Ugh, this is a real bummer. It's especially shitty for those who were at work when registration went live. Was there even any announcement ahead of time when reg would open up? And why has nothing been done to at least stem the tide of scalpers? I wish I could finally go to PAX Prime, but it looks like this won't be the year either.
Unfortunately, they haven't, at least in the years that I've gone, ever announced ahead of time when the tickets go on sale. Registration goes live randomly around this time of year and word gets out and then bam they sell out. They'll send out a tweet when registration goes up but that's it. ): It really sucks, I know.
I got in for Fri only. *sadface* Happy I got in for then at least. This will be my first PAX, so I'm pretty disappointed that I didnt get in for the whole thing. *sigh* Next year.
I can imagine that this was a real shit year to try to sign up for the first time. My first registration happened when I just randomly checked the paxsite last year and found the badges up for sale. I was lucky enough to check specifically that day, and I was able to get all three days. Perhaps try buying off some forum people via PM. There's no public sale allowed here, but I do know that some people always buy extras to help out the other forumers who were too unlucky to get in right away.
I think that every single person involved would agree that the token issue is really shitty, especially those working on PAX. I would not be surprised to see a different vendor for East.
East didn't have this problem - as a matter of fact, badges were still readily available for purchase directly from the site up to like 3 days before the event, if I remember right. I know I didn't buy my PAX East badges until reaaaaaal close to it.
There were 2 failings with the vendor:
1) The tokens they issued didn't expire and
2) Even accounting for the fact that I work as part of a very experienced network security group, it only took someone about 30 minutes to reverse engineer a token to bypass the queue entirely (*I* would never do that of course, but others perhaps aren't so ethical :P). Even a significantly less skilled security guru could have done it in a matter of an hour or so. And once that's done, distributing it to other people within the office occurs very quickly. All perfectly legal and entirely avoidable if the company hosting the ticket sales properly encrypted their tokens.
Yes, I know it wasn't an issue for East, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't want to make changes for east
So here is my story/whine: I saw the tweet about tickets and immediately went to the site. I got in the queue. I sat for THREE hours at my computer, skipping lunch, pushed back a meeting, didn't go to the bathroom, so I wouldn't miss when the queue comes up. It finally does three hours later and everything but monday is sold out. I find out later people who joined the queue long after me got 4 day tickets before I even got to see the ticketing screen. How is that possible even? Why is there no timer or ticket counter so people don't waste a day and get nothing out of it? The only up side is I can still cancel hotel reservations for this so I'm not out money at the very least.
Is there no solution to this? I feel like I got screwed by some system here even though I did everything I could.
If PAX really wants to do this right going forward, they'd tie badge purchases to Nina. No queues, no timeouts, no ability to exploit web sites or security holes, and you'd be able to tie purchases to legitimate phone numbers instead of a bunch of dummy drops. And I know full well that the Nina architecture can handle the load that'd come from 20,000 people trying to use it at once.
Got mine, but it was so so close. I bought mine after the main page was showing Saturday sold out. I think I'm going to have to go to East next year. The stress of getting Prime tickets is just too high.
Names at registration, a very difficult process to change them, and waves of ticket sales. Was there not one person who thought these things might be ideas to consider?
It's a pretty big "fuck you" in the face of everyone who is currently ticket-less to execute sales without tiniest shred of consideration or care. I guess you guys sold out in the first hour, so congratulations. From a business standpoint you're the best! From every other standpoint you're just negligent. Cons happen all of the time, and the popular ones prepare. Fuck this, I'm real mad.
I'm so glad I bothered saving up money for the past 6 months to not get tickets.
This whole queue system is a wreck, and the idea that it's not even announced beforehand when tickets will be available is ridiculous.
All this system does is promote counter fitting and reselling.
If PAX really wants to do this right going forward, they'd tie badge purchases to Nina. No queues, no timeouts, no ability to exploit web sites or security holes, and you'd be able to tie purchases to legitimate phone numbers instead of a bunch of dummy drops. And I know full well that the Nina architecture can handle the load that'd come from 20,000 people trying to use it at once.
There's one hell of a lot more than 20k people concurrent. 200k conservative minimum. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more, honestly. PAX is amazingly popular.
