Isn't it always scheduled for the middle of the day? I can't remember when it hasn't been... but maybe I have selective memory. It certainly was the case last year!
For those saying that it is fair that the tickets sold out the way they did. Let me point out since the selling of the tickets go without warning people who work may not always have a cellphone to check twitter and buy tickets at the moment they go out.
PAX Prime is a classic supply and demand problem. In our case demand far outstrips supply and only does so by increasing amounts each year. This is evident consdering the amount of time it takes to sell out of tickets each year has shrunk by several orders of magnitude since PAX began.
I'll use my own experience as a microcosm of the demand growth to illustrate my point. I'd heard of this thing called PAX in 2006 and had a passing curiousity in attending. I couldn't find anyone interested enough to go with me so I didn't. I'm not local to Seattle so a passing curiousity wasn't enough for me to drop the cash on flights and lodging. In 2007 my girlfriend and I went and we had a blast. In 2008 we convinced some friends to join us and added six people for a total of eight. The following year friends asked friends and we added another 4-5 people. The same has happened each year since. Two years ago it was 20+ and this year it looks to be nearly 30 if not more.
Now my group may not be indicative of most attendees in general, in fact I wouldn't expect it to be. But I also can't be alone in my experience. Look at gaming in general over the past decade and how popular and mainstream it's become. The industry has grown by leaps and bounds and with it the potential audience for PAX.
Scalping is not the problem. It's a mechanism that actually attempts to correct the market imbalance in demand and supply. Ultimately scalped tickets still go to people who want to attend. I'd be willing to pay 2-3 times as much to attend PAX, as would most of the people in my group. $200-300 for tickets is a drop in the bucket when you consider the total cost of airfare, lodging, and food/drink over an entire 4 day weekend for an out-of-state attendee.
Yes some of it is just pure luck or circumstance: Being in the right place at the right time. Having access to an internet connected device at the moment tickets go on sale. Having the luxury of waiting 2+ hours to wait for the queue to let you in to purchase tickets. But there are things you can still do to prepare, to control for variables and put yourself in the best position possible. Knowing the general timeline each year of when tickets go on sale. Noticing the website recently got updated. Following the Twitter account and having notifications on.
The only true solutions involve moving the entire demand or supply curve. Increasing supply of tickets--which PAX claims to do each year--but unfortunately by nowhere near enough to keep up with the demand increase. It would take a huge shift in supply along the lines of moving to a venue with much higher carrying capacity.
Holding PAX in other parts of the world was supposed to help with this, but the effect on PAX Prime's demand is miniscule at best because of the localized demand on the east coast and Australia. Expanding supply into those geographic regions actually created their own demand to a large extent. People who wouldn't have attended PAX Prime because it was too far or expensive would now attend one closer to home.
The other option is to lower the demand curve by increasing the price of tickets. How many people would still attend PAX if 4-day tickets were $200? $300? $1000? This would be the easiest and possibly most effective solution, but it'd also be the most unpopular by far.
The people who seem to get it probably took a class or two in game theory or economics. Our supply limited problem presents itself as a zero-sum game: someone getting a ticket means taking a ticket away from someone else who wanted it.
All 'solutions' proposed thus far simply shift tickets around in the same zero-sum game. Potential solutions that seem 'fair' to you will always leave someone on the other side of that coin. There's no feasibly enforceable system that would be fair to each and every person that wants to attend as long as we have our supply/demand imbalance.
Congrats if you were one of the lucky ones this year. At least we're not quite at SDCC levels of craziness yet, although I imagine it's only a matter of time.
TL;DR: More of us are fighting for the same pie, which feels like it gets smaller every year. Supply outstrips demand and will only get worse each year unless a PAX is held every month in a different part of the US/World and/or ticket prices increase fivefold. Yes that's an exaggeration (I hope).
I didn't read everything here but definitely some good points...
But is this really different than concerts selling out in seconds?
For some reason people think it's different when a convention sells out...
For me it just means they're doing really well.
Also I am not so sure the scalpers are as big of a problem as they are made out to be.
They're just the most obvious scapegoat besides the ticketing system which IMO worked very well.
It didn't go down.
Obviously a lot of frustration here but unless they move to a MUCH bigger venue, this is always going to be a problem so get used to it ;-
*facepalm* I give up. No more wasting my breath. I get that people are upset. I'm upset I couldn't get 4 day passes. But complaining that it's not fair is childish. Life's not fair. I'm sorry if this is too harsh. :shock:
They do a lottery system for the Nike Women's Marathon and in order for a group to get in, they make you sign up for a group ID. You give that group ID to the members of your group and they sign up with it. If your group ID is picked the whole group gets in. I'm not sure how fair that is in this situation.
