Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Fair ticket selling methods for large conventions
Posts
I think opening up a third PAX is a terrible idea; it will dilute the content of them waaayyyy too much. It's one thing to ask people to show up to two shows six months apart (and a lot of companies still don't make both). Three would be overkill.
Personally, I hate the idea of moving PAX to So-Cal, but it may be the best way to expand it.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
And how hard is it to set a Twitter account to forward to either a text number or an email address?
Sal keeps talking about how it takes very little effort to set up an email mailing list; how does that amount of effort compare to the amount required to set up a twitter account, follow the PAX twitter, and have it forwarded to you?
I think that only may be for direct messages and @ replies, but there is probably a web app that will do it for you.
However, the SMS functionality is pretty robust. I'd prefer that for time-sensitive info over email anyway (especially without a smart phone/no data).
Make people have to beat I want to be The Man to get tickets?
Setting up twitter and having it forward SMS to you is very easy. Probably would take about 5 minutes to set that up unless you are a luddite who is easily confused.
Of course with email, you would have to deal with making sure it doesn't get filtered to junk mail, not helping those without phone data plans, etc. so I don't really see an advantage over SMS.
Still not sure I can find it in the app, but I logged in to my desktop version and it looked easy.
So it's not all Luddites
Pokemon Black 2: 0519-5108-3139
Lottery systems often allow people to put their name in for multiple tickets, so that those who win can bring friends.
Yes, and see Feral's post above on why that creates a perverse incentive that will make the problem worse not better.
I'm glad to see that Gabe posted on this issue. It's nice to know that it's something they are going to put a lot of thought into, regardless of outcome.
They could offer refunds for those who have to cancel. That way, if something comes up, the ticket isn't wasted, but there's no incentive for people to buy tickets just to make money. They could auction off those returned tickets with proceeds going to Child's Play.
We already knew this...they care a lot about the attendees and community.
I understand why people think a lottery would be better, but I really don't see it working. For one, the friends/group thing, though you still have that issue with someone missing out, but seems like it'd be more likely in a lotto.
For me, the bigger issue would be the onus is now on P-A, Inc. to ensure a fair system - which will just give people more opportunity to cry foul. I think with a little Khooperation we can find a system that works.
Electronic composer for hire.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
And 55 auctions does not a disaster make.
But the point of this thread is to discuss amongst ourselves what we feel could be the best method of decreasing that "55" number, so just thought I'd offer one solution.
Refundable, non-transferable (to another person or party) tickets. All refunded tickets will go back on sale. You can use Twitter to announce something like "hey, we've got 5 refunded tickets available, come and get 'em now!". Find out a friend can't go? Get a refund and that ticket goes back into the pool of 100,000+ that wanted a ticket.
Electronic composer for hire.
I believe he's referring to the people scalping the tickets who say they aren't scalpers on their E-Bay auction.
Nontransferable tickets are also dumb. It make mitigate scalping, but it also increases the chances that tickets are unused, which is probably worse.
Amusingly, I actually checked about an hour before they went up, a little while before I went home from work... and rebuilt my computer and cleaned up for a couple hours when I got home because new furniture had gotten delivered that day; by that time the 3 days had already been sold out
In a simultaneous offering, everyone puts in bids of how much they're willing to pay. So a rich person might put in a bid for 4 tickets at $300 each to make sure they get them, while a poor college student would bid $20 for a 3-day pass on the off chance they get lucky. Bidding goes on for a set time period, at which time all bids are finalized. PAX then lines up the bids by price, and sells tickets to the highest 60,000 people for their bid price.
In a lowering auction, you start bidding at $1000 dollars (or some super high number), sell as many tickets as people are willing to buy, and let people know you have 60,000 tickets left. Then the next day, you drop the price to $900 and sell as many tickets as people are willing to buy and let people know how many tickets you have left. Then the next day, you drop it to $800 and sell... etc. As you get to lower values, you start stepping it down by $50 dollar increments, then $25 dollar increments and so on. 700, 600, 500, 400, 300, 250, 200, 175, 150, etc. Eventually the price will either reach the reserve limit (where they'd be losing money), or they will run out of tickets. In actuality, it tends to be that nobody bids until tickets look like they're going to be 'scarce' and then there's a mad dash to buy all at once, but that's the price you pay for trying to save money.
There is also the variant that everyone who bids ends up paying the same amount as the point they run out of tickets. So, if you bid for $250, but they still have tickets until the $190 price point, you only pay $190; however if you bid $250 and they end up running out of tickets at $240, then you have to pay $240.
However, with any of these setups, scalping becomes practically impossible, everyone gets tickets at the price that they're willing to pay, and PAX gets the maximum amount of money possible. Win-win-win. (Unless you're poor, in which case you should support a lottery)
Electronic composer for hire.
I think it's fair to assume that the guys care about their attendees beyond the money they receive from them, so yes they have some incentive to at least consider if a change would improve the situation.
Many people were already going to lose out. That's the thing. X people want to attend, Y people can legally fit in the convention center, with X>>Y. No more or fewer people lost out because of their ticket selling policies. All we are talking about is how winners should be picked. The number of losers will not change, regardless of what they do (aside from moving to a larger space).
Yes, that would be much much worse. Right now the issue is choosing who gets a pass in their hand, but it's a fair assumption that just about everybody with a pass will use it. Start putting any hurdles in the way of selling it, particularly if you don't raise the price, and you risk passes going entirely unused. At $65, honestly it's not necessarily worth the hassle for me to resell a pass if there's any additional effort at all required. So now less discrete humans get to attend, and this is bad.
Same goes for friends sharing passes, which is a thing that happens.