Real talk: if tickets are selling out in less than 15 minutes then it means they're too cheap or too few. Increase the price or the amount to manage the demand so this bullshit doesn't happen every year.
I don't think raising the price would do anything. Even if PA decided to raise the prices significantly, people, like me would still buy the passes and it would still sell out quickly. I'd be super mad about it and think that PA is getting greedy.
I don't really give a shit. Raise the price until the tickets stay available long enough that people have a fucking chance to buy them rather than needing to watch Twitter every single second of the day from when PAX East lets out to when tickets go on sale. Right now they're leaving money on the table and pissing off people who can afford it but are being turned away, might as well stop leaving money on the table since people are going to end up pissed one way or another.
Without this scalping BS, all of us here today on day 1 of registration would have 4 day badges. All of us!
I'd love to see you cite evidence on this .
Evidence is my personal experience. As late as 2011, it was taking days and weeks for the 3 days passes to sell out. But the scalping community got wind of it, and now they're on to it worse than Skylanders. Just seems like common sense to me based on evidence. Or are you suggesting that PAX magically got much more popular in 2012? For what reason?
Names at registration, a very difficult process to change them, and waves of ticket sales. Was there not one person who thought these things might be ideas to consider?
It's a pretty big "fuck you" in the face of everyone who is currently ticket-less to execute sales without tiniest shred of consideration or care. I guess you guys sold out in the first hour, so congratulations. From a business standpoint you're the best! From every other standpoint you're just negligent. Cons happen all of the time, and the popular ones prepare. Fuck this, I'm real mad.
These have been considered. There was rather extensive discussion about it last year, in fact. There are reasons that your ideas have not been implemented, even if you're upset.
I have to agree. The fact that nothing was announced sayign when they would be available is bs. the fact that scalpers were able to get 100+ each because once they got though the queue (of which there was 0) they could go back in as much as they want..
I think it would be awesome of the powers that be to log in to ebay, "buy" one of the tickets on there, then negate every one sold from that IP address or address or card number or phone number or whatever.
:!!: Current Addiction: World of Warcraft
:!!: Progress: My mage can kick your mage's ass. My hunter can kick your mage's ass, and I'm positive my Shadow Priest can kick your mage's ass also.
Names at registration, a very difficult process to change them, and waves of ticket sales. Was there not one person who thought these things might be ideas to consider?
It's a pretty big "fuck you" in the face of everyone who is currently ticket-less to execute sales without tiniest shred of consideration or care. I guess you guys sold out in the first hour, so congratulations. From a business standpoint you're the best! From every other standpoint you're just negligent. Cons happen all of the time, and the popular ones prepare. Fuck this, I'm real mad.
Names are useless unless you're checking IDs a lot
I'll agree with the others that commented on PAX getting in touch with Blizzard for how they handle ticket purchases. They learned their lesson the hard way. I was there for the "Failoc" of 2008 and miraculously managed to get tickets. The site/ticket queue system in use since 2010 and 2011 worked really well. Multiple batches of tickets, including a weekend, sold outside of 8am-5pm (US at least), and an interface that is informative and helpful.
sakura-con uses a system to attach the name and dob for each pass you're buying and having the passes picked up the day before or of the con. this makes sure that whomever is buying multiples is really buying for others to use instead of reselling.
whoever they use for future paxes should consider something like this.
I agree. As much as I hate waiting in line to get my pass for Sakura-con I think it would really help.
Names at registration, a very difficult process to change them, and waves of ticket sales. Was there not one person who thought these things might be ideas to consider?
It's a pretty big "fuck you" in the face of everyone who is currently ticket-less to execute sales without tiniest shred of consideration or care. I guess you guys sold out in the first hour, so congratulations. From a business standpoint you're the best! From every other standpoint you're just negligent. Cons happen all of the time, and the popular ones prepare. Fuck this, I'm real mad.
Me too! What's the point in not insisting on names on names/ID checking? All that happened was scalpers swooped in and now are selling $400 tickets. People who legitimately tried to get in got screwed, that's not very community-centric. Its just "who cares we made money, lawl."