Here is the timeline based on tweets. I put all times in Pacific time
on sale at 10:38am
4 day passes sold out 11:01am
saturday sold out 2:12pm
Sunday sold out 2:36pm
Friday sold out 2:56pm
Monday sold out 4:25pm
Based on the average 2.5 hour wait in the queue if you were not in said queue by 11:42am pacific time you were not able to get passes for all 4 days. that means that effectively the ability to go for all 4 days was sold out in roughly one hour and four minutes.
You submit you name and credit card number over a 24HR period on a predetermined date.
-> One submission per name with a valid credit card number.
-> Names are drawn at random.
-> Credit Card is billed immediately.
Everyone has a fair chance (even the low-life D-Bag scalpers). If you want to organize twenty people willing to give you their credit card number or get twenty new credit cards.... you really want them badges. And dont tell me it cant be done with the amount of BS contests everyone does.
don't want to burst your anger bubble but how does buying one ticket help. pax is funnest going with other people. who wants to wait in line by themselves or travel to this even by themselves, etc
I never really got an answer to my question earlier (my apologies if this has been posted before): will canceled tickets (for whatever reason) all go on sale at a specific time or will they be individually released the moment they are canceled? Thanks.
If you're not following the PAX twitter feed and having it send you tweets through SMS, you're doing it wrong.
That's not realistic! For one, I have to pay for each SMS I send or receive because AT&T are greedy a-holes.
Aren't SMS texts $.25 a piece if you have no plan? I'm sure if you can afford a PAX ticket you can afford $.75 for the two tweet-texts they sent in the last couple weeks and the one they sent this morning letting us know that the passes were on sale. And then (like I did) you go back to Twitter and turn it off.
I never really got an answer to my question earlier (my apologies if this has been posted before): will canceled tickets (for whatever reason) all go on sale at a specific time or will they be individually released the moment they are canceled? Thanks.
Here is the timeline based on tweets. I put all times in Pacific time
on sale at 10:38am
4 day passes sold out 11:01am
saturday sold out 2:12pm
Sunday sold out 2:36pm
Friday sold out 2:56pm
Monday sold out 4:25pm
Based on the average 2.5 hour wait in the queue if you were not in said queue by 11:42am pacific time you were not able to get passes for all 4 days. that means that effectively the ability to go for all 4 days was sold out in roughly one hour and four minutes.
Destructoid put up their story 37 minutes after the sale started it seems, and unfortunately I did not see the story until 47 minutes after that. So I go into the "queue" 1 hour and 24 minutes after it went live, waited something like 2 hours or more, and was able to get tickets for all days EXCEPT Saturday. And minutes after I got my tickets, Sunday sold out. So your estimate is INCREDIBLY accurate. Good job. And damn me for not being high tech and rich enough to afford free text messaging AND set up PAX twitter to go off on my phone. Sheesh!
The only answer to crippling supply issues is raising the price to lower the demand. If they refuse to do that then the demand will lower because no one will want to deal with the bullshit of trying anymore. At this rate I hope the scalpers get more than their fair share of tickets by abusing the many bugs, using multiple browsers/addresses/CCs, using refresh-bots, and whatever else they do because then at least normal people get a fucking chance to buy them.
At least we're not quite at SDCC levels of craziness yet, although I imagine it's only a matter of time.
I think you're quite right. It accelerates each year due to exactly what you laid out. Increases in demand with no increase in supply has generated additional competitiveness. It's only going to get worse until one of the two variables change. Increasing supply would mean Prime leaving Seattle. I don't know if that will ever happen and I personally hope it doesn't. Demand isn't going to diminish anytime soon (even with a price increase IMO), so the pass sell-out rate it is only going to get worse year after year.
*facepalm* I give up. No more wasting my breath. I get that people are upset. I'm upset I couldn't get 4 day passes. But complaining that it's not fair is childish. Life's not fair. I'm sorry if this is too harsh. :shock:
Yeah you're right life's not fair because life is random (to a certain degree) but not humans because if we were we'd be insane; humans make it fair (to a certain degree) to make sense of it all. Debunking shitty old school philosophical ideas aside if the tickets were announced (at least without batches) and I didn't get one I wouldn't be pissed I would kindly accept it just like a game were to be sold out after being in line. The thing about this is I didn't even get to be in line (online speaking I didn't get to race to click with my mouse).
I got the tweet at 1:40 (est) for them going up. I was in the queue by 1:41, and waited and waited until about 1:54 before I got through. At that time it told me 4 Days were sold out, so I was furious but hustled to get singles, where I got 3 sets for me/friends.
This sucked, is all I can say. I'm grateful I got them, but on my phone I was so paranoid I wouldn't even get these damn things...
I dont understand why they dont just announce when they will sell tickets and release them in batches instead of just releasing all of them at once at an unspecified time that catches people that really want to go off guard.
Because, as has been said over and over, most of the tickets sold are STILL going to people that really want to go. Put a date on the registration and they'll sell out even faster, AND you'll have a much larger server load, resulting in even more people missing out because of site glitches.
