Why the existing ticketing model is not going to work

[portaplaya]

It is my belief that people learned their lesson in 2011. Those who wait, lose. There was a system (first-come, first-served) that initially rewarded early adopters with lower ticket prices, and then this year with just having tickets.

But the slow pokes are aware of this now. Opening day for tickets last year sold over half of the tickets (about 27,000 in fact) in one day, despite server crashes galore. Now that everyone knows they sell out, how are we not going to get everyone buying a ticket on opening day. In fact, there will be many lining up to buy tickets just in case they decide to go, since it is quite easy to sell them on the secondary market.

And I also think that this will be the majority of purchasers. Surely there will be some scalpers, but it's not likely to be a majority of the purchases due to the logistics problems, the high capital needed, and the time commitment to lock that capital into BM tickets. (at $300 per ticket, just 10,000 tix are $3,000,000 locked up for as much as eight months.)

The thing that every fails to see when they say this system will work is that it didn't work last year, but the lottery was run by technical problems (lost connections, server resets, etc.) instead of through a deliberate process. There will be no such thing as "those who are prepared", because it is likely that we'll see more than 50,000 ticket buyers on the first day if we try the old system.

A lottery is needed to make the first day fair. Using it to manage scalpers and to give the few that would allegedly buy their tickets later in the year a chance are both secondary benefits. Not the primary goal.

[Nipple]

So... how empty do you estimate the playa will be this year?

30,000 people? 20,000?

[EspressoDude]

what if NOBODY bought tickets or went to the event?

[Nipple]

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