Switching from Will Call to Shipping No Longer An Option

[agua]

I know for a fact that up until wednesday it was possible to transfer a will call ticket to a shipped ticket. So I arranged to pass my tickets to a friend in New York, at cost. To my surprise to find out TODAY that this is no longer an option! Fine, the BMORG is entitled to change policies, but I sent them an email requesting to have my tickets shipped on WEDNESDAY, when it was still an option. They didnt reply to my email and today i find out this is no longer an option.

THIS IS DISRESPECTFUL.

Yes, I know I can change the name at will call, etc. But this friend in New York is a friend of a friend. It is not someone that trusts me nor I want to have to deal with them paying me after the event.

[junglesmacks]

SHAME ON YOU, BMORG!!!




Get over it. They may be a tad busy at the moment. Your lack of preparation and/or waiting until the minute to do things like this is not their problem.

[agua]

[quote="junglesmacks"][size=85]Get over it. They may be a [i]tad[/i] busy at the moment. Your lack of preparation and/or waiting until the minute to do things like this is not their problem.[/size][/quote]

My lack of preparation? Last minute? The event starts a MONTH from now.

I did my homework. I didnt come to ask for help, just to expose what is IMO lack of respect for a customer (not the first, probably not the last time). If you aint got something to say stay shut!

[wh..sh]

I know for a fact that up until wednesday it was possible to transfer a will call ticket to a shipped ticket. So I arranged to pass my tickets to a friend in New York, at cost. To my surprise to find out TODAY that this is no longer an option! Fine, the BMORG is entitled to change policies, but I sent them an email requesting to have my tickets shipped on WEDNESDAY, when it was still an option. They didnt reply to my email and today i find out this is no longer an option.

They havent said no to you, yet. Maybe they will reply to your email since you mailed them before policy changed.
Wait for couple of days and mail then again.

[agua]

yep, thats what i am hoping for!

[trilobyte]

If it makes you feel better, doing that wasn't an option for months before the event last year.

[agua]

They replied to my wednesday email, which was sent before they removed that option, and said they would ship it. I sent them the address and I didnt hear back from them. I tried calling the number they gave me and several times and it goes straight to voicemail, but the mailbox is full.

[b][size=150]WHERE ARE MY TICKETS???[/size][/b]

[trilobyte]

Write back through the email address you've been using for correspondence, don't call (as you can guess, it's a very busy time of year). Have patience, don't be that jerk who calls and writes 16 times in the span of a couple days.

[agua]

I emailed twice since the 27th, when I got a reply. I tried calling today for the first time, but when you only get a voicemail and that voicemail is full I dont think it is unreasonable to call a few times (though I only tried 3 times).

I'm far from a jerk, Trilo. But they are also far from delivering proper customer service with regards to ticket sales.

(Not even trying to open that can of worms, but as I told Paynie in January: "The genius who is able to come up with an online lottery system that can't be cheated might as well apply for a patent and retire". So naive...)

[Nipple]

(Not even trying to open that can of worms, but as I told Paynie in January: "The genius who is able to come up with a n online lottery system that can 't be cheated might as well apply for a patent and retire". So naive...)

Edited for succinctness.

The people involved aren't nearly as naive as you'd expect.

Online, offline, doesn't matter. If someone could build a jerktrap we'd be extinct as a species long ago. If you search around you'll find an endless supply of fiddly things that people feel will fix the ticket issue but: All of it works/None of it works.

The problem boils down to having a broken cookies to piggies ratio: Too many piggies, not enough cookies.

Some piggies will eat more cookies than they deserve/need/want/think/should. The trick is to make a system painful enough to dissuade the bad piggies while keeping it usable enough for the good piggies. Most of the time it works just like intended, but no one ever talks about that. Sometimes it doesn't work and a good piggy gets none. Sometimes it doesn't work and a bad piggy gets a lot.

The constant: Piggies sure do make a lot of noise.

[agua]

Nipple, that is surely an intelligent contribution, but when was the last time a state lottery was cheated?

They WERE naive. They are wonderful, amazing people, but leave the creation of an ONLINE lottery system to geniuses (and dont forget to file that patent).

Anyways, I just want to sort out the situation with MY tickets. The ticket fiasco has been long overdiscussed...

[theCryptofishist]

...but when was the last time a state lottery was cheated?

I assume you mean successfully cheated, because I'm pretty damn sure they try every day.
And I don't know that we'd've heard about it if it had.

[Eric]

Nipple, that is surely an intelligent contribution, but when was the last time a state lottery was cheated?

Here are over two million hits on people trying to do just that.