I've said it repeatedly in this thread, this thread's cousin from last year, and the linked D&D thread:
X people want to go. Capacity is Y. X>>Y.
Nothing anybody suggests will change this. At all. Ever. Well, aside from changing the con to make X smaller I suppose, but do we want to do that? Until then, every suggestion...every last one...is for the purpose of taking passes from one fan and giving them to another. Period. Even scalped passes. Because a scalped pass is exactly what I'd be buying if I hadn't been able to get mine from the site, after fighting with the fuckawful ticket agent today.
EDIT: X>>Y. Repeat it until it sinks in, seriously. There is no solution.
No one is talking about eliminating the problems, we're talking about spreading tickets out. We're talking about reducing the number of scalpers. Throwing your hands up and saying "Oye, what are you gonna do!" is a telling response. Even if you hadn't mentioned it I would have bet all the money in my wallet that you had gotten a ticket.
Order. Rules. Regulations. These things exist to make things more fair, not to eliminate the problem that some people will still go without. Clearly the only way to fix that is to up the supply (an impossibility here), but no one is saying that. You don't think things should be changed because you won and that's that. What reason do you have to care? Enjoy yourself at PAX, but please, please, please... don't try and keep things the way they are. It's broken, and what you're saying is completely useless in any effort to fix it.
The only issue I saw today, personally, was the broken-ass ticket vendor. The token/cookie issues, timeouts, etc. Everything else? Fine. Because no fix to the other "problems" does anything but shift badges around among fans.
And yes, that would have been a safe bet. Because even if I hadn't gotten a ticket through the site today, you can bet that I'd have gotten one later through the secondary market. Period. They're available. Not even that expensive, if you avoid the day-after panic buying. And the badge itself is, yearly, one of the smallest line items in my PAX budget. I make good money, but even if I made half what I do now it's not like an extra $50 or even $100 would be the difference between "going" and "not going" for me. Even if I made a quarter of what I do now it would not. My current paycheck merely means that the sky is the limit...if I had to pay $500 for a pass, I still might. But I won't, because every year badges are available for maybe 50% over face if you look.
I almost didn't get a ticket. I was pissed. But not because of the notification system. Not because scalpers. Not because tickets wouldn't have names on them. But because the vendor was taking six minutes to load a page but still only giving me eight minutes to complete a purchase. Because I had no indication of whether I was even moving in the queue, whether my browser was even compatible with their scripting. Because that was the only aspect of all this that was entirely out of my control.
I don't think things should be changed because change is all it's about is picking winners. If I hadn't gotten a badge this year, if I don't get one next year, my position will not change. Because I'm not going to say that the system is bad simply because I didn't "win." Like I said, every single "solution" has its own problems, and screws some subsets over others. Zero sum game. X>>Y. Literally nothing you can say changes any of this.
I got the tweet at 1:40 (est) for them going up. I was in the queue by 1:41, and waited and waited until about 1:54 before I got through. At that time it told me 4 Days were sold out, so I was furious but hustled to get singles, where I got 3 sets for me/friends.
This sucked, is all I can say. I'm grateful I got them, but on my phone I was so paranoid I wouldn't even get these damn things...
I'm a little upset at not getting the 4-day, merely because I hang my badges on the wall (and single-days aren't the same). Other than that? It's $25, I'll be fine.
And limiting 4-day badges encourages single-day attendance, which means more discrete humans get to experience some portion of PAX. This is a good thing.
I'm a little leery of the BYOC thing. I managed to get a BYOC pass, supposedly, like two hours into the sale. Is that even possible? Don't those usually sell out earlier than most badges? I get a sinking feeling that the vendor wasn't accurately accounting for those, and they were oversold...
Yes, @mcdermott - exactly what you said about website frustrations. I was stuck in a holding pattern for almost 2 hours, all while I was also trying to work. It happened to be on a very, very rare mellow day for me. I wish I would have known where in line I was. I heard about the timing out for other people but I also got lucky in that respect. Once I was in, the transaction was executed perfectly.
Yes, @mcdermott - exactly what you said about website frustrations. I was stuck in a holding pattern for almost 2 hours, all while I was also trying to work. It happened to be on a very, very rare mellow day for me. I wish I would have known where in line I was. I heard about the timing out for other people but I also got lucky in that respect. Once I was in, the transaction was executed perfectly.
That fact that all I had as an indicator of progress was what could well have been noting more than an animated GIF of a reload symbol was not acceptable. Like, for all I knew nothing was even happening in the background. Ridiculous.
Then having the purchase timeout? Ridiculous.
I mean, the token/cookie thing is hilariously awful but at the same time it's the only reason I got a badge, because it's what let me skip back to the front of the line after their system punched me in the dick on checkout.
TL;DR: More of us are fighting for the same pie, which feels like it gets smaller every year. Supply outstrips demand and will only get worse each year unless a PAX is held every month in a different part of the US/World and/or ticket prices increase fivefold. Yes that's an exaggeration (I hope).