So here is my story/whine: I saw the tweet about tickets and immediately went to the site. I got in the queue. I sat for THREE hours at my computer, skipping lunch, pushed back a meeting, didn't go to the bathroom, so I wouldn't miss when the queue comes up. It finally does three hours later and everything but monday is sold out. I find out later people who joined the queue long after me got 4 day tickets before I even got to see the ticketing screen. How is that possible even? Why is there no timer or ticket counter so people don't waste a day and get nothing out of it? The only up side is I can still cancel hotel reservations for this so I'm not out money at the very least.
Is there no solution to this? I feel like I got screwed by some system here even though I did everything I could.
I don't get it either, because my story is the EXACT same as yours but I waited maybe 10 minutes in the queue total and had my passes by 2 PM EST. I feel like different browsers were the main issue, the site said to not refresh at first and I never did in Chrome, but others were saying their Safari browser was auto-refreshing and it took forever.
Evidence is my personal experience. As late as 2011, it was taking days and weeks for the 3 days passes to sell out. But the scalping community got wind of it, and now they're on to it worse than Skylanders. Just seems like common sense to me based on evidence. Or are you suggesting that PAX magically got much more popular in 2012? For what reason?
Not that I agree or disagree either way, but it was more popular last year due to the LOL tournament. This year, people probably have figured that the new consoles will be there. Or it could just be that word spreads and more and more people want to come. Look at the FB group or this forum for how many "first timers" are still looking to make it.
Names at registration, a very difficult process to change them, and waves of ticket sales. Was there not one person who thought these things might be ideas to consider?
It's a pretty big "fuck you" in the face of everyone who is currently ticket-less to execute sales without tiniest shred of consideration or care. I guess you guys sold out in the first hour, so congratulations. From a business standpoint you're the best! From every other standpoint you're just negligent. Cons happen all of the time, and the popular ones prepare. Fuck this, I'm real mad.
These have been considered. There was rather extensive discussion about it last year, in fact. There are reasons that your ideas have not been implemented, even if you're upset.
Why, because it prevents people from buying unmarked tickets to be sold days before the event for an extreme markup? Because it would prevent people selling 'tickets' that they never bought? Because you have to show photo ID the day of the con to grab the ticket with your name on it? Because it gives people fair warning and allows those with things to do in the middle of the day on a Tuesday to have a chance at grabbing a ticket? Because it works too well for Blizzcon and Sakuracon?
Jesus, at least backup such a bullshit statement with some of that great 'discussion', or maybe a couple of those fantastic 'reasons' why PAX must ignore precautions that have been in place and fairly successful for years at other events. The system this year was fucked, plain and simple. Randomly throwing all the tickets up into the air without warning on a Tuesday is asinine.
You heard wrong, 4-day passes were completely sold out minutes after the tweet went out, not long after.
I know, I was in the queue SECONDS not even minutes after it was announced. I happened to have twitter up and saw the pax prime post, and immediately was there. Even if minutes after 4 day passes were sold out people could buy 4 individual days for a long time after and I still sat in queue for 3 hours and got NOTHING out of it.
I think I'm more upset about seeing tickets already on ebay for as much as $260 for a 4 day, and people are actually bidding on them. 13 auctions as of right now. They went on sale 6 hours ago and people changed their minds about going? While PA might not see this as a big enough problem to look in to, and maybe it isn't, it just bothers me that scalpers are already hard at work exploiting the registration system. SDCC had the same problems in the past, now you can't scalp their tickets. I'm not saying their system is perfect, though.
Just a little venting on my end. I guess my hopes for PAX 2013 are gone since I won't spend hundreds for each 4 day pass. Maybe I'll fare better for 2014.
Names at registration, a very difficult process to change them, and waves of ticket sales. Was there not one person who thought these things might be ideas to consider?
It's a pretty big "fuck you" in the face of everyone who is currently ticket-less to execute sales without tiniest shred of consideration or care. I guess you guys sold out in the first hour, so congratulations. From a business standpoint you're the best! From every other standpoint you're just negligent. Cons happen all of the time, and the popular ones prepare. Fuck this, I'm real mad.
Names are useless unless you're checking IDs a lot
Really? Once, when you get the ticket with your name on it. Really??
sakura-con uses a system to attach the name and dob for each pass you're buying and having the passes picked up the day before or of the con. this makes sure that whomever is buying multiples is really buying for others to use instead of reselling.
whoever they use for future paxes should consider something like this.