You can dig & see how often someone was caught (which is very different from how often they were successful), but they sure are trying.

Nipple's analogy is pretty much correct, give people a system & some of those people will devote time to figuring out how to circumvent it.

[trilobyte]

I didn't call you a jerk, agua, I said don't be one. The right thing to have done would have been to reply to the email you got on Wednesday, and then be patient.

As far as the lottery goes, it actually worked. It did exactly what it was designed to do. The registration process allowed us to limit participation by professional scalpers (something an unrestricted open sale is unable to do), and to award tickets through a drawing in the event that we had more people interested in tickets than we had available tickets to sell. Based on the number of tickets being offered as a percentage of the total supply, a much smaller chunk of the supply is available to Burning Man in the aftermarket than with any other hot ticket event.

[Nipple]

Nipple, that is surely an intelligent contribution, but when was the last time a state lottery was cheated?

4 days ago. Massachusetts. (8/2/12)

They WERE naive. They are wonderful, amazing people, but leave the creation of an ONLINE lottery system to geniuses (and dont forget to file that patent).

A patent only protects the money. In the early 80s, Nintendo (You may know them. They make video games.) patented a method to only allow "Nintendo blessed" game cartridges to work in their systems. Any outsiders needed to go through Nintendo, which gave Nintendo full control over content and quality.

They didn't like the cut of your jib? Take it walkin', pal.

Atari (You may know them. They make video games.) thought about this and decided they didn't like that. Instead they sent a dude into the patent offices, pulled the patent and reverse engineered their system. Then they started releasing games for the NES on their own under the name Tengen. (You may have heard of them. They made video games.)

It's naive to think that such systems cure jerks. They build BETTER jerks.

As a boy, my father (You may not know him. He doesn't make video games.) explained it to me like this: "Locks keep honest men honest." That was seconds before he used two very large screw drivers to pop a padlock asunder using some applied physics and a tiny amount of wit.

Anyways, I just want to sort out the situation with MY tickets. The ticket fiasco has been long overdiscussed...

Of course you do! I hope it works out. Good luck.

[agua]

[quote="Nipple"]4 days ago. Massachusetts. (8/2/12)[/quote]

You see my point? It took geniuses to cheat ONE lottery system (out of what, 50?)

BMORG people are (very intelligent, wonderful people) but they are not geniuses. They got cheated in their first run.

But disrespecting PATENTS is a whole different thing. It's not cheating - it is just breaking (some) law.

[Nipple]

Some day you're going to walk into an Apple store, and you are going to see a sign that says "Genius bar".

You are going to have the largest orgasm of your life.

[agua]

hahaahahah!!

Luckily for me I dont think that will never happen... I don't buy Apple products. Ever. Don't even install iTunes

[kiss-o-matic]

Nipple's analogy is pretty much correct, give people a system & some of those people will devote time to figuring out how to circumvent it.

Mix this w/ Murphy's Law, and you have a disaster, as any web administrator knows. The internet really has brought out the immaturity in man.

Patent info

You're mistaking this for licensing, which is quite a bit different. But in the end, it is some type of protection of money, and indeed people try to get around it. [I will say that licensing has been extremely successful for the last 25 years though]. And in the spirit of the lottery debate, there are definitely pros and cons. It funnels money to the distributor of the license, but is also prevented heaps of shovel-ware from being put on the system by random developers. (One could debate this is what destroyed the home games market just before Nintendo got it back on track.) Licensing also helped them keep porn off the system.

Anywho...

I think you're piggy/cookie analogy is spot on. We live in a world of captchas, which are totally annoying but we live w/ them to keep spam down. I realize there's a lot of work involved in ticketing, but some of BMorg's policies are simply bad by design. From the "Last 1000 tickets thread" it seems they were 86'ing tickets made on the same credit card. If they want to do that, fine, but doesn't it make sense to make this very clear? I would have recommended a bold font, maybe even in red. If it's 1 ticket per order and non-transferable Will Call only, doesn't the government ID ensure the person making the order is the one using the ticket? That seems to be an ample enough check against someone gaming the system. Finally, even if they're going to be vague about it, why not have an error page when the credit card is about to be used for the 2nd time? Let them try another card (or a friend/family member's card) instead of having both tickets cancelled after the fact. Whomever programmed that should be ashamed of himself. It requires either a manual check, or a computerized check after the fact. Bad architecture design, IMHO.

Just so I don't sound like a total dick (too late?), it sounds like the IP queue thing actually worked, albeit slow. I'm sure it sucked if you had to wait for hours, but it is more fair than grabbing X refreshed connections every Y minutes.

Sorry for the geek ramble...