I wish we had a way to pull numbers and put together a demand table. It'd be interesting to work out the equilibrium price given the maximum capacity of the venue.
Huh, well according to the BYOC thread Showsucks eventually did report BYOC as sold out, so maybe that wasn't bullshit. Interesting that they lasted that long.
I almost didn't get a ticket. I was pissed. But not because of the notification system. Not because scalpers. Not because tickets wouldn't have names on them. But because the vendor was taking six minutes to load a page but still only giving me eight minutes to complete a purchase. Because I had no indication of whether I was even moving in the queue, whether my browser was even compatible with their scripting. Because that was the only aspect of all this that was entirely out of my control.
I don't think things should be changed because change is all it's about is picking winners. If I hadn't gotten a badge this year, if I don't get one next year, my position will not change. Because I'm not going to say that the system is bad simply because I didn't "win." Like I said, every single "solution" has its own problems, and screws some subsets over others. Zero sum game. X>>Y. Literally nothing you can say changes any of this.
^This. After waiting my first hour in the queue I didn't know if the little refreshes the page was doing were failed attempts at loading my turn, or if it had glitched out and just wasn't going to tell me. I know, first world problem, but that was the tensest two hours I've had in a long time. Having a "you are Xth in line" ticker show what place you're in next time would be nice. I was afraid if I ran to the restroom I'd lose my place.
TL;DR: More of us are fighting for the same pie, which feels like it gets smaller every year. Supply outstrips demand and will only get worse each year unless a PAX is held every month in a different part of the US/World and/or ticket prices increase fivefold. Yes that's an exaggeration (I hope).
I wish we had a way to pull numbers and put together a demand table. It'd be interesting to work out the equilibrium price given the maximum capacity of the venue.
Probably not as high as you'd think. There are a lot of local, "casual" attendees (hate that term, and don't mean it negatively) who are more price sensitive than you'd think. I know plenty of people who have decided not to go simply because (in previous years) 3-day badges sold out and they didn't want to pay the premium for 1-day badges. Meaning that even increasing the price by less than double can cut off much of the demand. I'd bet that at $45 a day, there would have been badges left over tomorrow (though probably not Saturday). And you'd see a lot more 1-day and 2-day attendees, instead of people buying all four...which again means more discrete humans get to experience the con to some extent or another.
Whether having more partial attendees is better is up for debate, of course.
The timeout clock was a nice idea, since it holds your badges for you until you finish the purchase, rather than enter in all you info only to have it sell out while you're doing that. They should definitely keep that in the future.
But having the clock keep ticking even before the page loads.... Man, my 4-day badge processed with 17 seconds left on the clock, and that's NOT because I was taking my sweet time entering my info, I'll tell you that.
The timeout clock was a nice idea, since it holds your badges for you until you finish the purchase, rather than enter in all you info only to have it sell out while you're doing that. They should definitely keep that in the future.
But having the clock keep ticking even before the page loads.... Man, my 4-day badge processed with 17 seconds left on the clock, and that's NOT because I was taking my sweet time entering my info, I'll tell you that.
Five times. It took me FIVE TIMES to get a sale to complete within the eight minute window. And you've seen my posts, I don't type slow.
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ClixThis guy I knowSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I understand that many people are disappointed that they couldn't get passes. I was sweating it myself for a while. It sucks to miss out on something like PAX.
But complaining about the alert method is just pointless. Twitter is a widely available system, and crying that SMS alerts cost you a nickel means that following the official PAX account just isn't that important to you.
TL;DR: More of us are fighting for the same pie, which feels like it gets smaller every year. Supply outstrips demand and will only get worse each year unless a PAX is held every month in a different part of the US/World and/or ticket prices increase fivefold. Yes that's an exaggeration (I hope).
I wish we had a way to pull numbers and put together a demand table. It'd be interesting to work out the equilibrium price given the maximum capacity of the venue.
Probably not as high as you'd think. There are a lot of local, "casual" attendees (hate that term, and don't mean it negatively) who are more price sensitive than you'd think. I know plenty of people who have decided not to go simply because (in previous years) 3-day badges sold out and they didn't want to pay the premium for 1-day badges. Meaning that even increasing the price by less than double can cut off much of the demand. I'd bet that at $45 a day, there would have been badges left over tomorrow (though probably not Saturday). And you'd see a lot more 1-day and 2-day attendees, instead of people buying all four...which again means more discrete humans get to experience the con to some extent or another.
Whether having more partial attendees is better is up for debate, of course.
That's true. I think the effect of increased prices is to de facto make it a more non-local con, since we're already paying a crapload for transportation and hotels.
sanovahNerd of the WestSan Diego, CaliforniaRegistered Userregular
edited April 2013
Prefacing this with I did get four 1-days
Reading a good portion of this thread and thinking to myself I've come to the conclusion that the only thing they did wrong/could do better for next year would be this.
