ePlaya

Hey there!

I would like to try to ensure that folks have the information that they need to purchase tickets quickly when the sale starts. I suspect that tickets will go pretty quickly and would like to give everyone an opportunity to be prepared. For example, I have a profile and I did register for the sale

Using me as a selfish example, I will be looking to purchase two tickets, and one vehicle pass. Can someone with current knowledge of the process help me understand:

• the flow of the page to place an order

• what payment methods are accepted

• will payment information need to be entered (like a credit card) at the time of the purchase, or is there a place that we can add that information prior to the sale. That would make the purchase much faster, rather than having to key in a credit card # or a paypal address

• are the servers robust enough to handle the initial volume of visitors

• anything else might we need to know that might be useful

Thank you, oh wise wizards,
Cyclic

Here are some tips cut and pasted from Captain’s log. Reno fb burner page

PURCHASING PHASE
- The MAIN sale begins on March 30, 2022 at 12pm (noon) PDT
- VISA and MasterCard ONLY, NO PayPal or American Express
Make sure you have enough money in your CREDIT line to complete your purchase!
CONTACT your card issuing BANK, for PRE Authorization, let them know you will be making a LARGE purchase ($1500.00 for 2 tickets, vehicle pass, taxes, fees, shipping)
- Figure about $820.00 for a single ticket and parking pass, shipping and fees (UPS shipping)
- Bookmark this url on your PHONE: http://www.time.gov/
This is the ATOMIC clock at National Institute of Standards
Make sure you have a tab open with either your email purchasing link or burner profile link on your COMPUTER
When the clock says 11:59:59 seconds, click on your purchase link
If you’re asking yourself “what link?” then you fucked up and didn't register for this sale
So now, the odds of Donald Trump revealing his tax returns are better than you getting a ticket to the burn!

I'd be curious to see how many people registered for the main sale. I'm sure there will be several people who flaked on registration and still attempt to buy the day of.

Since everyone who registers will have a link to click on I'm assuming that everyone will click @ 11:59:59 and you will either go in to queue or not. I like the idea that you can only participate in one sale (with the exception of the Invitation to the future tickets). That should help.

I'm also wondering how the "Invitation to the future sale (ITTFS)" tickets will affect the main sale. I don't recall how many of those were sold but I'm assuming those come out of the main sale.

With only 10,000 (minus ITTFS) tickets up for grabs there will no doubt be a lot of disappointed Burners who will strike out.

Most of the 2022 participants have already bought tickets in the other sales so Good Luck to everyone left.

ITTF tickets are separate from main sale
1000 sold
People who bought were notified that they will be able to execute starting 3/28

Cyclic wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 24, 2022 9:25 am

... Can someone with current knowledge of the process help me understand: ...

Do keep in mind that eplaya is not the Org, nor Ticketing. People will post of what they know, or could find, but things could change or things could be different. So following up with any sources given, and searching for others, may be advisable.
And if you find something further, or different, please report it back here for others to find.

Here is how you do it.

Between my wife and I we have 4 cell phones that can tether. Add two ISPs for home internet ...

I get six unique IP addresses to work with.

Fortunately, we both super-geeks, so I got half dozen laptops in working order to set up ticket rig.

So, we fire up 6 laptops with a VM in each for 12 connections, one for me, one for the Mrs.

I craft a quick script that fires off at noon-sharp - all NTP synced, and with some retry logic.

Once all 12 instances are in the queue, this is where the fun begins ...

I go in with a seventh device, and start poking around. Refresh, cookie analysis, trace down threads and handles, see if I can find a sequence of actions to reset a queue and jump me up front.

It hasn't failed me yet. Every time I tried, I got through and jumped the line!

You can bet your ass there is an army of gearheads from SF and the likes doing the same

Disclaimer: Even though I do go through this exercise every now and again, purely for fun, I have not been to BM ever since it sold out - pun intended - and even when I get to the purchase page using these shenanigans, I have never bought any ticket that way.

I do understand this will sand up some vaginas here, "oh, how outrageous, you could have blocked or kicked someone out" ... yeah, possibly, but Fuck it!, It is the ethos of the FKO. Its Burning Man, a very expensive camping trip.

Interesting setup.
Good friend, a government certified computer forensic expert (via army counter intelligence MOS) works for one of the big 3 in SF.
Has permission from his boss (a burner himself along with several other is their building) to use their hardware next Wednesday. They even are taking in latency in their planning. Don't know how many rigs they set up.

And don't forget the inevitable "choice" during the process, while the internet pipes unclog. Am I in the que? Or should I refresh? Is my order being processed, or should I click again? Is my connection froze? Should I do something that may be my salvation, or could very well cause defeat? And even then, deprived, the debate continues, maybe changing the order to no vehicle pass, or just one ticket, it might go thru? Good times.

The first time burning man said, “no.” to me was awful. Little running yellow guy for hours, and the realization there was no trick to it that I was going to figure, which button to push or just call it done?

Rich swinging ducks act like it’s all their’s now. Should they get a 200 ah battery or a 100 for their ebike? Only a thousand bucks difference, and they “fly in.” What to make of a diminished thing.

art walsh wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 25, 2022 12:56 pm

Interesting setup.
Good friend, a government certified computer forensic expert (via army counter intelligence MOS) works for one of the big 3 in SF.
Has permission from his boss (a burner himself along with several other is their building) to use their hardware next Wednesday. They even are taking in latency in their planning. Don't know how many rigs they set up.

If you rig-up but want to stay legit, latency is the key.

Many a wall street traders would buy whole buildings to gain a ms for their trading algorithms by being closer to the servers. Made obscene $$

My exercises were simply looking for sloppy coding that can be exploited.

It always happens. There is just no way to simulate the stampede and test for it ahead of time.

