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PAX Badges Cancelled
My wife and I just received notification that all of our PAX badges have been cancelled. Apparently, there was a 4 per customer limit policy which I can not find any reference to on the PAX website, and neither of us were aware of during registration. We are long-time PAX attendees, and have always been responsible for purchasing badges for our group (approx 10 of us). We have never encountered this policy before.
It's pretty easy to imagine why neither of us saw it. First, we were flipping out because PAX tickets were on sale. Anyone here understands how exciting that time is. Second, we did not read the terms/legal jargon in detail. Can anyone honestly say they read the entire terms of agreement prior to a purchase? I never do. I guess that's our mistake, but it feels incredibly unjust to punish us for trying to be honest in our purchase, whereas we could have had credit card/address info for our other members on hand and skirted the policy.
To add insult to injury, ALL of our badges have been cancelled - we don't even get to keep 4, per the policy. Is there no process of appeal? All of us would be more than happy to jump through some hoops, submit identification, etc to have our badges re-assigned.
I totally understand the need to combat scalping; unfortunately, I don't believe this policy is going to help. The sad irony is, if we truly want to attend PAX, now we'll have to buy badges from the scalpers.
I apologize if this comes off as over-dramatic, but I'm frustrated and heartbroken right now. Any advice would be appreciated.
It's pretty easy to imagine why neither of us saw it. First, we were flipping out because PAX tickets were on sale. Anyone here understands how exciting that time is. Second, we did not read the terms/legal jargon in detail. Can anyone honestly say they read the entire terms of agreement prior to a purchase? I never do. I guess that's our mistake, but it feels incredibly unjust to punish us for trying to be honest in our purchase, whereas we could have had credit card/address info for our other members on hand and skirted the policy.
To add insult to injury, ALL of our badges have been cancelled - we don't even get to keep 4, per the policy. Is there no process of appeal? All of us would be more than happy to jump through some hoops, submit identification, etc to have our badges re-assigned.
I totally understand the need to combat scalping; unfortunately, I don't believe this policy is going to help. The sad irony is, if we truly want to attend PAX, now we'll have to buy badges from the scalpers.
I apologize if this comes off as over-dramatic, but I'm frustrated and heartbroken right now. Any advice would be appreciated.
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Your case is different.
You need to call support at 877-674-8241, and then email Pax_Questions@paxsite.com.
Thanks man. I called support and they said they were unable to do anything at this time. He suggested that I email them with the confirmation numbers of our orders wait for a response. Wish me luck.
Yeah, I probably just glossed over it, or it didn't register as "4 per person" in my brain since we've always been able to order more in the past.
I don't understand though, that if the rules were 4 tickets per person, and my wife and I each bought tickets... how else is a family of more than 4 people supposed to have done this? Kinda sucks to be us, but the kids are going to be seriously bummed if there's no way of appealing.
Indeed. The wording of their automated response sounds final. IF there is indeed an appeal process, it would be really nice if they could slip in something like:
"Your order has been flagged for a possible violation of our policy, please contact us to resolve the issue within 7 business days or your order will be cancelled..."
Instead of:
"YOUR ORDER IS CANCELLED BETCH. *drops mic*"
You can also try tweeting http://twitter.com/official_pax
I share your pain, if in a slightly different manner.
I live in a house which I own; I've turned it into a duplex and rent half of it to my best friend and her husband. As such, we share a billing address.
For years now, we've both attended PAX Prime, with each of us buying four badges: she gets four (herself, her husband, her two cousins), and I get four (myself, our Canadian friend, my friend back east, and one spare for whoever else in our local social circle doesn't manage to snag one in time; a co-worker at my office had laid dibs on it this year). This works out well; there's many people in our group who cannot go and get the passes themselves, because they work in a field where they can't go run to a computer when badge sales go up. (You don't want your nurse leaving the hospital floor to go camp a convention ticketing line, for instance!)
Now, this is four passes each, within the normal policy. It's never been a problem in the past. But apparently, because we share a billing address, it's been flagged and my passes were all cancelled. (She says she hasn't had hers cancelled yet, at least, so at least perhaps not everyone in our group is out of luck.) Attempts to contact customer service have not met with any answers yet.
We're looking at a backup plan, of just splitting her order; we'd get two passes each, and tell everyone else they're out of luck. But that's not ideal, and it's kind of heartbreaking and frustrating to have to tell people who were planning to go—who had tickets squared away—that "Sorry, you better cancel your plans and stay home, or else hit up scalpers on eBay for tickets at twice the price."
And at the very least, it mars what's been a wonderful and much-anticipated yearly tradition of this whole group of people attending the convention and sharing in our love of gaming.
