@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): Son,(my apologies if you are a woman) you seem to be having a bit of a thing for asses today. Any particular reason why?

sarcasmOD

@ostartero: It wasn't first come, first served though. It was first come, make it through the ridiculously failing website when it was indeed working served.

Mike Fahey

@ostartero: Except it wasn't first come first served. People had their ticket removed from the cart as they were making a purchase. I got to the effing credit card screen only to have it error out on me multiple times and then poof! sold out!

Boudabras

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): well said.

Oban

That post overflowed with frustrated killing intent

G_the_fresh

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okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under)

@ostartero: what if 4000 people come at the same time? then who gets it? Or what if you got the ticket first but stumbled typing in your CC # so you lost out on a ticket

robokasey

@Taurus_McGee: I really wish they could do that. Sadly, it would consume a lot of resources that Blizzard or major console companies don't have or don't care to have. The whole thing in unfortunate, especially for a company that tries so hard (in my opinion) to produce and deliver the best possible experience to their fans in everything they do. Perhaps the system for selling the tickets was set up by a third party that does this sort of thing for big events, or maybe there was just simply no way for the system to handle as many requests at once as they got. Obviously, whatever the problem it needs to be fixed, but I do think that Blizzard will take responsibility and make sure that nothing like this happens next year, although that will not make those who had their tickets slip through their hands any happier.

As an aside, I am concerned as to what happened to all the credit card numbers that many many many people submitted more than once? Could a breach in security by an outsider to obtain said numbers have been a cause? Or are those numbers in the possession of Blizzard or someone else because they were submitted although no purchase was made? If I had tried to buy tickets, after the anger wore off, that would be my main concern.

sarcasmOD

The eBay tickets seem strange to me since you have to meet them at the convention for the trade. Just seems like something could easily go awry. 2 days left on one auction for 700+ dollars.. that including cost of travel and hotel (if you can find one) oi.

A couple of the auctions list a similar incident to yours, they wanted to buy tickets for others but couldn't get through and want to just sell it off rather than go alone.

Also, looks like eBay has removed a lot of WotlK beta keys.

wolfeditor

This is what happens when you give away exclusive in-game content for attending events like these. Sell all your tickets, really fast, to people only really interested in getting that special item/mount goody bag.

Bael

How did they handle it poorly? What do you expect when the demand is 100 times more than supply? First come, first served.

ostartero

Blizzcon scores a first place knockout!
eBay finishes second!
Kotaku takes a weak third.
The Blizzard servers are in another time zone!

kainzero

I'm glad I wasn't the only person filled with a ray of hopeful glee as I plopped a ticket in my cart only to have it snatched away by "the availability of some items in your cart has changed" message. My stomach sank with sadness.

Does anyone else remember chef's speech to stan during the stem cell research episode of south park? "If you want to make a baby cry, first you give him candy, then you take it away. If he never had the candy in the first place, he wouldn't have anything to cry about. That's like [Blizzard]."

All I ask is that they do like ticketmaster, even partner with them, to handle this. Because when you order on ticketmaster (at least for some events), you're allotted the tickets in your cart as if you've already purchased them, resulting in true first-come-first-served service. Anyway, that's two cents from someone else whose hopes were dashed.

Themindtaker

@invictus: I cut to sooth my pain and anger :(

okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under)

I honestly believe that people like the guy selling his icket on eBay should be tracked down and have their ticket revoked, reimbursed for the ticket, and then banned from being able to buy a ticket in the future. I have zero tolerance for people like that. And no, I don't believe that capitalism or free market should be allowed into the discussion so I don't want to hear that argument. Things like this should be reserved for those that are going to enjoy it and not try to make a profit off of it. Same thing with jerks that buy 3 or 4 launch systems of a new platform and then sell them on eBay for an enormous profit. If you aren't going to buy something and keep it for personal enjoyment, then you should only be allowed to turn around and sell it for retail value. Really makes me mad.

And no, I have no desire to go to Blizzcon, nor did I try to buy tickets. I just feel bad for people like Fahey, or for some little kid who's parents could barely afford a Wii for Christmas and aren't able to buy one from some dipstick who gets lucky enough to find several and then hocks them on eBay for 2-3x what they're worth...

/rant over

Taurus_McGee

Bah blizzard games were good. I doubt SC2 or D3 are going to knock my socks off. WoW was dead to me years ago.

Personally I think they are resting on their laurels and expansions to a MMO amount to nothing to anyone but their subscribers. RTS can only go so far before you are off track and tedious, so SC2 and maybe a WC sequel will be more of the same with newer graphics. D3 would need a much better online experience and interface for me to get wet over that.

Blizzard is hot right now for one reason. Media coverage of their subscriber base. Is that base even current? Or is it just the total number of accounts created?

invictus

Note for Blizzard.....get bigger buildings for Blizzcon

Darknickle

They're not ebaying tickets. Without faking an ID there's no way to use a ticket bought by another person.

