The Perfect Ticket System

[paul_bennett]

As a though experiment, I'd like to present "the perfect" Burning Man ticket. Rather than show solutions, I'll show the joys of an hypothetical utopian ticket system, even if the solution to an item is "it will work, somehow, by magic".

The Perfect BM Ticket would work like this:

• People get their ticket number immediately when purchasing;
• Only real individuals get to purchase tickets, not companies, not bots, not scalpers, not scammers;
• People can resell their tickets at any time, from day 1 of purchase;
• Ticket resell is only for the face value or less.
• There's no way to sell the ticket for a higher price;
• People can gift the ticket free to anyone;
• Ownership transfer takes seconds;
• The buyer and seller knows immediately and for sure that the transfer went well;
• The seller knows for sure he'll receive the money;
• The buyer knows for sure the ticket is valid and now belong to him.
• Tickets can't be stolen in the mail or in your house door or your car;
• Tickets can't be faked;
• Tickets can't be lost;
• You can just show up naked at the gate and the system will still allow your entrance;
• It is very easy and clear for people to see they're being scammed;
• In case someone decides to purchase a fake ticket from a scammer, the system makes it very clear for the person to feel they're taking a huge dumb risk that looks nothing like a real purchase;
• In case someone decides to pay extra for a real ticket (say, face price + extra deposit), the system favors the buyer for the face value, the extra must be payed outside the BM ticket system.
• Scammers can't do the voided-ticket trick anymore;
• There is no void list because all tickets are magically perfect;
• If you miss this year, the ticket is still valid for one more year;
• You can leave and go back to Burning Man, for a fee, but without any worry of loosing a reentry paper;
• Not one single person goes through horror stories of getting entrance denied;
• No one gets kicked out of the will call parking lot, no one cries, no one prepare for months to get their entrance denied.
• Everything ticket related works like an Utopia, they laugh at the old antique system and wonder how their ancestors managed to live on such a primitive system.
• People rejoice and celebrate in pure awe how the the ticket system is the pinnacle of human intelligence. It is the summoned knowledge of many decades that makes us stand on the shoulders of giants.

I'd love to hear your new ideas, if you have any.

[Captain Goddammit]

You’ve regurgitated this cut & paste across a few social media platforms.

The ideal post would be original content, and shorter.

[Sham]

Alrighty then. I'm sold.

[goodleaf]

I also had a story of ticketing woe but it all ended well, so I’m kinda feeling like we do have a ticketing system where things do magically work out but the price you have to pay is tears/fears/mild trauma.

Details (long read, just sharing for posterity):

We bought two hard copy tickets and a vehicle pass from an acquaintance for face value. This was a friend of a friend who was a veteran. when we met up to get the tickets, we had a great conversation with him and bought the tickets. Getting to know our seller and having his contact information saved us in the end.

When we got to gate Sunday night at 6pm, one of the tickets scanned ok and the other one scanned an error message. We were routed to D lot and they checked tickets and IDs again and then asked us to wait in line at counter A at will call (with all the other folks on “fun ticket adventures” including lost and stolen tickets).

Thankfully, we were in text communication with our seller while we were waiting in line - he was so worried about us missing our burn and stayed up with us until 12am which is when we got things resolved.

So after a few hours in the will call line, we get to the front and the volunteer first tells us that the hard copy tickets are not enough and we should have had the tickets transferred to our burner profiles. I hadn’t heard of this before. We asked our seller to transfer the tickets on his profile and he says both the tickets now say “ineligible for transfer”.

Will call volunteer then says there’s nothing they can do and we’re out of luck. This is when I cried a bit, though I was somewhat prepared because I’d heard of the ticketing scams where sellers report a ticket as stolen after selling it. These tickets weren’t on the voided list but still. We’d mentally prepped ourselves for this by telling ourselves that we had packed up for our 2020 burn and we were just taking our stuff to BRC 2019 for a “drive by visit”.

Anyway, we got the seller on the line again and gave the volunteer as much information as we could about the original purchase. The volunteer then went and got the onsite representative from the ticket vendor.

