capjbadger wrote:Not sure what you mean by "directed buy-ups". I assume you mean a person getting a bunch of people to all enter the system and wait in line to scoop up more ticke... Oh wait... That isn't prevented by a lottery. If anything the 2 week signup window allows more of them to get in and gum up the system.
What I mean is being able to purchase things directly (first-come-first-served, etc.), rather than using an indirect system like the lottery. Say for example we do have first-come-first served like previous years. Most people will end up buying the number of tickets they need, so if they can buy 2 at a time, they'll buy for a friend and themselves. Great, worked well most of BM's history. Now enter a predicted ticket scarcity situation, and we have people doing the same thing: buying the tickets they need. However, you also have scalpers who want to profit, predicting a ticket scarcity situation, so they bring 5 credit cards to bear for purchasing tickets. If they get in early, they're guaranteed their 10 tickets or so.
What does the lottery do for all this? Well now people looking to profit can't guarantee they
will profit, so they'll have to carpet bomb accounts at a much higher level to get the tickets with a lower chance of success. That really isn't the
main benefit though. The
main benefit is now you have regular ticket buyers
also playing the game. They're bringing
their resources to bear, having every single person signing up for 2x ticket, or even more. The effect is that rather than only having scalpers gaming the system for more tickets, you have everybody doing it, and a single purchaser (lottery entrant) has a far less pronounced effect. It's like diluting poison with a lot of water. In some ways I wonder if that was the real goal of the lottery and the overbuying was
by design.Of course drinking too much water can also be a poison. It can wipe out your electrolyte balance, and that's kind of what occurred in the aftermath of the lottery: tickets spread out too much.
The nature of the server line we had in previous years was still a lottery, just a slightly different one (Where will I get in line? vs. Will my name be drawn?). The main and in this year's case, critical difference was the number of people in the lottery.
There are other differences as well, the most important of which is: "will I get a ticket at all?" With the first-come-first-served system you had a pretty good idea of what tier you'd get, and if you'd get tickets at all.
Another factor was also in play, however: in previous years there were no ticket-sell-out scalpers, so there really was no incentive to hoard tickets of any tier just to sell them. So while in previous years there was always demand, and most people would just buy up to their demand, this year there were also agents seeking to hoard tickets to resell. Bear with me, I'm just describing some of the thinking behind the scalper conditions this year, not whether those really happened.
The current lottery took away the reward for being on the ball. THAT is why we're pissed.
No, we were pissed because the lottery fragmented our camps. If we had all gotten tickets we might've seen some complaints that we couldn't get cheaper tickets by waking up early (like myself!); however, it never would have equaled the panic the ensued when people discovered that their camps only had some 30% or so fulfillment.
Anyway, there really wasn't a need to be "on the ball" anyway, as there were always tickets available. Yeah, you might not get Tier 1 or Tier 2, but there was always Tier 3. Many people just wait and buy tickets for the Tier 3 price to avoid the stress of the early line.
All of this to bail out a shitty little ticketing company that has failed year after year.
I don't think that's the narrative that played out this year. In-ticketing has always had problems (database problems I believe, not hardware), but even last year it only affected the initial surge of people signing up. People promptly forgot about it after the first week, and it wasn't an issue after that. The lottery was specifically made to counter the perceived scalper threat, just as with the late release of tickets, STEP, etc. Everything this year has been to address that problem, not some ticketing program that has been tolerated for years anyway.
stretch80 wrote:I still do not believe that scalping is actually a major problem! A couple hundred tickets out of 50000 is not a serious quantity....
Is, or
was a major problem? It's hard to gauge just how things would've panned out with a different system otherwise even with hindsight. Maybe scalpers aren't a big deal
because of the measures taken? Who knows?
