don't know about most of them, I know that ebay apparently does not allow the sale of a ticket that is not "in hand". StubHub does allow the sale of a ticket "not in hand" but that you have purchased. However, ticket sellers on StubHub are not paid until StubHub receives the physical ticket from the seller.

[mshaman]

Inog,
Are you a member of a theme camp or an art collective? Have you ever staged a massive installation or a camp with multiple domes and a donation budget that at minimum doubles the median national income? It takes time, money, and people. That takes planning. Certainty. The lottery, especially as implemented, destroys our ability to plan, fund, and staff large-scale undertakings. I have been articulating this point relentlessly, and it seems that people just aren't listening, or don't value having camps like Death Guild, sculptures like multiple tractor-trailer rigs stacked on top of each other, or 80-ton Trojan horses with hundreds of people to build, them light them, and perform with them. Perhaps you don't like having your choice of sound camps, each of which is superior to most permanent night-club installations, for free. Perhaps these things aren't important to you. That's okay. If you do manage to get a ticket, you won't find them in force on the playa this year because the camps that brought them to you have been devastated. Read the Theme Camp thread and look at the body count.

To me this isn't proof that a lottery where we don't know if we'll come up with anything until it's too late to put a meaningful project together is better than first come first serve, it is proof that tickets need to be non-transferable except through STEP. Problem solved. No hoarding, no scalping. To compare the two events is apples and oranges.

Coachella is a music festival, it is 3 days, with paid acts and less art. As far as I know, it doesn't depend on donations, artists, and volunteers to build it... a high-dollar sound and light company comes in and handles staging for a fee. Much of the art is recycled Burning Man wares, and there are no theme camps per se. If you want Burning Man to be Coachella, to have no theme camps, smaller and less art, and no mutant vehicles, the combination of the lottery and transferable tickets is helping ensure you're almost there. Mix in a double in ticket demand because of the viral promotion of the event by burners commemorating themselves online, and you're all the way there. Now if we could just commercialize it and pay Perry Ferrel or Madonna to show up and patronize us, we'd have it made.

[lemur]

Inog,
Are you a member of a theme camp or an art collective? Have you ever staged a massive installation or a camp with multiple domes and a donation budget that at minimum doubles the median national income? It takes time, money, and people. That takes planning. Certainty. The lottery, especially as implemented, destroys our ability to plan, fund, and staff large-scale undertakings. I have been articulating this point relentlessly, and it seems that people just aren't listening, or don't value having camps like Death Guild, sculptures like multiple tractor-trailer rigs stacked on top of each other, or 80-ton Trojan horses with hundreds of people to build, them light them, and perform with them. Perhaps you don't like having your choice of sound camps, each of which is superior to most permanent night-club installations, for free. Perhaps these things aren't important to you. That's okay. If you do manage to get a ticket, you won't find them in force on the playa this year because the camps that brought them to you have been devastated. Read the Theme Camp thread and look at the body count.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

[vargaso]

Not sure how Coachella works, but as stated elsewhere on the boards, Burning Man tickets aren't mailing out until June and most ticket sites don't allow people to sell something they don't have physical possession of, so I believe that is the reason for such low numbers of scalped BM tickets online at this point. We won't really know how well the system worked until June when people start receiving the tickets in the mail.

Since last year, Coachella uses a braided fabric wristband (with RFID chip no less) that doesn't get mailed out until the middle of the summer.

Ah, that's interesting, didn't know that. In that case, hell, maybe the lottery was pretty successful in weeding out scalpers, which means the rest of us are shit out of luck! Ha.

[mshaman]

Inog,
Are you a member of a theme camp or an art collective? Have you ever staged a massive installation or a camp with multiple domes and a donation budget that at minimum doubles the median national income? It takes time, money, and people. That takes planning. Certainty. The lottery, especially as implemented, destroys our ability to plan, fund, and staff large-scale undertakings. I have been articulating this point relentlessly, and it seems that people just aren't listening, or don't value having camps like Death Guild, sculptures like multiple tractor-trailer rigs stacked on top of each other, or 80-ton Trojan horses with hundreds of people to build, them light them, and perform with them. Perhaps you don't like having your choice of sound camps, each of which is superior to most permanent night-club installations, for free. Perhaps these things aren't important to you. That's okay. If you do manage to get a ticket, you won't find them in force on the playa this year because the camps that brought them to you have been devastated. Read the Theme Camp thread and look at the body count.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Lemur, If you're going to disagree that's cool, please take the time to expand, and articulate specifically what it is you find fallacious.

[bluesbob]

Coachella has hotels and motels, restaurants, gas stations, markets, etc. It's not in the middle of nowhere, not a self-reliance event. It's very popular. So scalpers are more willing to buy in the chance they will resell. Burning Man on the other hand...

[inog]

I do not think the current lottery system is the BEST option, but I do think it is BETTER than what happened before.

I think the change was good. I think further change is going to make it better.

I think people need to turn around and quit complaining about what is clearly an improvement, and instead focus on how to further improve and manage in this new paradigm.

Try and see the good. Then look for the better.