Ticket vendor pulled up the tickets using the sellers personal information, points out a couple of things to the volunteer and says “these tickets are fine”. She had to show the volunteer where to look to see that the bar code was fine.

They reissued the tickets and sent us on our way, 6 hours and some tears later.
I hope everyone else in the ticket adventure line got in too!

[paul_bennett]

You’ve regurgitated this cut & paste across a few social media platforms.

The ideal post would be original content, and shorter.

Yes I did it, but I'm trying to get ideas from different groups of people. I HAD to post here too because this forum takes discussion more seriously than Facebook. It is also a great archive for future queries. Answers here are longer than Reddit. But every medium has different views.

[Token]

Blockchain.

Could be a good way for all kinds of things BM, be it tickets, grants, fundraising, etc.

Lots of possibilities.

[some seeing eye]

I always send people to the Burning Man Census long presentation for ticket data. Of course the BORG has all the proprietary ticket data.

From the standpoint of Burning Man Corp, the ticket system is perfect. They contract it out and build the cost into the price. They always get their money. There is an infinite supply of new customers waiting to displace the disgruntled ones.

The experienced burners usually practice safe ticket buying and have personal networks to save their bacon as a last resort.

The event takes a lot of preparation, and planning how to get tickets is just a small part of that, though essential.

For those who want to save money booking international flights many months in advance, there is always the option without tickets to tour our fabulous Western lands and camp!

In fact, like the kids from OZ on walkabout, plan a camping trip for 2-3 weeks after the event and lose the stress of a tight schedule between BRC and the airport, detailing your car, showering and washing your clothes.

To the OP, we could all have an identity chip that could be read at a distance supplemented by having all our biometrics entered into a worldwide database run by the government or Facebook that would be connected to all of our bank accounts and tickets. That would solve everything, including your perfect ticket system!

[Captain Goddammit]

The event needs to be made much MORE difficult to attend, to reduce the demand and weed out the spectators.
Then the tickets supply problem goes away.

[XPTom]

No scalpers, no scammers, and easy resale on the same wish list?..... hard to make that work...

[sparr]

Are you familiar with Arrow's Impossibility Theorem? It's about voting. There are three traits an ideal voting system should have, and this guy proved it's actually impossible to satisfy all three. Every voting system must give one of them up to achieve the other two.

That's the situation here. You can repeat a list of features of a perfect ticketing system until you're blue in the face and it won't make a difference. Some of these features are mutually exclusive; no possible ticketing system can have both/all of them. You have to prioritize and give some of them up.

[Captain Goddammit]

No scalpers, no scammers, and easy resale on the same wish list?..... hard to make that work...

It’s also a hell of a long post that I thought woujd at least contain an idea how to do any of that.

[some seeing eye]

The event needs to be made much MORE difficult to attend, to reduce the demand and weed out the spectators.

After the DGS, the rest of the tickets should be distributed by treasure hunts in the regionals.

Really difficult would be no portos and no medical. If you get hurt first aid, bystanders deliver you back to you camp, and your campmates drive you out. Like a wilderness camping trip.

[Token]

The event needs to be made much MORE difficult to attend, to reduce the demand and weed out the spectators.
Then the tickets supply problem goes away.

That’s easy.

Make 447 access a full strip search with “The Glove” at Nixon and only other road in via Jungo.

That would be loads of fun!

[DoctorIknow]

The event needs to be made much MORE difficult to attend, to reduce the demand and weed out the spectators.
Then the tickets supply problem goes away.

Blockchain.

Could be a good way for all kinds of things BM, be it tickets, grants, fundraising, etc.

Lots of possibilities.

The Captain's and Token's ideas blend together. Once blockchain is set up, perhaps with crypto "BurnCoin", it is no walk in the park to set it up for yourself. New regulations make IDing yourself a chore, and linking to a bank account is needed. You would need to put the BurnCoin in a digital wallet making transactions less cumbersome. It would be more difficult for burners to comply and thus to attend, and blockchain is such a clear way to go,,,,I'd be surprised if BMORG hasn't already looked into it.