elitism and its impact on available tickets

[tattoogoddess]

http://isopop.com/2012/02/01/burning-man-ticket-survey/


Please take a min and take it. The numbers are not good.

[usurpedus]

with so few tickets being available now.. and a growing number of large camps/artists/infrastructure/bm vets who did not get tickets.. I wonder if these members will be shown favor for any remaining tickets ie they will somehow get tickets before the rest of the public does.

[The CO]

Nope. There is no such thing as a 'member' in the way you are describing. The only 'special' treatment is for certain types of returning staff, fire conclaves that audition for and are accepted into the great circle, & sponsored art grants.

There is no magical club of secret burners... If there were, they would already have tickets. The lottery has shown than anyone can be affected by an event having more interest than population space.

[usurpedus]

Im gonna have to disagree.. as I know people for a fact received tickets last year, from BM, after the event had been sold out(this was just a few weeks before the event)

[Nipple]

with so few tickets being available now.. and a growing number of large camps/artists/infrastructure/bm vets who did not get tickets.. I wonder if these members will be shown favor for any remaining tickets ie they will somehow get tickets before the rest of the public does.

I think those people will have an easier time getting tickets once the freakout is over, as they have larger networks. They know more burners, so they're likely to know more people that have tickets out there.

[Eric]

Im gonna have to disagree.. as I know people for a fact received tickets last year, from BM, after the event had been sold out(this was just a few weeks before the event)

Your question & follow-up show that you already assume you know the answer. Nothing we say otherwise will change that assumption, regardless if it's correct or not.

[CornMan]

with so few tickets being available now.. and a growing number of large camps/artists/infrastructure/bm vets who did not get tickets.. I wonder if these members will be shown favor for any remaining tickets ie they will somehow get tickets before the rest of the public does.

I think those people will have an easier time getting tickets once the freakout is over, as they have larger networks. They know more burners, so they're likely to know more people that have tickets out there.

I concur.

And you're wearing a party hat, but you don't look very happy. Hilarious.

[usurpedus]

[quote="Eric"][quote="usurpedus"]Im gonna have to disagree.. as I know people for a fact received tickets last year, from BM, after the event had been sold out(this was just a few weeks before the event)[/quote]

Your question & follow-up show that you already assume you know the answer. Nothing we say otherwise will change that assumption, regardless if it's correct or not.[/quote]

an assumption about what I know as fact? I think youre deflecting the question and issue..

I guess I can rephrase. how do we know that the same people who received tickets from BM after the event was sold out(to the public) won't similarly receive preferential treatement with remaining tickets or otherwise? as an editor for BRC weekly i think you may have some qualified assumptions about this?

[The CO]

Who are 'these people?' Can you be more specific or is this an 'I heard from a friend of a friend...' things?

[usurpedus]

you want their names? why?

[AntiM]

Im gonna have to disagree.. as I know people for a fact received tickets last year, from BM, after the event had been sold out(this was just a few weeks before the event)

Staff tickets? Gift tickets? Performer tickets? Those have always been around.

[ygmir]

Im gonna have to disagree.. as I know people for a fact received tickets last year, from BM, after the event had been sold out(this was just a few weeks before the event)

Your question & follow-up show that you already assume you know the answer. Nothing we say otherwise will change that assumption, regardless if it's correct or not.

an assumption about what I know as fact? I think youre deflecting the question and issue..

I guess I can rephrase. how do we know that the same people who received tickets from BM after the event was sold out(to the public) won't similarly receive preferential treatement with remaining tickets or otherwise? as an editor for BRC weekly i think you may have some qualified assumptions about this?

I think you may be missing something here.
This is a private event, run by a private LLC.
if they want to hold back tickets, for friends, relatives, hookers'Nblow..........so what?
It's their gig.
They can do, what they want, with their tickets.

so, if they hand out 200 tickets? so.
500? same.

don't act like life is fair....it's not.
Don't assume, you'll be treated fair, you may not.
Either go, play, and enjoy, or shut up.

[alt12]

with so few tickets being available now.. and a growing number of large camps/artists/infrastructure/bm vets who did not get tickets.. I wonder if these members will be shown favor for any remaining tickets ie they will somehow get tickets before the rest of the public does.

Well let's see. The BMORG awards ticket to staff, to volunteers who perform a certain quantity of volunteer hours, to recipients of art grants, and to some art-projects where they are unable to give grants but want to support the art project. There then are however many Friends of First Camp tickets. Aside from that, I don't think there will be any secret distribution system for veteran burners. Logistically, you're talking about tens of thousands of people who are veteran burners or involved on some level so its not really feasible, aside from the aforementioned categories which relatively speaking are quite small.

[socks]

Thank you for this

[tattoogoddess]

Your welcome. I saw someone reposted this shortly after I did on here. Glad people are doing this. It is interesting to see the numbers.

[arthur5005]

Great stuff, I love numbers.

Understanding the situation in terms of number will give us a clearer picture of what's actually taking place.

