STEP advice - How long does it usually take?

[CarinaLouise]

Hi,
Just after some advice from those of you have participated in STEP before or might just know.
I got up at 5am (in Australia) to register and was succesfully registered by 5:02am.
I was just wondering how long people have waited before being offered a ticket. Or is the que already rediculously long even after only 2 minutes and i should be trying to find a different method for aquiring a ticket?
Thanks in advance for your help

[Capn Crunch]

From what I've read (and I've asked around a lot) is that STEP starts at a very slow crawl and picks up pace in late May early June. There are people that are getting it, with the same time-stamp that you received... however, (and there are many people on the board that will say this), you can't go by time-stamp... due to the variance, but it is safe to say you would be in front of someone that registered at 12: 10 for example..

Anyways, I have a thread that I started, where we are congratulating people that got offered one... kinda what time they entered in (again, not a good measure), and just overall the STEP process...

viewtopic.php?f=367&t=68855

On top of it, it contains some useful information... from the banter that has gone on back and forth about the process. Hope it helps...

[Eric]

There is no "usual" when it comes to STEP: those tickets are sold as people contribute them into STEP and there is no way to know when people will decide to contribute tickets, there is no way AT ALL to know how many people are ahead of you since the BMorg doesn't release that data, which means there is absolutely no way to know when you'll be offered a ticket.

It's still extremely early in the season, most people on the fence about being able to attend are still on the fence, and will most likely remain so into early summer, and there probably won't be much movement for a while. Continue to use all other available resources to try to get a ticket (which is harder when you're coming from out of the country, but it can be done) - just make sure to read the link in my sig about ticket fraud.

As for the "timestamps" thing - there is no way to know how many people are ahead of you: even if you registered in the first two minutes there could be several thousand people ahead of you (or there could be six people, there is absolutely no way to know).

[Lonesomebri]

Last year the tickets went out thru the organization, this year it's thru a ticket company. Notification while registering for STEP, etc. have changed slightly... Last year I received a confirmation email confirmingI was in STEP and this had a timestamp on it from when the org sent it to me. Going by these timestamps people could tell what place in line they were, in a way. This year, after registering, the registration webpage confirmed I was in, but there was no confirmation email to me, no timestamp on a email from BM showing me their time of my registration. So there is no BM timestamp comparison to make with others, just what each of us says is the time we are pretty sure we registered. In other words, last year was a different animal. But, as said, the source of tickets are people giving them up as their own plans change, so, yeah, the pace picks up dramatically as the event approaches. I'm in. I'm waiting.

[media]

Oh, and you should be trying any means necessary.

[trilobyte]

STEP is a game of weeks and months, not minutes and seconds.

[Capn Crunch]

STEP is a game of weeks and months, not minutes and seconds.

Are you sure? I think these guys would beg to differ....

[youtube][/youtube]

[Lonesomebri]

Okay, so I was wrong. My tickets came thru STEP the last two years so I went thru that process my self, but hey...my memory is weak. The tickets have always come thru the ticket provider I have been informed, it's just I think that the provider has changed, and the way to register changed, and the notification of registration changed. Hell, for all I know the whole structure of the org has changed. Last year people did receive a confirmation email, and this year they did not. I was worried about that change, others posted slight confusion over whether they should have received a confirmation email like last year. Me pointing out that last year there was this "timestamp" comparison between confirmation emails, and that this year that is not the case, there are no timestamps, there was no confirmation email, I kinda continued the whole "timestamp" mythology in some way by saying it does not apply. But, hey, I'd wager the timestamps were more real than that meteorite left in the burn. In conclusion, nothing has changed from last year, except some stuff. There is no way to know were you are in line or how many months you have to wait. The t-word is nixed from here on out. You should try to get tickets other ways than STEP. It relies on people bailing at the last minute. And it's a long long long long long wait. I am in on it, i got no tickets for being a placed camp. Sorry for any confusion I might have caused.

[trilobyte]

Yes to all those things, actually. They've been covered on the boards, the blog, and the JRS if you care to find out more about some of the changes.

You'd also lose the meteor bet, by the way. The piece was well documented before the man burned (the creator, the folks at HQ who gave it placement, the thousands of participants who saw it in the saucer pavilion during the week), and analysis of the recovered object was consistent with the analysis of the object prior to the burn (the difference between meteorites and earth rocks tends to jump right out under a microscope). To me it's far more likely that the known meteorite survived fires of significantly lower intensity than the heat of burning through the Earth's atmosphere than the chances someone somehow swapped in another meteorite of similar size, shape, and composition on-playa.

[Jackass]

Ahh, yes... The legend lives on.


I had temporarily forgot about that recent bit of history.

[theCryptofishist]

There is no "usual" when it comes to STEP: those tickets are sold as people contribute them into STEP and there is no way to know when people will decide to contribute tickets...

This is only the third year of the program and the first year was very different for a bunch of reasons.
So, there isn't even a baseline yet.