[bluesbob]

There is no good. BRC is fucked up at the moment. In case you haven't been reading, many mainstays that keeps the city running have no tickets. You can yank the infrastructure out of a smaller event and it will survive. Try yanking the rug out from under 55,000 and see what happens. No Rangers, no Recycling Camp, no DWP, no Fire Conclave, no Post Office, no Center Camp volunteers, no mutant vehicles, no dancing because their aren't any sound camps...AND NO ART...the list goes on.

[Rice]

I have no doubt that there will be different theme camps this year. It is probable that some will scale down. And yes, some will just not be there.

How exactly is not having a specific theme camp actually bad for Burning Man??

If a sound camp is gone, I am sure as heck not going to shed a tear. (Would this not reduce the fratt-boys, raver / tourists ???)

I am sorry you or your buddy/wife/girlfriend/lovers did not get a ticket in the lottery. It is February and the burn happens at the end of August. Maybe after the dust settles and the panic subsides a bit tickets will start to end up in more people's hands...

I have no doubt that there will be art, art cars, sound stages, theme camps, mutant vehicles, jackassery ... No, it wont be the same as last year.

I look forward to it.

[mshaman]

I do not think the current lottery system is the BEST option, but I do think it is BETTER than what happened before.

I think the change was good. I think further change is going to make it better.

I think people need to turn around and quit complaining about what is clearly an improvement, and instead focus on how to further improve and manage in this new paradigm.

Try and see the good. Then look for the better.

Dude, I am diametrically opposed you you on this issue, but I like and respect the above statements. I don't like the lottery one bit because as I've said, I think it will kill undertakings of scale. But, I do like that that you want to move forward and make it better next year.

[mshaman]

I have no doubt that there will be different theme camps this year. It is probable that some will scale down. And yes, some will just not be there.

How exactly is not having a specific theme camp actually bad for Burning Man??

If a sound camp is gone, I am sure as heck not going to shed a tear. (Would this not reduce the fratt-boys, raver / tourists ???)

I am sorry you or your buddy/wife/girlfriend/lovers did not get a ticket in the lottery. It is February and the burn happens at the end of August. Maybe after the dust settles and the panic subsides a bit tickets will start to end up in more people's hands...

I have no doubt that there will be art, art cars, sound stages, theme camps, mutant vehicles, jackassery ... No, it wont be the same as last year.

I look forward to it.

I won't miss most sound camps, either. I've heard enough of the same tired dub-step to last 10 lifetimes. But I will miss the sheer size of the undertakings that once were. The reason to drive an extra 2000 miles to BM vs. my regional is the SCALE. If I want to see what kind of crap I can slap together with a couple of friends in a month of weekends, I can do that 60 miles from home. Burning Man is about SCALE. Epic rocket ships that are 10 stories tall, steel sculptures of women so big and beautiful that the strands of their hair is made of logging chain, video screens that are bigger than an office building and have scaffolds, platforms, and layers for people to pop in and out of the images, a giant Rubik's cube that you can play interactively, and a full-size viking ship that glides around the playa. No one seems to get that these things which make Burning Man special, better than the regionals, take the ability to plan and that this ticket system precludes it.

[vargaso]

A good analogy would be booking Radiohead to headline your festival where bands are required to buy tickets via a lottery, and after the lottery is done, oops, Thom Yorke didn't get a ticket.

(He's the singer.)

[stinkyfoot]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Lemur, If you're going to disagree that's cool, please take the time to expand, and articulate specifically what it is you find fallacious.

Well, allow me a little presumptuous here, but I think he's probably responding to the sentiment expressed here and in other forums that large theme camps are what make the event or that the continuation of camps in their current forms are intrinsic to the event. They may have made the event last year, but if you consider how this campout on the desert has changed over it's 20+ year history, well, your line of reasoning looks like exactly what it is, nothing but self-righteous whinging.

As a personal anecdote, I don't think I've heard any non-theme camper complaining about the potential lack of theme camps yet. So scale back, change it around, find people who are going, merge, go solo or just don't go, but quit assuming that it isn't going to be Burning Man without you or your camp or your stage. If you're in that much of a rut, I hear a good dose of psilocybin can help you out with that.

[mshaman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Lemur, If you're going to disagree that's cool, please take the time to expand, and articulate specifically what it is you find fallacious.

Well, allow me a little presumptuous here, but I think he's probably responding to the sentiment expressed here and in other forums that large theme camps are what make the event or that the continuation of camps in their current forms are intrinsic to the event. They may have made the event last year, but if you consider how this campout on the desert has changed over it's 20+ year history, well, your line of reasoning looks like exactly what it is, nothing but self-righteous whinging.

As a personal anecdote, I don't think I've heard any non-theme camper complaining about the potential lack of theme camps yet. So scale back, change it around, find people who are going, merge, go solo or just don't go, but quit assuming that it isn't going to be Burning Man without you or your camp or your stage. If you're in that much of a rut, I hear a good dose of psilocybin can help you out with that.

@Stinkyfoot, I'm not in a theme camp per se. We build art cars and installations. Large ART is what makes the event.