I've heard a lot of people on these forums doing their own back of the envelope calculations to find out how many people applied for tickets. Numbers I'm seeing a lot are in-between 70-90k. I did my own calculations, and I present my findings below.

BMORG won't tell us how many people registered for the main sale lottery, but we can glean enough information from these forums to make an educated guess.

To help us with this, we'll determine what the chances of getting a ticket were. This survey gives us a that, but it helps to have a random sample, this survey could very well be biased, maybe slanted toward people who don't have tickets, who knows, so it helps to have some additional sources. Taking into account an honest look at my own camp's success rate along with success rates from various other camps we can come up with a mean success rate. The success rate is equivalent to the chances of succeeding. If out of a 100 people 10 people got tickets, then the chances of getting a ticket are 1/10 or %10 ( I've pulled some numbers from here: viewtopic.php?f=290&t=53722 )

This survey: 34.5% (1027/2978 - as of 12:10 am PST)
My camp: 30.7% (4/13)
Pipey: 40% (Camp Distrikt)
Drutter: 30%
alt12: 30%
igor47: 47.6% (10/21)
mshaman: 14% (4/30)
tattoogoddess: 6% (2/30 - seems a bit low, but we'll go with it.)

Chances of getting a ticket: 29.1%
disclaimer: this is by no mean scientific, I am not a statistician and these reports are anecdotal; My intention here is to come up with the statistical probability of receiving a ticket based on what people are 'saying'.

Now I recognize that there are multiple tiers, and each tier might have had different odds, but we don't know how many tickets were distributed in each tier, so we'll ignore the tiers. Plus, as per the survey, most people applied evenly between the mid and upper tier, which is where I imagine most of the tickets are. I also recognize that the some of the tickets tabulated in these reports may have been from the presale, which may affect the results, but only upward and only slightly; So if the chances are even lower, the number of applicants for the main sale are even higher.

Armed with the chances of getting a ticket finding out how many burners applied becomes a trivial task:

[chances of getting a ticket] * [number of tickets requested] = [number of tickets awarded]

0.291 * n = 40,000

Solve for n

# of tickets requested: 137,457

1.7 requests per person

[request per person] * [number of people who requested tickets] = [# of tickets requested]

1.7 * n = 137,457

Solve for n

# of applicants: 80,857

Super high demand this year. I have a suspicion Dr. Seuss was behind this...

[marcgorcey]

I think your numbers look pretty good.

Dr. Seuss wouldn't account for this kind of increase IMO. Has any ad campaign for an event resulted in a 100% increase in interest ?

Must be scalpers. I'm more and more convinced.

[AntiM]

One reason I feel this survey yields invalid results is the sample size, and the sample selection. People who got their tickets and have little interest in FB or eplaya don't go online to express their opinion. From what I know of data gathering methods, this one is heavily skewed toward the have nots who have a stronger reason to express discontent.

Not to say their isn't a problem, there is, but I wouldn't put money on anything to wildly unscientific.

[marcgorcey]

Yes, this is called self-selection and it does skew results, no question.

There are some folks who have polled their camps, though, to find out who did/didn't get tickets and this would presumably be more accurate but the sample is smaller. Our camp, for example, surveyed 50 people and found a 30% success rate in getting tickets.

[5280MeV]

One reason I feel this survey yields invalid results is the sample size, and the sample selection. People who got their tickets and have little interest in FB or eplaya don't go online to express their opinion. From what I know of data gathering methods, this one is heavily skewed toward the have nots who have a stronger reason to express discontent.

Not to say their isn't a problem, there is, but I wouldn't put money on anything to wildly unscientific.

100% agree with you about the problems with the sample selection.

However, as a former statistics teacher I feel absolutely compelled to clarify the issue regarding sample size.

As of yesterday, there was a sample size of n = 1630. That is a very good sized sample, and had it been properly selected, it would have been perfectly ok to draw statistical inferences from.

The size of the total population is irrelevant, so long as it is considerably larger than the sample. It could be 50,000 or 50 billion, and one could draw the same conclusions.

Had the sample been selected correctly, we would be 95% confident that the actual proportion of people successfully getting a ticket was between 30 and 34%. There is a small (5%) chance, that we just happened to randomly pick a large group of people who got a few more or a few less tickets, and so the actual proportion is outside the interval that we measured.

We could also be over 99.7% confident that the proportion of successes was between 28 and 36%.

Some sciences require 95% confidence in their results, in high energy physics we require 99.99994% confidence to announce a discovery.

[BetaBox]

Ha, I just got off a jury, because I started stating confidence intervals.

[Ruleryak]

n is getting close to 4000 responses now - I think that's a very fair sample size. Reading the responses folks have given in the comments block it seems many of the responses come from people that have spoken to their groups and see no tickets or just a few.

Thanks for doing the survey, be sure to post it as many places as you can so Mods can stop saying "oh eplaya's full of whiners so your results don't count". Maybe not everyone comes here or fb, sure - but tie in twitter, youtube, tribes, etc and they can stop relying on that as an excuse to dismiss this data.

[AntiM]

I'm not a "they", I'm retired.