Legitimately purchasing tickets via the site is ALWAYS greater than purchasing from the secondary market of scalpers, right? Punishing those who used the right channels to purchase tickets damages their reputation and seriously discourages loyal fans. (Wasn't there a GOT eppy recently about something-something punishing loyalty doesn't encourage loyalty? They should watch that.)
As others have posted here, there seems to be an error in the way in which some orders are flagged, so PA might not have intentionally meant to dick us all. I sincerely hope that's the case, and that all of our purchases will be honored. I'd hate to leave years of PAX attendance with a sour taste in my mouth, especially given the sheer luck of having gotten into the queue to purchase tickets in the first place (as is the case every year).
Trade me pins, yo: https://www.pinnypals.com/pals/Lazorz
I agree, and if you read the rest of my post, I admit it was my mistake. Can you explain then, how I've been able to order more than 4 in the past? I was accustomed to the way I've ordered badged for several years. This was out of the blue for me.
I don't suspect that the limit will change. If you think you have a legitimate reason for not having your order canceled, or that your order was flagged in error, I encourage you to contact pax_questions@paxsite.com and explain your situation. Mistakes happen!
However, anyone who broke the 4-set limit is subject to cancellations, regardless of how strict ReedPOP has been in the past. I really don't like the whole precedent-following thing of "they didn't cancel my over-order in the past so why should they now!"
Trade me pins, yo: https://www.pinnypals.com/pals/Lazorz
What about the people that live with roommates, I literally live in a gamer house and we get our tickets canceled because we look like scalpers at 1 address???
As an employee in a government/bureaucratic system, I can tell you with certainty that this argument successfully works more than any of us want it to. "The buck stops here" is a great idea if you have the right conditions. Until PAX gets their ticketing system to an exceptional level of functionality though, they lack the ideal conditions to begin such a rigid implementation. This is evident in this thread, with all its heartbreaking stories.
I hadn't realized that was a valid reason for the cancellation until now, and now I wonder if this is the issue that got me. They certainly didn't provide any information in the automated mail beyond "your address was flagged for over-ordering, and your tickets will be cancelled". The first time, it claimed I couldn't order more than two due to the ordering bug; I contacted customer support, and they put a second order in for me for the remaining two.
At any rate, if you call customer support now, they'll just tell you to contact pax_questions@paxsite.com with any questions about badge cancellation, and to wait patiently for an answer. So I shall try to do so.
There are also others who have written confirmation that their order of 4+ would NOT be canceled due to the glitch. This is because some people bought 2, and then checked out again a second time after the glitch was resolved, and purchased 4.
If you do not fall into the 4 or less category, or do not have written confirmation, you are likely out of luck. The 2 scenarios above are the core of the issue. They cancel orders every year, and people freak out, so this thread is expected by them every year. What is not expected is the promises they made, and then accidentally broke today. We need to separate the promises made from the business as usual to be heard.
Our situation is this: 3 couples living in a 4 bedroom house. 1 software engineer at his desk ready to purchase notifies his roommate (web dev) tickets are on sale. No one else in the house hold at the time are able to get into queue to order tickets.
The 2 of us purchase tickets on behalf of our other roommates and 1 co-worker.
We e-mail pax_questions@ to make sure we're not going to get flagged.
Hotel is booked (mind you, I am seeing people on Twitter that have hotel and plane tickets booked that got flagged by this shit algorithm).
Wake up this morning, half our tickets are gone.
We are NOT scalpers, but we get kicked to the curb only to beg scalpers for spare tickets? The irony of the situation...
Which is too bad, because that's only 4 tickets per person, but I can see why the automated system might trip on that.
My friends and I rented a huge house so we could all go together via airbnb and they have plane tickets booked for this. We're losing major $$$$ for this. If we wanted to all vacation together int he summer it sure wouldn't be in Seattle without PAX. We could have put that money going anywhere else than the middle of a busy city we've been going to since 2009.
The lesson I'm getting here is you can't have more than 3 nerdy loved ones. Nice isn't it?
We have $1500 on a hotel for the weekend. I can't imagine you're situation, or others from out of state flying in to Seattle and get their tickets pulled. PAX to me and my gf, my friends, and roommates are basically our yearly vacation. We take a week off just to spend time in Seattle for this weekend. Meanwhile, people within the community assume we're hogging all the tickets and/or reselling them? We save our hard earned money for 1 week of the year and take time off from work...
My friends and I use this as an annual retreat. We're all older now with families, degrees, jobs, etc. It's a nice place for us to gather and hang out like we did when we were younger and could game all the time. However, the past 3 years PAX ticket sales have gone to shit. They hike the prices and remove 4 day sales, to do what? Still cancel tickets?