I agree. As much as I hate waiting in line to get my pass for Sakura-con I think it would really help.
I'll take this over a 9 hour lineup on Friday, thanks. And PAX is way the crap bigger, too.
Without this scalping BS, all of us here today on day 1 of registration would have 4 day badges. All of us!
I'd love to see you cite evidence on this .
Evidence is my personal experience. As late as 2011, it was taking days and weeks for the 3 days passes to sell out. But the scalping community got wind of it, and now they're on to it worse than Skylanders. Just seems like common sense to me based on evidence. Or are you suggesting that PAX magically got much more popular in 2012? For what reason?
This is what happens. When I lived in San Diego, you could get tickets to Comic-Con a month before the show (and I did). The show itself was still busy and stuff, but tickets didn't sell out as fast. Not even 10 years later, you sneeze and they're sold out - and Comic-Con sells a LOT more passes than PAX Prime (130,000+).
You're confusing your anecdotal evidence with empirical proof. I myself was surprised - at least half of the people I talked to at East this year were attending their first PAX. You lose some attendees year-over-year due to scheduling, financial issues, etc - but it's clear that PAX is growing a lot faster than that. The organizers (Mike & Jerry) want to continue to have a show that is affordable-ish for students and the like. If price doesn't go up (by a lot), and supply is obviously constrained, then demand is going to vastly outweigh supply. We are entering that phase of the lifecycle in PAX.
East 2014 Status: Badge [ Friend got it ] Hotel [Crappy] BYOC [YES] Transport [ ] Name on Forum Badge [ ] Challenge Coin [ ]
If PAX really wants to do this right going forward, they'd tie badge purchases to Nina. No queues, no timeouts, no ability to exploit web sites or security holes, and you'd be able to tie purchases to legitimate phone numbers instead of a bunch of dummy drops. And I know full well that the Nina architecture can handle the load that'd come from 20,000 people trying to use it at once.
There's one hell of a lot more than 20k people concurrent. 200k conservative minimum. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more, honestly. PAX is amazingly popular.
There is no way that 200,000 people tried to access this place at once. Beyond that, OK fine, let's say 200K. The architecture that runs Nina is the exact same platform that powers Siri for the iPhone and S-Voice for Samsung Androids. Do you really think PAX'ers are going to bring it to its knees?
Today's debacle was fucking bullshit. I got in the queue an hour after it opened (by luck no less, there was no warning whatsoever that tickets were about to go on sale) and still didn't get the passes I needed. By the time I got through, only Monday was available.
There's something very very wrong happening when the only people who can manage to get to go to PAX without shelling out to scalpers are the devout few who keep an every present eye on the twitter or who resort to using bots. I've been lucky in years past but seriously, this shit needs to change somehow.
Posts
Unfortunately, they haven't, at least in the years that I've gone, ever announced ahead of time when the tickets go on sale. Registration goes live randomly around this time of year and word gets out and then bam they sell out. They'll send out a tweet when registration goes up but that's it. ): It really sucks, I know.
I can imagine that this was a real shit year to try to sign up for the first time. My first registration happened when I just randomly checked the paxsite last year and found the badges up for sale. I was lucky enough to check specifically that day, and I was able to get all three days. Perhaps try buying off some forum people via PM. There's no public sale allowed here, but I do know that some people always buy extras to help out the other forumers who were too unlucky to get in right away.
Trade me pins, yo: https://www.pinnypals.com/pals/Lazorz
I'd buy one
PAX Prime 2011 [x]
PAX Prime 2012 [x]
PAX Prime 2013 [x]
PAX Prime 2014 [x]
PAX Prime 2015 [x]
https://pinnypals.com/pals/5Panel
Is there no solution to this? I feel like I got screwed by some system here even though I did everything I could.
I'm down.... Finally got Friday badges... the keynote should be fun.
How'd you get Friday badges o.o
I thought there were only Monday badges left?
It's a pretty big "fuck you" in the face of everyone who is currently ticket-less to execute sales without tiniest shred of consideration or care. I guess you guys sold out in the first hour, so congratulations. From a business standpoint you're the best! From every other standpoint you're just negligent. Cons happen all of the time, and the popular ones prepare. Fuck this, I'm real mad.