The thing that makes the big burn so much more rewarding than the regionals its scale. But these policies undermine the ability of art collectives and camps to achieve that scale. I'm not just talking about sound camps. I could personally give a damn about hearing another dose of dub-step. I'm talking about the big sculptures, like the Trojan Horse, the Rocket Ship, 80 foot art cars, the serpentine tractor-trailer rigs that were stacked end on end.... this is why I bother to drive 2000 miles instead of 60. If you don't value that scale, don't worry, there will less of it in 2012. As for me, if I wanted to see an 8' plywood sculpture that was thrown together in 4 hours, I could do that at home. I travel 2000 miles to be a part of something EPIC.

I am nowhere near narcissistic enough to think that it won't be the burn without me or my camp or my stage. I don't even have a stage. But it won't be the Burning Man I love if the most ambitious undertaking we see fits the the back of a pickup.

[socks]

My question is better for whom?Last year you could buy tickets until July before it sold out.So please tell me how its better with the lottery

[theCryptofishist]

There is no guarantee that we wouldn't be sold out by now. I think that that is a poor metric. The question is would it have sold out in 24 hours or less with huge numbers of people who spend 8 hours or more in line with getting any tickets? The lottery is better than that, I think.

[socks]

The lottery just added value to the tickets for the resale market.The harder it is to get tickets the more a scalper can charge for them.BM.org just made it easy for them.As for most to get a ticket we had no chance.It will be the same in the March sale.I will try as all the others who got the Dear John e mail from BM.org.The scalpers will have the ticket bots going at full speed set to grab the lion's share of the 10,000 tickets.I hope to buy a ticket a face value but its looking more and more if you want to go you will be doing business with a scalper.

[Bunns]

I do not think the current lottery system is the BEST option, but I do think it is BETTER than what happened before.

I think the change was good. I think further change is going to make it better.

I think people need to turn around and quit complaining about what is clearly an improvement, and instead focus on how to further improve and manage in this new paradigm.

Try and see the good. Then look for the better.

I agree that the lottery is better than the regular smash and grab of the past, last year my friends and I spent over 10 hours on our phones/computers waiting in line for tickets. We were all kicked off the site more than once, this year the stress was much reduced even if we did not all get tickets we let fate decide instead of basing it on who had the better Internet connection and fastest computer.
Things will need to change but when did burners become so afraid of change? If the large art and theme camps are gone the heart of burning man will live on. My favorite memories have always been the people and not the objects.

[Trishntek]

The lottery just added value to the tickets for the resale market SAYS YOU?.The harder it is to get tickets the more a scalper can charge for them. It's harder for a scalper to get a ticket too! BM.org just made it easy for them. HOW? As for most to get a ticket we had no chance. YET! It will be the same in the March sale. SAME AS WHAT? I will try as all the others who got the Dear John e mail from BM.org.The scalpers will have the ticket bots going at full speed set to grab the lion's share of the 10,000 tickets. PROVE IT! I hope to buy a ticket a face value but its looking more and more if you want to go you will be doing business with a scalper. PRESUMPTUOUS HYPERBOLIC BULLSHIT!

edited for clarification

[lemur]

The lottery just added value to the tickets for the resale market[citation needed].The harder it is to get tickets the more a scalper can charge for them.BM.org just made it easy for them[citation needed]. As for most to get a ticket we had no chance[citation needed].It will be the same in the March sale[citation needed].I will try as all the others who got the Dear John e mail from BM.org.The scalpers will have the ticket bots going at full speed set to grab the lion's share of the 10,000 tickets[citation needed].I hope to buy a ticket a face value but its looking more and more if you want to go you will be doing business with a scalper[citation needed].

edited for the lulz

[BlackRockCityPimp]

Heres why the lottery is better...

A buncha sound art camps started showing up. Than more ravers started showing up growing the population of rvs, spectators, and weekenders. We sold out last year due to the fact that the sound camps helped make brc the "coolest rave evah". Now so many ravers want/need to roll in the desert that the sound camps cant get their build crews onsite. Sound camps are threatening to cancel participation rather than wait for tickets or take in new members/builders/etc. Less sound camps = less ravers. How is this a bad thing? Both sound camps and ravers will both have tickets available via STEP since the ravers wont come if theres no sound camps.

[Rice]

Heres why the lottery is better...

A buncha sound art camps started showing up. Than more ravers started showing up growing the population of rvs, spectators, and weekenders. We sold out last year due to the fact that the sound camps helped make brc the "coolest rave evah". Now so many ravers want/need to roll in the desert that the sound camps cant get their build crews onsite. Sound camps are threatening to cancel participation rather than wait for tickets or take in new members/builders/etc. Less sound camps = less ravers. How is this a bad thing? Both sound camps and ravers will both have tickets available via STEP since the ravers wont come if theres no sound camps.

I see no negative with this Less sound camps will mean less ravers and that is good! Maybe this will cut down on the Frat-children and tourists.

[BBadger]

I'm really hoping that this year's influx of new darktards end up with most of them colliding with each other and causing mutual grievous injury to each other.