I've had to jump through hoops and battle for any tickets for my friends and me. At the very least, the first year they started doing cancellations they left me with the allowed "4" per house hold, but they canceled ALL of my tickets? What the fuck is that? I got the e-mail notification at 7:20 AM PST, I woke up and saw the email at 7:40 AM and sent them an e-mail begging them to not refund my tickets because everyone has everything planned out and paid for already. At 8:04 AM I got notification that my refund was being processed. Neither, paxquestions@reedexpo.com or pax_questions@paxsite.com have sent me any e-mails after I tried to dispute them.
Mine shows that I placed an order at the appropriate time, but now says it was for 0 tickets.
In fairness, while I'm still fairly grumpy and sad about how this affects me personally and my friends if it can't be corrected, I have a lot of sympathy for the folks trying to handle ticket sales. You have the legitimate use case that I and others have described: multiple people at the same address, trying to get tickets for a large group of friends. Then you have the use case they want to squash, which is one person using a lot of minions to order tickets for scalping and resale, most of which will probably be shipped to the same address.
From an automated standpoint, they probably look nearly identical. Worse still, apparently many scalpers will use multiple cards/identities tied to a single ShowClix account, so the "X ordered multiple batches of tickets from the same ShowClix account" and "X had to order multiple batches of tickets due to the ordering bug" situations also probably look basically the same.
While this is a huge hassle for those affected, I've got faith they're talking right now about how to sort it out (and that's probably why we haven't heard much from them).
I'd say the one major blunder they did make in this that can't be entirely blamed on an automated system is the fact that they sent out a "We're going to cancel your tickets" notice with somewhat brusque language, which also could have been clearer. Mine said I would be allowed to keep four badges and that the refund would happen sometime this week. Then, while people were already emailing and looking for clarification (and no answers had gone out), they went ahead and pulled the switch 30 minutes later (which, okay, counts as "sometime this week"), cancelling all the orders; the natural human reaction to this would probably be to feel even more frustrated and frantic. Especially when you had a "you can keep four badges" goes down to zero.
I think they probably needed to wait a few before pulling that switch, or have more information about the specific reasons for the cancellation in the mail. (Is it because I share a billing address with someone else who ordered tickets? Is it because I ordered two sets of two tickets? I genuinely don't know!) Yes, that's more of a hassle to set up, but I imagine it would have saved them hassle now, as many people try to contact them with questions/appeals.
I'm quite certain those mailboxes are flooded. According to the woman I got on the phone at the customer service phone number, they are digging through the emails slowly and trying to reply to them all.
"Hi,
Unfortunately we cannot reinstate the order as it would put you over the ticket allotment. Sorry.
Thanks,
Customer Service"
This reply has proved completely unhelpful. My message included an offer to do whatever I can to prove the legitimacy of my purchase. The issue (I think) is that my wife purchased tickets as well, but she purchased them from a physically different location, with a card that has her name on it, and they were bought for her and her friends. I'm so completely distraught over this; PAX is always on a shared birthday weekend between my friend (born on 9/1) and I (born on 8/31). This is completely stressful and terrible.
One person using a lot of minions to order tickets for scalping and resale? I'm not entirely sure you're trying to make it sound like I'm a scalper or something? A scalper is a person who resells shares or tickets at a large or quick profit. I bought a set and gave them to my brother, sister-in-law, and cousin for free because they were family, and another two sets were my friends who payed me face value for them.
This is a legitimate vacation. They're punishing me because I have enough money and friends to go with? I understand if they cancel some of them, last time they canceled they left me with 4 sets, it reduced the amount I had to work to find and pay A SCALPER for to get to PAX. Their cancellation in turn boosted a scalper's sale.
Their non-response and response I'm seeing from other fellow gamers are not okay nor do they point out their reason for canceling ALL of them. Okay, I went over the limit? Cancel the ones over the limit. Why cancel ALL of the tickets? What's the point of that? Me spending time watching for tickets and spending time in queue not enough for the their own rule?
I 100% agree with you. I'm one of a few in my group of friends that has a slightly lucrative job. So I have no problem fronting my friends money. Friends help each other out. The hard ban for multi-family households is ludicrous for their price increase and removal of the 4-day pass.
I work in automation, there's no reason for a hard ban to reduce a person to 0 tickets... Unfortunately poor planing and decisions on their part have fucked it up for a lot of people. You would think with the price hike they would have hired more competent people. It's unfortunate
What does that have to do with automation? "orders over the limit will be cancelled" vs "if you go over the limit all your orders will be cancelled" is a policy decision, it has nothing to do with automation.