What they are ebaying are the contents of the goodie bag that is distributed with your ticket.

How many people will pay $100 bucks for something they quickly flip on eBay WITHOUT entering the con to play Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 is an entirely separate question.

Sekai

@mrdietsoda: BAHAHA!

scumm_boy

@DarthHater1137: Yes.

Lorch

Rats. My doctorate thesis on body odor will have to find another venue to collect samples from.

mrdietsoda

Do you think that there was a lot of people buying tickets just to turn them around on ebay? I know that's been an increasing trend with concerts, etc lately and I personally hate it.

DarthHater1137

While I'd never be as stupid as to cry boycott, it's obvious that things have really, really been mishandled by the folks at Blizzard. But then, why do they care? They're getting the same amount of money and press out of it, whether they're good to their fans or not.

deejsylvis

I feel you on this one... happened to me 3 times... you would think having tickets in a cart while you type in your credit card numbers mean something...

Seventh

Yeah, 14,000 tickets + Millions of fans = clusterfuck.

They could think of moving to a bigger venue next year maybe? I mean, PAX is expected to accomodate 40,000 people this year, why can't Blizzcon?

CarbonFalcon

Its very sad that Olaf from "The Lost Vikings" is not up on that poster, too...

Shiryu

Amazon.com had something similar last Christmas. They were selling a 360 for VERY cheap, they only had I think 200 units and were going to go on sale on a specific day, at a specific time.

Same exact crap happened, people refreshed like crazy, servers timed out, once the servers were back up the units were all sold out.

People went onto the forums and complained about amazon's management, threatened to leave amazon forever, AND most suggested a lottery for next time.

This incident caused amazon to change their Special Deals method from then on.

Stuff like this happens all the time.

aceshigh521

@ryohazuki: Well on the internets, you actually get into the line (or queue as Luke might call it) after you enter in your credit card information and hit submit. You have gone through the line when the following order confirmation page comes up. You don't get in line when you go to the order page simply because of the potential ass-hattery that can take place with such a system. Imagine some one deciding to drop a duce before you (and your #2 ) because now you will have to wait for him to come back to his computer and finish his order before yours can be processed. Now that would just be rewarding incompetence (as well as incontinence) and I don't think blizzard or any other online retailer has the time to do something silly like that. The only down side is as your frustration has exemplified, it makes the ordering of highly sought after items a manic affair.

okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under)

There are a lot of people that are upset. But some food for thought. The first Blizzcon took 3 months to sell out. The second Blizzcon took 3 days to sell out. Granted, that's a huge jump in demand, how were they to anticipate that after increasing capacity by 50% that they would sell out within minutes? It was just a case of unforeseen circumstance.

Perhaps next year they'll work on ways to gauge interest to see how they will handle ticket sales.

thegreatpablo

Is it just me, or does Tyrael look like he could lose some weight in that pic? He looks like a big ball of.. archangel. Roll, Tyrael! Roll!

cL9

@mrdietsoda: I too find humor in your clever quip.

My applause, sir. Or madam? How does one know?

Anarchist_Gamer

How is it not first come first serve? Everyone is crying about their tickets being "snatched" out of their carts but this is how I see it:

1. The guy who really got the ticket came and clicked on Ticket #23037 first.
2. You, the guy who didn't get the ticket, came and clicked on Ticket #23037 second.

The system is poorly designed, yes, but that doesn't mean that those of you who put tickets into your checkout carts and then got errors after entering in your credit card numbers were cheated or robbed. Seriously, do you guys think that you were the ones who clicked on the ticket first and then some big bad eBay boogey man waltzes over and stole your tickets? NO! You and thousands of other joes were all fighting for the same ticket and the guy who clicked it fastest and typed in his CC# fastest was the lucky winner. It's that simple, and it's still "first come first serve" per individual ticket.

What's not "first come first serve" about the situation is that many of you were 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th to the website and fighting over Ticket #00001 with the 1st guy to the site and meanwhile somewhere else the 6th guy to the site was happily purchasing Ticket #00002. That's the only aspect of this model that one could attack as not being first come first serve. Per each ticket though? It seems to me that it was.

Maybe you guys know something I don't. I'm all ears.

ryohazuki

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under):

Wow.

That was great.

Vecha

LOL! I always wanted to see what that feature looked like :) I guess my analogy wasn't very well worded. I try and find something more appropriate next time. Looks like I dodged a bullet today.

okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under)

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): Oh yeah, and by different example, I don't mean different Kotaku editor.

You made me throw up a little.