[lemur]

n is getting close to 4000 responses now - I think that's a very fair sample size. Reading the responses folks have given in the comments block it seems many of the responses come from people that have spoken to their groups and see no tickets or just a few.

Thanks for doing the survey, be sure to post it as many places as you can so Mods can stop saying "oh eplaya's full of whiners so your results don't count". Maybe not everyone comes here or fb, sure - but tie in twitter, youtube, tribes, etc and they can stop relying on that as an excuse to dismiss this data.

screw this supposed data .. of what point is it to even collect it ? I mean really what ?


it proves what? ?!!?!?


whether more demand for burning man tickets was because of lots of new comers wanting to come
whether more demand for burning man tickets was because of lots of 'hoarding' tickets
whether more demand for burning man tickets was because of lots of 'scalpers'

..what will this supposed data tells us?!

what is the point of it ?

we knew there was going to be more people wanting to go to burning man than tickets available in 2011...


there is no point at all for this supposed data to even exist because it serves no purpose but to confirm to people "yeah we didnt get a ticket either"

well .. we knew people wouldnt get tickets.. it was a random drawing and we were pretty sure more people would want tickets than existed.. so ?! whats the point of this data?

even if Black Rock City LLC comes out with a big spread sheet and could some how prove that it was 20,000 newcomers, or 20,000 hoarders or 20,000 scalpers.. nothing has changed. nothing would change..

more people want to go than there are tickets.
newcomers want to see burning man
people 'hoarding' tickets want their friends and camps and projects to make it
scalpers want to put tickets in peoples hands..


so what?!!??! none of this will result in you getting a ticket... there is nothing to prove the supposed data does nothing and serves no purpose other than to confirm something we already knew:

more people want to go to burning man than there are tickets available

[Nipple]

Dr. Seuss wouldn't account for this kind of increase IMO. Has any ad campaign for an event resulted in a 100% increase in interest ?

I was just saying to someone last night that if it's that video, someone better get this TeddyBoy's ass on a plane to Madison Avenue quickly.

[melodiousdirge]

I like how you make a pointless post to rant about "pointless" data.

The point of gathering it is to try to understand what the Borg hasn't told us. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Yes, demand exceeds supply but that can't be the whole story. Stop belittling people for trying to understand the situation.

[lemur]

last i saw it there were 1,200,000 hits on that Suess video

if only 3% of the people who saw it decided to go to burning man..

that could easily account for what appears, from the various anecdotes, to be the missing 65% of tickets available.

[lemur]

I like how you make a pointless post to rant about "pointless" data.

The point of gathering it is to try to understand what the Borg hasn't told us. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Yes, demand exceeds supply but that can't be the whole story. Stop belittling people for trying to understand the situation.

thats startin to sound like conspiracy theory territory

what could the secret be?

[melodiousdirge]

No conspiracy theory - but a fairly mystifying massive shortage that isn't accounted for by increased interest and hasn't been commented on by the LLC. If it's scalpers - that sucks but some people will have recourse if they can afford it. If it's a screwup - Yay!, if it's genuinely 40,000 newbies, well, that's a real head scratcher.

[arthur5005]

This survey could very well contain a bias. But after talking to some other camps and getting exact numbers from others including our own, I'm inclined to believe that a 30-35% success rate is about right. Most camps I speak with, including my own didn't have such a high success rate, so it's hard to say that the survey is skewed with people who don't have tickets.

Here's my interpretation: It's a demand problem.

While it may not be possible that a prominent video wouldn't increase the demand by 100%, we first have to realize that the increase in demand isn't actually 100%. The reality is we don't know what the demand was last year because it was the first year they capped it and it sold out. One thing is for sure, it was definitely higher than 53,000 and was probably much higher. Our group had an extra ticket the day before we left for the burn, put it on craigslist and got 20 calls in 5 minutes, I shit you not.

These numbers help us realize that, if this demand is real, than the lottery system isn't a good way to do this. It very well may thwart scalpers, but how anyone is supposed to plan a camp with so few confirmed tickets is beyond me. In-fact, it may not even thwart scalpers all that much, in this scenario relative demand goes up; camps that have a lot invested into this festival are now willing to pay a lot more for a ticket, which just incentives scalping even further. Whether scalpers actually get their hands on them is yet to known, but relative price will be higher, that much is true. STEP may help, but I'm not certain it will help 'that' much.

If after the registration period BMORG had come out and said "Community, we have a request for 130,000 tickets, what do we do?" the community would have likely said 'start over'. BMORG could have at least surveyed some applicants after the registration to see if they actually did order more than they needed and by how much before the drawing took place.

About that video...
That video garnered 1.3 million views and got several national newspaper mentions, IMHO it's a big reason we're seeing such an uptick in interest. It came out January 6th, after the presale and before the main sale. I didn't hear of many people who were denied in the presale, in fact most people on this forum reported they were awarded the tickets they asked for during presale.

We can only hope that there are a lot of only half-interested virgin burners willing to give up their ticket through STEP.