Don't open registration until right before the tweet goes out. From what I can tell registration was technically open about 20 minutes before the actual tweet went out.
This just ruins the spirit of PAX and encourages no lifeing and running bot scripts repeatedly refresh the page to get ahead.
I know I personally was one of the first people in the system because I happened to be on my break at work and browsing my phone when the tweet happened. It took me less than 10 seconds to get in line and another minute to be able to buy my passes. Being that fast you'd think I would have gotten at least one 4-day, but because the system had already been up for about 20 mins all the scalpers and no lifers stalking or botting the site got them.
While I can't say I would have gotten a four day had the system not gone up unofficially early, but I think it would have helped my chances.
Another thing I'd like to see happen is the number of allowed passes be changed. I can't see any reason why a person should be able to buy 5 sets. I'm sure a good number of people buy passes for their friends/families but as evident by reading this thread a lot of people buy extras to the limit to resell so they can pay for their trip.
It would suck for legitimate families and groups, but I seriously think they should reduce the number of passes available per order to 2 full sets. IE two 4-days or two fri,sat,sun,mon. Again it would suck for real groups and people but it's apparent that way too many people but extras to just resell so they can pay for their trip to allow the current 5 per type to continue.
sanovah on
+2
ClixThis guy I knowSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
The timeout clock was a nice idea, since it holds your badges for you until you finish the purchase, rather than enter in all you info only to have it sell out while you're doing that. They should definitely keep that in the future.
I'll argue the exact opposite. The servers sucked at keeping up with the load of people trying to purchase passes. However, even as each page of the registration process took several minutes to load, the 8 minute timer continued to wind down. I first tried ordering passes on my Android (with great 4G connection), but was never able to complete the checkout after four times of trying. It was terrible.
TL;DR: More of us are fighting for the same pie, which feels like it gets smaller every year. Supply outstrips demand and will only get worse each year unless a PAX is held every month in a different part of the US/World and/or ticket prices increase fivefold. Yes that's an exaggeration (I hope).
I wish we had a way to pull numbers and put together a demand table. It'd be interesting to work out the equilibrium price given the maximum capacity of the venue.
Probably not as high as you'd think. There are a lot of local, "casual" attendees (hate that term, and don't mean it negatively) who are more price sensitive than you'd think. I know plenty of people who have decided not to go simply because (in previous years) 3-day badges sold out and they didn't want to pay the premium for 1-day badges. Meaning that even increasing the price by less than double can cut off much of the demand. I'd bet that at $45 a day, there would have been badges left over tomorrow (though probably not Saturday). And you'd see a lot more 1-day and 2-day attendees, instead of people buying all four...which again means more discrete humans get to experience the con to some extent or another.
Whether having more partial attendees is better is up for debate, of course.
I'd say allowing more people to go, even if it's for one or two days, is far better limiting it to just the few who happen to be lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time. If the people who used to buy 3 day passes now buy just one day pass, so what? They still get to go and now more people can fill in for the days they're no longer filling.
In addition, with the current announcing strategy even if the vendor was perfect and everyone got served in order and only once, there's people who are fucked due to real life circumstances. People who were in meetings, at lunch, in the restroom, in the car, asleep, or any myriad of things. By not giving a single iota of forewarning all they do is allow the resellers--people who have made it their job to get tickets the second they are available--an advantage over everyone who would want to go but can't spend their day staring at a website or their phone.
So I'm saying this is what should be done:
1) Increase the prices of tickets by at least double to hamper demand, especially out-of-town demand from people who are closer to PAX East anyway as the increased prices will go on top of their airfare and hotels.
2) If an all-day pass is offered, then if X = the amount of days, the price should at least be (X+.5) times more than the price of a single day's ticket.
3) Pre-announce the release time of the tickets. If you still don't want to announce the time for whatever stupid reason, then the first time should be all-day passes only and then the next day is when you start selling the single-day passes.
4) Get a vendor that can handle 100k unique hits within the span of a minute. If they follow step 1 they'll be making so much more money I'm sure they could afford it.
This is what a serious company would do to solve the problem. If they're going to continue hemming and hawing and digging their toe into the floor about how they want it to be affordable so their college-aged selves could have made it in then that type of person is all who will make it in because they're the only ones who'd have time to wait for the starting gun to go off.
The timeout clock was a nice idea, since it holds your badges for you until you finish the purchase, rather than enter in all you info only to have it sell out while you're doing that. They should definitely keep that in the future.
I'll argue the exact opposite. The servers sucked at keeping up with the load of people trying to purchase passes. However, even as each page of the registration process took several minutes to load, the 8 minute timer continued to wind down. I first tried ordering passes on my Android (with great 4G connection), but was never able to complete the checkout after four times of trying. It was terrible.