This whole queue system is a wreck, and the idea that it's not even announced beforehand when tickets will be available is ridiculous.
All this system does is promote counter fitting and reselling.
There's one hell of a lot more than 20k people concurrent. 200k conservative minimum. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more, honestly. PAX is amazingly popular.
Monday is the land card in the booster pack of 1 day passes.
I don't really give a shit. Raise the price until the tickets stay available long enough that people have a fucking chance to buy them rather than needing to watch Twitter every single second of the day from when PAX East lets out to when tickets go on sale. Right now they're leaving money on the table and pissing off people who can afford it but are being turned away, might as well stop leaving money on the table since people are going to end up pissed one way or another.
Evidence is my personal experience. As late as 2011, it was taking days and weeks for the 3 days passes to sell out. But the scalping community got wind of it, and now they're on to it worse than Skylanders. Just seems like common sense to me based on evidence. Or are you suggesting that PAX magically got much more popular in 2012? For what reason?
I believe it's like 3-4 of each type of ticket
I think it would be awesome of the powers that be to log in to ebay, "buy" one of the tickets on there, then negate every one sold from that IP address or address or card number or phone number or whatever.
Names are useless unless you're checking IDs a lot
I agree. As much as I hate waiting in line to get my pass for Sakura-con I think it would really help.
Had tickets then it timed out.;/
well Sir, I got my passes. I hope you do too.
I don't get it either, because my story is the EXACT same as yours but I waited maybe 10 minutes in the queue total and had my passes by 2 PM EST. I feel like different browsers were the main issue, the site said to not refresh at first and I never did in Chrome, but others were saying their Safari browser was auto-refreshing and it took forever.
Not that I agree or disagree either way, but it was more popular last year due to the LOL tournament. This year, people probably have figured that the new consoles will be there. Or it could just be that word spreads and more and more people want to come. Look at the FB group or this forum for how many "first timers" are still looking to make it.
Why, because it prevents people from buying unmarked tickets to be sold days before the event for an extreme markup? Because it would prevent people selling 'tickets' that they never bought? Because you have to show photo ID the day of the con to grab the ticket with your name on it? Because it gives people fair warning and allows those with things to do in the middle of the day on a Tuesday to have a chance at grabbing a ticket? Because it works too well for Blizzcon and Sakuracon?
Jesus, at least backup such a bullshit statement with some of that great 'discussion', or maybe a couple of those fantastic 'reasons' why PAX must ignore precautions that have been in place and fairly successful for years at other events. The system this year was fucked, plain and simple. Randomly throwing all the tickets up into the air without warning on a Tuesday is asinine.
Just a little venting on my end. I guess my hopes for PAX 2013 are gone since I won't spend hundreds for each 4 day pass. Maybe I'll fare better for 2014.
Really? Once, when you get the ticket with your name on it. Really??
I'll take this over a 9 hour lineup on Friday, thanks. And PAX is way the crap bigger, too.
This is what happens. When I lived in San Diego, you could get tickets to Comic-Con a month before the show (and I did). The show itself was still busy and stuff, but tickets didn't sell out as fast. Not even 10 years later, you sneeze and they're sold out - and Comic-Con sells a LOT more passes than PAX Prime (130,000+).
You're confusing your anecdotal evidence with empirical proof. I myself was surprised - at least half of the people I talked to at East this year were attending their first PAX. You lose some attendees year-over-year due to scheduling, financial issues, etc - but it's clear that PAX is growing a lot faster than that. The organizers (Mike & Jerry) want to continue to have a show that is affordable-ish for students and the like. If price doesn't go up (by a lot), and supply is obviously constrained, then demand is going to vastly outweigh supply. We are entering that phase of the lifecycle in PAX.
There is no way that 200,000 people tried to access this place at once. Beyond that, OK fine, let's say 200K. The architecture that runs Nina is the exact same platform that powers Siri for the iPhone and S-Voice for Samsung Androids. Do you really think PAX'ers are going to bring it to its knees?
There's something very very wrong happening when the only people who can manage to get to go to PAX without shelling out to scalpers are the devout few who keep an every present eye on the twitter or who resort to using bots. I've been lucky in years past but seriously, this shit needs to change somehow.