By very nature of the methods they use, it’s basically a denial of service by design.

So having multiple devices using the same ip address is essentially no good then?

Token wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 27, 2022 10:09 pm

By very nature of the methods they use, it’s basically a denial of service by design.

Technically, it is DDDOS by design. Dusty Distributed DOS.

skibike wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 28, 2022 12:08 pm

So having multiple devices using the same ip address is essentially no good then?

Not necessarily.

The BORG changes ticket vendor so much you never know what’s there.

But it is “low hanging fruit” to just dump duplicates.

Welp the ticket link in the email was unable to connect and timed out after 3 minutes. It was trying to reach https://email.burningman.org/t/t-xxxxx-y/

The link on the burner profile seems to be queueing with url https://here.burningman.org/event/burni ... 20/tag/xxx
This one appears to be refreshing about every 10 secs.

The BORG would have internal ticketing data but it is said that there is about 2x demand of people that would actually go than there are tickets. That ratio might be higher for this sale. Add to that the ticket farm multiplier. However the BORG is saying they may deny tickets to people who cheat. Fortunately they have some visibility with the burner profiles.

YMMV

As always, if you are looking specifically for ticketing support, you should go to the Ticketing Support site.

As far as the flow is concerned, my experience from this and previous ticket sales is that the page flow looks like this.

You start either from your Burner Profile or the email with the link to the sale. While some have had success with mobile phone or tablet purchases, the nature of mobile device connectivity makes them more prone to communication dropouts that could lose your place in line. If possible, use a computer with a reliable connection.

If you try to access the sale well before the start time, you may simply receive an error. If you are a little early (usually within the hour), you go into a waiting room. This is an electronic orderly queue (think of it as like standing in line at a virtual box office). Once the gates open, the virtual queue starts 'moving' so to speak. The queue feeds the ticketing engine with as many customers as it can process (think of it as individual windows at the box office).

Once you're through the queue, you get the options for tickets, vehicle passes, ship method, and optional donations. It is important that names and emails on the order match the name and email of the Burner Profile. As posted on the main ticket info page and in earlier replies here, MasterCard and Visa are the only debit/credit cards accepted.

After the sale completes, you will see a confirmation in the browser window. Ideally an email confirmation should appear almost immediately... HOWEVER during the crush of the ticket onsale, these confirmation emails could easily be delayed. I recommend screenshotting or saving your browser window to a PDF if you can for your records.

Once a person's sale completes and they have been given a confirmation number, then that 'individual window' at the virtual box office pulls another person from the waiting room queue.

While you are in the queue, it is normal for it to go several seconds, and even a few minutes, without seeing your place in the queue advancing (not sure offhand if it will display your place in line). Again, this is normal. Everyone moves at different paces as they fill out their forms, make typos on different fields, scramble to get the right credit card out, and all the other variables. And MasterCard/Visa can sometimes take a few moments to process and approve a transaction. These are fairly substantial dollar amount transactions, and in these days of wild and crazy credit card and identity thefts, it may take some banks longer than others to sort things out. The phrase "hurry up and wait" applies here - I've seen the queue sit without movement for a couple minutes, and then suddenly lurch forward (again, that is if it is displaying place in the queue).

All ticket onsales are technically challenging, and it's something that even large scale ticket providers like Ticketmaster struggle with. In a sense, it is functionally a planned DDoS attack. Number of people registered has not been published that I'm aware of, but at the end of the day it comes down to how many people are clicking those links at the same time. With 10K or so tickets plus vehicle passes in the sale, it should probably go fairly quickly (wow, just realized it took me til after the start of the sale to post this... sorry).

Hope that info helps

Hi Trilo!

I got through on the profiles button but . . .
The first time I hit it was a split second early and it gave me the "you are early" page.
Hitting back and re-clicking the link got the same thing.
Then I thought to hit refresh. that got it but very late dammit.

Thinking positive thoughts and crossing fina;osira... crossing TOES (can't type with fingers crossed hehe)... GOOD LUCK!!!

Nothing. As expected. Time to put burning man firmly in my past. No more heartbreak accepted.

Well...

I believe this is the 5th consecutive year that the ticket overlords have over looked my presence.

Glad I went the last 2 years for free. Free of most rules, this ticket mess, and subsequent disappointment.

With that said, I always get in. I would think that most eplayans on these boards with regularity, should have enough friends, accomplices and sympathetic ears on here to find a ticket. It may take some begging and perhaps even some lashing out, but It'll happen.

When I say "regular eplayan" I mean someone who's been around here a little while, not the one's that signed in 2 days ago to try to trick someone out of a ticket with anecdotes, make believe, and whimsy...

Jackass wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 01, 2022 11:28 am

I believe this is the 5th consecutive year that the ticket overlords have over looked my presence.

Glad I went the last 2 years for free. Free of most rules, this ticket mess, and subsequent disappointment.

With that said, I always get in. I would think that most eplayans on these boards with regularity, should have enough friends, accomplices and sympathetic ears on here to find a ticket. It may take some begging and perhaps even some lashing out, but It'll happen.

When I say "regular eplayan" I mean someone who's been around here a while, not the one's that signed in 2 days ago to try to trick someone out of a ticket with anecdotes, make believe, and whimsy...

I haven’t even tried main sale for years. This is the first year in a long time that my network isn’t too robust, and my dearest friend who gave me her plus one many times is not going. Who you may be referring to as not regular, isn’t clear, but I haven’t been here in a long time. I didn’t show up to get a ticket. I came because I have been in effective isolation since September, and I need a little feeling of community. I don’t think I actually will go, can’t actually afford it. I got swept up in the frenzy and disappointment of the day. Between now and August I will be deciding for or against many more times. The pull is very strong.