Did you not read the rest of my post? I said it was a good idea. In practice it didn't work. But that doesn't mean they should give it up all together.
Did you not read the rest of my post? I said it was a good idea. In practice it didn't work. But that doesn't mean they should give it up all together.
I smell what you're stepping in. I still think it's terrible though.
And on another point, why the hell is there even a discount for 4-day passes?
Did you not read the rest of my post? I said it was a good idea. In practice it didn't work. But that doesn't mean they should give it up all together.
I smell what you're stepping in. I still think it's terrible though.
And on another point, why the hell is there even a discount for 4-day passes?
Given that there is excess demand, there certainly shouldn't be. You don't need a discount. You could sell 1-day passes alone, and sell out in the same amount of time, clearly.
If anything, as the 4-day pass is clearly a premium item (as a keepsake), it should perhaps cost more. I would pay an additional $10-$25 for a four-day pass over four one-day passes.
Posts
PAX Prime is a classic supply and demand problem. In our case demand far outstrips supply and only does so by increasing amounts each year. This is evident consdering the amount of time it takes to sell out of tickets each year has shrunk by several orders of magnitude since PAX began.
I'll use my own experience as a microcosm of the demand growth to illustrate my point. I'd heard of this thing called PAX in 2006 and had a passing curiousity in attending. I couldn't find anyone interested enough to go with me so I didn't. I'm not local to Seattle so a passing curiousity wasn't enough for me to drop the cash on flights and lodging. In 2007 my girlfriend and I went and we had a blast. In 2008 we convinced some friends to join us and added six people for a total of eight. The following year friends asked friends and we added another 4-5 people. The same has happened each year since. Two years ago it was 20+ and this year it looks to be nearly 30 if not more.
Now my group may not be indicative of most attendees in general, in fact I wouldn't expect it to be. But I also can't be alone in my experience. Look at gaming in general over the past decade and how popular and mainstream it's become. The industry has grown by leaps and bounds and with it the potential audience for PAX.
Scalping is not the problem. It's a mechanism that actually attempts to correct the market imbalance in demand and supply. Ultimately scalped tickets still go to people who want to attend. I'd be willing to pay 2-3 times as much to attend PAX, as would most of the people in my group. $200-300 for tickets is a drop in the bucket when you consider the total cost of airfare, lodging, and food/drink over an entire 4 day weekend for an out-of-state attendee.
Yes some of it is just pure luck or circumstance: Being in the right place at the right time. Having access to an internet connected device at the moment tickets go on sale. Having the luxury of waiting 2+ hours to wait for the queue to let you in to purchase tickets. But there are things you can still do to prepare, to control for variables and put yourself in the best position possible. Knowing the general timeline each year of when tickets go on sale. Noticing the website recently got updated. Following the Twitter account and having notifications on.
The only true solutions involve moving the entire demand or supply curve. Increasing supply of tickets--which PAX claims to do each year--but unfortunately by nowhere near enough to keep up with the demand increase. It would take a huge shift in supply along the lines of moving to a venue with much higher carrying capacity.
Holding PAX in other parts of the world was supposed to help with this, but the effect on PAX Prime's demand is miniscule at best because of the localized demand on the east coast and Australia. Expanding supply into those geographic regions actually created their own demand to a large extent. People who wouldn't have attended PAX Prime because it was too far or expensive would now attend one closer to home.
The other option is to lower the demand curve by increasing the price of tickets. How many people would still attend PAX if 4-day tickets were $200? $300? $1000? This would be the easiest and possibly most effective solution, but it'd also be the most unpopular by far.
The people who seem to get it probably took a class or two in game theory or economics. Our supply limited problem presents itself as a zero-sum game: someone getting a ticket means taking a ticket away from someone else who wanted it.
All 'solutions' proposed thus far simply shift tickets around in the same zero-sum game. Potential solutions that seem 'fair' to you will always leave someone on the other side of that coin. There's no feasibly enforceable system that would be fair to each and every person that wants to attend as long as we have our supply/demand imbalance.
Congrats if you were one of the lucky ones this year. At least we're not quite at SDCC levels of craziness yet, although I imagine it's only a matter of time.
TL;DR: More of us are fighting for the same pie, which feels like it gets smaller every year. Supply outstrips demand and will only get worse each year unless a PAX is held every month in a different part of the US/World and/or ticket prices increase fivefold. Yes that's an exaggeration (I hope).
But is this really different than concerts selling out in seconds?
For some reason people think it's different when a convention sells out...
For me it just means they're doing really well.
Also I am not so sure the scalpers are as big of a problem as they are made out to be.
They're just the most obvious scapegoat besides the ticketing system which IMO worked very well.
It didn't go down.
