Comparison to another first case of lottery.

[ZaphodBurner]

during the registration process you could either set up your own group (and establish a user name and password for this group) or join and existing group (if you had the username and password for it given to you by the groups founder or member). During the lottery once one member of a group has won a ticket (only one ticket per person was allowed) the rest of the group was also awarded tickets. groups were limited to 50 people, all tickets were named and were non-transferable.

Fascinating.

[bradtem]

Yes, something similar has been talked about in the past. The question is: Is a camp truly ready for the shock of being told "Your whole camp is not coming this year?" How many camp members will say "I only want to go if the whole camp goes" and how many will say "I want to go even if the rest of the camp doesn't go?"

You can't stop people from splitting like this, but then you get the situation where the ones who pooled together go, and the ones who wanted a chance to go regardless don't go but are important members. A bit messy.

If they do a lottery again -- I don't recommend they do this -- they can no longer do one where people can oversubscribe. That probably means nontransferable tickets, and not even fully refundable tickets. Ie. if you buy and change your mind, there's a meaningful penalty even to return the ticket to a STEP style program, and a huge penalty to just not go. This sort of regime is pretty harsh, and would push for many people to buy "group" tickets where the master buyer has their face associated with all tickets, and all must enter with this person. He or she had better be going.

If you don't do all these things, and you hold a lottery, you will get even greater oversubscribing. That's because people can ask for more than required, and can find a way to get rid of extras (transfer, return to STEP.) So it demands some harsh rules that few will like.

[mullenc525]

There are certainly competing interests that need to be traded against each other in an improved ticketing system. I've seen good ideas in this thread. Its not possible to make a perfect system, but we can make it as painless as possible.

BMORG values the flexibility in the ticketing system, but also supposedly values face value resales.
It's safe to assume true demand will exceed supply from now on - but it's also safe to assume there were not 120k people interested in going though there were 120k lottery entires (AFAIK).

ID'ing the tickets will reduce the demand to the true demand.

To be successful scalpers need to be able to profit with minimal effort or cost. If you were able to pick up 4 tickets with ID, it would allow flexibility within social groups yet not be worthwhile for scalpers who would have to make the trip to sell 3 tickets.

Possibly, on a case by case basis, ID'd persons could have the ID transferred minus a ticket for that group. Death, hospital admission, etc. with proof required. Or not, and BMORG could oversubscribe the playa statistically knowing a certain percentage of these things happen.

Returns into a STEP system would be allowed with some significant fee depending on the time the return occurred, reducing speculation.