Michael McWhertor

@wolfeditor: Yea.... I honestly think that there has to be SOMETHING out there that would put $700 to better use. Don't get me wrong, BlizzCon will probably be awesome, but for at least $1000 total? I'm not so sure. :(

cainxavier

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): Y'know, I was totally going to argue and say I wan't upset at capitalism because it's inconvenient so much as how people are allowed to be selfish jerks, but then your "anal"-ogy (haha)so totally flabergasted me that I just threw up a little in my mouth and decided not to argue. Well played sir. Well played...

@sarcasmOD: Understood. However, maybe what I should hope for, instead of better systems of distribution for people that really want items and don't get them, is that other people stop being greedy. On the other hand though, I guess I'd be better off wishing for a good new Star Wars movie. Either one ain't gonna happen any time soon. /sigh

Taurus_McGee

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): There are so many phrases in there I never wanted to see. Maybe you can use a different example next time?

Michael McWhertor

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): You either have my sympathy, or my respect. I don't want to know enough details to make that decision, however.

sarcasmOD

@kainzero: how has nobody praised this person for bringing in a Rock n' Roll Racing reference?

Fahey unleashes hot fury!

Flashfire

I'm sad about the website problems for the people that wanted to go. I personally live more than 2000 miles away from all of blizzard's little parties and therefore am completely unable to attend them anyway.

It makes me sick though that people get hot items like that and sell them on ebay...made me sick with the Wii. Made me sick with this. It's pathetic and cruel.

Ajh

I feel bad for them,
but I'll see you there, Fahey.
We'll write some haiku?

Dorphat the Insomniac

I find this really disgusting personally. Everyone knew these tickets would sell out very fast of being available and yet their site was not properly prepared for the amount of traffic they received. Now obviously this is first come first serve kind of deal because lets face it, there are more fans wanting to go than there are tickets but when the site dies on you when the tickets do finally go up - thats just ridiculous.

First come first serve is fair. Trying to order tickets from a website thats server can't handle the load is not fair.

Walker

@ryohazuki: I don't think you are fully comprehending what went down here. People went through the order process, only to have the website fail on them. It isn't a matter of purchaser X got the ticket before purchaser y. It's that purchaser y and purchaser x got the went through the process at the same time, only to have the website fail to complete the transaction.

It wasn't a matter of first come, first served. It was a frustrating 2-day game of chance.

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): Many online stores when faced with an influx of orders imlpement a system where once you add the items to the cart you have a certain amount of time to complete the transaction in order to secure your items. Doesn't have to be a half hour. Could have just been five minutes and it would have helped.

When you take the website problems into consideration, a good analogy would be putting the item in your shopping cart only to have a wheel fall off on the way to your register, after which a store rep comes over and tosses your product to someone else because their equipment was faulty and you couldn't make it to the register.

Mike Fahey

@sarcasmOD: Lets just say I had a bowel movement this morning that set the tone for the rest of the day :3

okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under)

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): Purity is overrated. I was just wondering why you kept talking about asses.

sarcasmOD

@ryohazuki: What you're saying makes sense, to a point. So I've clicked purchase and someone else has gotten ticket X before me. It should not make me resubmit anything to have to click again, it should automatically give me ticket X+1, UNLESS ticket X was the very last ticket.

sarcasmOD

@ryohazuki: No, I wasn't trying to contradict. I was trying to:

A) Just cut to the heart of "Why" things work that way.

B) Offer up an appropriate comment that didn't involve "ss sx" to prove to myself I'm a clean and none-perverted individual. Things have transpired to day to make my question my purity :(

okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under)

I was there with you - refreshing that damn site for 14 hours on day 1. Luckily the friend I was going with took over for the night shift, and he nailed a pair when the site went back up one last time at 12:15 am est, right before it went back down for the whole night.

A total mess. The forums were in flames and I feel bad for alot of the people who sat there for over 20 hours straight only to not get tickets even though they'd already booked hotels and flights.

gunsakimbo

@okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under): Nothing in your response contradicted anything I wrote. :\ I'll restate: from what I can tell, people are crying foul that they clicked on a ticket and before they could get to the final checkout confirmation page somebody else had already been confirmed to buy it. To me, that doesn't scream "a lack of 'first come first serve' tactics." It screams "'first come first serve' tactics to the nth degree, to the point it bends over backwards onto itself."

As for having to wait for somebody else to finish his purchase ... wha? What are you saying, Kenny? That each time somebody wants to purchase a good on an online retail website (say tickets for Blizzcon) that they have to wait for the guy ahead of them to proceed all the way through his checkout before they can get back into line all over again and try for the next issue of the same product? That sounds absurd. If this is truly how Blizzcon's online retail setup went down, then yeah, it's truly retarded and urgently in need of renovation.

Your first sentence, though, was rather insulting. Come on, Kenny: give me and anyone else who's touched a computer in the last 10 years a little more credit than that.

ryohazuki

Sorry to hear, Mike.