Obviously a lot of frustration here but unless they move to a MUCH bigger venue, this is always going to be a problem so get used to it ;-
on sale at 10:38am
4 day passes sold out 11:01am
saturday sold out 2:12pm
Sunday sold out 2:36pm
Friday sold out 2:56pm
Monday sold out 4:25pm
Based on the average 2.5 hour wait in the queue if you were not in said queue by 11:42am pacific time you were not able to get passes for all 4 days. that means that effectively the ability to go for all 4 days was sold out in roughly one hour and four minutes.
That's not realistic! For one, I have to pay for each SMS I send or receive because AT&T are greedy a-holes.
don't want to burst your anger bubble but how does buying one ticket help. pax is funnest going with other people. who wants to wait in line by themselves or travel to this even by themselves, etc
and a PAX in Vegas or the midwest.
Destructoid put up their story 37 minutes after the sale started it seems, and unfortunately I did not see the story until 47 minutes after that. So I go into the "queue" 1 hour and 24 minutes after it went live, waited something like 2 hours or more, and was able to get tickets for all days EXCEPT Saturday. And minutes after I got my tickets, Sunday sold out. So your estimate is INCREDIBLY accurate. Good job. And damn me for not being high tech and rich enough to afford free text messaging AND set up PAX twitter to go off on my phone. Sheesh!
I think you're quite right. It accelerates each year due to exactly what you laid out. Increases in demand with no increase in supply has generated additional competitiveness. It's only going to get worse until one of the two variables change. Increasing supply would mean Prime leaving Seattle. I don't know if that will ever happen and I personally hope it doesn't. Demand isn't going to diminish anytime soon (even with a price increase IMO), so the pass sell-out rate it is only going to get worse year after year.
Yeah you're right life's not fair because life is random (to a certain degree) but not humans because if we were we'd be insane; humans make it fair (to a certain degree) to make sense of it all. Debunking shitty old school philosophical ideas aside if the tickets were announced (at least without batches) and I didn't get one I wouldn't be pissed I would kindly accept it just like a game were to be sold out after being in line. The thing about this is I didn't even get to be in line (online speaking I didn't get to race to click with my mouse).
This sucked, is all I can say. I'm grateful I got them, but on my phone I was so paranoid I wouldn't even get these damn things...
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The only issue I saw today, personally, was the broken-ass ticket vendor. The token/cookie issues, timeouts, etc. Everything else? Fine. Because no fix to the other "problems" does anything but shift badges around among fans.
And yes, that would have been a safe bet. Because even if I hadn't gotten a ticket through the site today, you can bet that I'd have gotten one later through the secondary market. Period. They're available. Not even that expensive, if you avoid the day-after panic buying. And the badge itself is, yearly, one of the smallest line items in my PAX budget. I make good money, but even if I made half what I do now it's not like an extra $50 or even $100 would be the difference between "going" and "not going" for me. Even if I made a quarter of what I do now it would not. My current paycheck merely means that the sky is the limit...if I had to pay $500 for a pass, I still might. But I won't, because every year badges are available for maybe 50% over face if you look.
I almost didn't get a ticket. I was pissed. But not because of the notification system. Not because scalpers. Not because tickets wouldn't have names on them. But because the vendor was taking six minutes to load a page but still only giving me eight minutes to complete a purchase. Because I had no indication of whether I was even moving in the queue, whether my browser was even compatible with their scripting. Because that was the only aspect of all this that was entirely out of my control.
I don't think things should be changed because change is all it's about is picking winners. If I hadn't gotten a badge this year, if I don't get one next year, my position will not change. Because I'm not going to say that the system is bad simply because I didn't "win." Like I said, every single "solution" has its own problems, and screws some subsets over others. Zero sum game. X>>Y. Literally nothing you can say changes any of this.
I'm a little upset at not getting the 4-day, merely because I hang my badges on the wall (and single-days aren't the same). Other than that? It's $25, I'll be fine.
And limiting 4-day badges encourages single-day attendance, which means more discrete humans get to experience some portion of PAX. This is a good thing.
I'm a little leery of the BYOC thing. I managed to get a BYOC pass, supposedly, like two hours into the sale. Is that even possible? Don't those usually sell out earlier than most badges? I get a sinking feeling that the vendor wasn't accurately accounting for those, and they were oversold...
That fact that all I had as an indicator of progress was what could well have been noting more than an animated GIF of a reload symbol was not acceptable. Like, for all I knew nothing was even happening in the background. Ridiculous.
Then having the purchase timeout? Ridiculous.
I mean, the token/cookie thing is hilariously awful but at the same time it's the only reason I got a badge, because it's what let me skip back to the front of the line after their system punched me in the dick on checkout.
I wish we had a way to pull numbers and put together a demand table. It'd be interesting to work out the equilibrium price given the maximum capacity of the venue.
^This. After waiting my first hour in the queue I didn't know if the little refreshes the page was doing were failed attempts at loading my turn, or if it had glitched out and just wasn't going to tell me. I know, first world problem, but that was the tensest two hours I've had in a long time. Having a "you are Xth in line" ticker show what place you're in next time would be nice. I was afraid if I ran to the restroom I'd lose my place.