So true. It'll be more than 55, obviously. But even assuming like 10% or 15% of tickets sold at registration were to those intending primarily to scalp them, that's not a disaster. It would have had a minimal impact on the ability of people complaining to get a ticket...mainly just those who had the tickets in their cart and were checking out as they ran out, that kind of thing. You're talking like a 30 minute difference in sellout time. 99% of people who missed the sale would still have missed the sale.
And every one of those scalped tickets will still go to a fan who wanted to go. Scalpers, whether or not we want to admit it, fix the problem of "zomg I can't sit at my computer 24/7." At least for anybody with money. And not even all that much money, in the grand scheme of things. I'd prefer the guys auction off a block themselves, with proceeds going into the con or to charity or even to pimping out their rides. I don't like that scalpers get the cash. But I do like having another avenue where I can, through my own actions, personally increase my ability to get a badge.
Not that I need to, because at least up until now we still aren't seeing 1-minute sellouts and there were already avenues available through which you could (for the most part) personally increase your chances of getting a badge. It may have seemed silly to start getting tweets forwarded as text messages and make backup plans for who would buy your tickets for you if you were at work and so on and so forth...I mean, it usually takes days for these to sell out...right?
But for some people, going was important enough that they wanted to be absolutely certain they got passes. And these people did.
Honestly, I'd prefer the answer be "try harder or pay more." I really don't want it to come down to luck.
Though if we're going to start with lotteries and nontransferrable shenanigans or any other silliness, I just hope we keep a significant block set aside for auction, because then I know I'll get mine. I guarantee that 15% of attendees aren't both willing and able to pay more than I am.
I can weigh in on this since I've done a massive Olympic trip before. It's not the same as what people are proposing here at all. You're talking about 1 pass for total access to 3 days of PAX to be put up via lottery for 200K peoplle, which is just going to put off a lot of people. You're either in or out, no in-between.
WIth the Olympics you have to fill out an elaborate lottery form stating our daily agenda. You fill in a Primary, Secondary, and Alternate event you'd like to see for every morning, afternoon, and evening time slot you feel like seeing an event, and how many tickets. So basically you're going to get some of the events you want to see, and some of the secondary events, and even sometimes the Alternate if the first 2 are super popular. So basically on like July 23rd we'd have "Morning - Basketball, Track & Field, Gymnastics - Womens", "Afternoon - Swimming, Basketball, Boxing", and then take the evening off. Or do an event in the morning and the evening, whatever.
So it works really well in getting you to a ton of events, all of which you're interested in, just some more than others. You're also talking about millions and millions of people though over hundreds of events that are held in arenas that can hold anywhere from 5-80K people at any one time.
This is making the ridiculous assumption that 55 people paying $texas for scalped badges don't "REALLY want one."
Do you see why that is ridiculous?
All you want to do is take those 55 badges out of their hands, and give them to someone else. All we're talking about is picking winners, not letting more people attend, or people who reeeeally want to go attend. I fail to see how being willing to drop a car payment (or two!) on a badge is any less a sign of devotion to attend than mashing F5 and/or taking a day off work to get one.
So I'll repeat myself:
I meant that as in "they get a second chance to get a ticket, but have to pay a much higher price".
You're reading into what I said all wrong. Yeah of course many other people REALLY wanted to go, but they aren't willing to pay some of these prices to get a ticket that some folks already have. I mean, eBay has been around for years. Surely people who use Twitter have heard of eBay. I'm not arguing if it's fair or not and I'm sorry if I lead you to believe that. I was merely pointing out the fact that people who didn't get a chance to get a pass during the first (and second) go around can now do so at a higher price if they were so inclined.
Completed listings. Three passes purchased for $299.95 each. Now there are some people who REALLY wanted to go and had the money who missed out the first (and second) time. These are probably people who don't use Twitter.
Electronic composer for hire.
So I think we're in agreement there, my bad. I do not agree that non-transferable tickets are an answer, even if refundable. Honestly, unless the scalping problem gets worse, I don't feel like we even need an "answer." Though I suspect it may get worse soon.
So far the only change I've seen that I like is mine. Surprising, I know.
Lottery off half or so, sell some of the rest off as normal (even keeping the date unannounced), and auction off maybe 10% or 20% directly. Everybody has a non-zero chance of getting a ticket through the lottery end, but with other methods of "winning" available. Big questions are the ratio of the three, and what order to do it in.
Or open up PAX Chicago or something.
I don't know that the guys are even up for running three PAXes a year, and if they are, a lot of companies and things would then pick and choose which PAX to go to; I think it would probably dilute PAX too much.
I imagine they're already at Seattle's biggest venue, so the only thing to do would be to open a third day or eliminate three day passes and just sell one days.
Thanatos, didn't you suggest something like that earlier in the thread?
Unless you make them nontransferable this does little or nothing to help the scalping issue. Announced sale times only make it worse.
This also removes the "effort" route, as you can no longer put in the effort and make backup plans to skip the melee at the cornucopia.. As it is, a lot of us leveraged twitter and backup plans to make sure we got ours well before the rest. I don't see how this is a bad thing.
This is basically what I think people SHOULD do.
I was just blue skying some "solutions" for discussion's sake.
Didn't Gabe say that scalpers are hardly the problem since the average ticket sale was 1.7 per?
The only solution is to create more tickets. There are two way to do that: one is to move locations to someplace larger (almost certainly either Vegas or So-Cal). The other is to change PAX into something closer to 3-4 one-day events instead of one 3-day event. Limit people to buying tickets for only a single day each transaction, have redundant panels and things, and get rid of multi-day passes entirely.
but for my part, i think funds or randomness are the two best arbiters. i like the idea someone mentioned of a decreasing auction where you can secure tickets if you're willing to pay more. especially because if you truly do pay more, those funds can go to charity. and randomness, of course, has its own symmetrical appeal.