Probably not as high as you'd think. There are a lot of local, "casual" attendees (hate that term, and don't mean it negatively) who are more price sensitive than you'd think. I know plenty of people who have decided not to go simply because (in previous years) 3-day badges sold out and they didn't want to pay the premium for 1-day badges. Meaning that even increasing the price by less than double can cut off much of the demand. I'd bet that at $45 a day, there would have been badges left over tomorrow (though probably not Saturday). And you'd see a lot more 1-day and 2-day attendees, instead of people buying all four...which again means more discrete humans get to experience the con to some extent or another.
Whether having more partial attendees is better is up for debate, of course.
But having the clock keep ticking even before the page loads.... Man, my 4-day badge processed with 17 seconds left on the clock, and that's NOT because I was taking my sweet time entering my info, I'll tell you that.
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Five times. It took me FIVE TIMES to get a sale to complete within the eight minute window. And you've seen my posts, I don't type slow.
But complaining about the alert method is just pointless. Twitter is a widely available system, and crying that SMS alerts cost you a nickel means that following the official PAX account just isn't that important to you.
That's true. I think the effect of increased prices is to de facto make it a more non-local con, since we're already paying a crapload for transportation and hotels.
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Reading a good portion of this thread and thinking to myself I've come to the conclusion that the only thing they did wrong/could do better for next year would be this.
Don't open registration until right before the tweet goes out. From what I can tell registration was technically open about 20 minutes before the actual tweet went out.
This just ruins the spirit of PAX and encourages no lifeing and running bot scripts repeatedly refresh the page to get ahead.
I know I personally was one of the first people in the system because I happened to be on my break at work and browsing my phone when the tweet happened. It took me less than 10 seconds to get in line and another minute to be able to buy my passes. Being that fast you'd think I would have gotten at least one 4-day, but because the system had already been up for about 20 mins all the scalpers and no lifers stalking or botting the site got them.
While I can't say I would have gotten a four day had the system not gone up unofficially early, but I think it would have helped my chances.
Another thing I'd like to see happen is the number of allowed passes be changed. I can't see any reason why a person should be able to buy 5 sets. I'm sure a good number of people buy passes for their friends/families but as evident by reading this thread a lot of people buy extras to the limit to resell so they can pay for their trip.
It would suck for legitimate families and groups, but I seriously think they should reduce the number of passes available per order to 2 full sets. IE two 4-days or two fri,sat,sun,mon. Again it would suck for real groups and people but it's apparent that way too many people but extras to just resell so they can pay for their trip to allow the current 5 per type to continue.
I'd say allowing more people to go, even if it's for one or two days, is far better limiting it to just the few who happen to be lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time. If the people who used to buy 3 day passes now buy just one day pass, so what? They still get to go and now more people can fill in for the days they're no longer filling.
In addition, with the current announcing strategy even if the vendor was perfect and everyone got served in order and only once, there's people who are fucked due to real life circumstances. People who were in meetings, at lunch, in the restroom, in the car, asleep, or any myriad of things. By not giving a single iota of forewarning all they do is allow the resellers--people who have made it their job to get tickets the second they are available--an advantage over everyone who would want to go but can't spend their day staring at a website or their phone.
So I'm saying this is what should be done:
1) Increase the prices of tickets by at least double to hamper demand, especially out-of-town demand from people who are closer to PAX East anyway as the increased prices will go on top of their airfare and hotels.
2) If an all-day pass is offered, then if X = the amount of days, the price should at least be (X+.5) times more than the price of a single day's ticket.
3) Pre-announce the release time of the tickets. If you still don't want to announce the time for whatever stupid reason, then the first time should be all-day passes only and then the next day is when you start selling the single-day passes.
4) Get a vendor that can handle 100k unique hits within the span of a minute. If they follow step 1 they'll be making so much more money I'm sure they could afford it.
This is what a serious company would do to solve the problem. If they're going to continue hemming and hawing and digging their toe into the floor about how they want it to be affordable so their college-aged selves could have made it in then that type of person is all who will make it in because they're the only ones who'd have time to wait for the starting gun to go off.
Did you not read the rest of my post? I said it was a good idea. In practice it didn't work. But that doesn't mean they should give it up all together.
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I wish it were a nickel. It's 25 cents per SMS.
And on another point, why the hell is there even a discount for 4-day passes?
Whos your provider that you pay for sms. It's considered a text and most carriers have unlimited text for next to nothing.
Given that there is excess demand, there certainly shouldn't be. You don't need a discount. You could sell 1-day passes alone, and sell out in the same amount of time, clearly.
If anything, as the 4-day pass is clearly a premium item (as a keepsake), it should perhaps cost more. I would pay an additional $10-$25 for a four-day pass over four one-day passes.