My roommate and I spent 14 and a half hours, after a LOT of work, which included his card getting charged and not getting tickets, to the constant site crashing, we were finally able to get through to customer service where we explained that we were charged but no tickets. We included a transaction number to push the charge through (to get tickets) and a receipt number from the bank for the purchase.

The guy was nice and said there was nothing he could do with those, however, he said he could try to manually sell the tickets to us. My friends card was tapped from the ghost charges so his was out. We ended up putting the 3 tickets we needed on my card. Shortly after I got a confirmation e-mail from the Blizzard store for my purchase. Needless to say I got tickets, but not after a huge fiasco.

Hope to see you there, dude. Any plans on what you'll be doing?

VileMethoD

Couldn't the power that be give you a ticket?. Are you hoping a Blizzie employee graces this website today?

PsycheE

@Day Man: You would be a hero to many, may people if you offered to sell them at face value if you end up having to got to Chicago. Show those greedy pukes that not everyone is out to take advantage of their fellow man and what lowlifes they are for rubbing their good fortune in other people's faces.

Taurus_McGee

I nabbed two tix as easy as pie. Unfortunately, I learned not half an hour ago I might have to be in Chicago that week. Yea me.

Day Man

I sat there all trying to get tickets Monday. Did it again Tuesday. Didn't get any. Now am changing my plans to propose to the girlfriend to somewhere else. She loves WoW though, so I really wanted to do it there. I officially hate Blizzard.

lulfas

thank god for "watch" in unix, threw together a script to let us know when the site was back up and we managed to squeeze 5 tickets out when the site came back up, sorry to those who didn't make it :(

Fert

@ostartero: Um, if you read the article, it wasn't first come first served. On the first day, people got through and made the transaction and even got a temp credit card charge for the tickets but because the servers couldn't handle the load the tickets were never actually purchased. No, I'm not second hand storytelling. It happened to me.

bleeps

I got tickets. This will be the first Blizzcon I attend, so I'm interested in seeing what all the hub bub is about.

I went to a Blizzard Christmas party once and to be honest, it wasn't all that great. Although I did get to meet Samwise, so that was pretty much the highlight of my evening.

goddessakasha

@Lnk64: There are actually posts on the forums of people who got to the Confirm Payment screen and since the site would load errors they'd continue to try and ended up getting charged thousands.

Yes, the money will be put back in their account, but their account has since been frozen by the CC company for what was seemingly security issues with the card. Now they can't even access their own money.

VileMethoD

@PsycheE: It seems he did get a ticket, he's complaining because he couldn't get one for his girlfriend (from what I gathered in the article). I say be lucky you have a girlfriend into Blizzcon.

Callidux

@Lnk64: You're arguing with the wall. I never said "this is the way it should be." I said "this is the way it is is, and I wish people would quit trying to make it out to be something else entirely different in order to console themselves."

However, Mike politely pointed out the missing variable in my analysis and for that a) I'm grateful and b) I now see why, in this case, it wasn't exactly "first come first serve". Click this link to (re-)read his reply: Mike Fahey

So anyway, yes, please don't make arguments up out of thin air just to find an excuse to post. :\ I never said Blizzard was doing this properly; I never tried to defend this broken system; I was only ever trying to explain WHAT the situation is, not WHY it is. There's a difference, and you either accidentally missed that or chose to miss it for the sake of getting pleasure out of "pwning" somebody on an online discussion.

ryohazuki

a Ps: add into the fact that blizzard put a $100 hold on credit cards, then didn't even get to reserve the tickets for a few minutes in order for them to complete their transaction, makes it even worse

Lnk64

@ryohazuki: Why should it be like that to begin with? Why should a few thousand people be vying for ticket #11 at the same time, only to be told clicker #1 got it and then booted to the back of the line to try again. It should be you say you want 2 tickets, you are issued 2 sequential number tickets as if you have them in your hand and then give your credit card number and if it's approved you get the 2 tickets. if you don't get approved, you release those tickets and they become available again.

it's not exactly hard. in fact its a lot simpler then if you were to do it for a concert since these tickets don't really "have" to be sequential since there is no seating arrangements and there is no worry about people having to sit near their friends

doing it like the way Blizzard did is really just a very poor thought on their part. it was really irresponsible of them to issue tickets to people which have already been claimed by someone up further in the line. it's like being at a register with your goods in hand and then by the time you finally get through to the ONLY cashier working in the store(in this case, a very slow cashier who kept on forgetting what to do), somehow your goods have been claimed by someone up ahead and you have go back into the isles and get another one. you repeat this process until you find out there are none left.

and before you start the "you're just upset because you didn't get in" argument, I didn't even bother to order tickets as I had no plans to go. I have friends who were all planning on meeting up before this fiasco began, and it just sucks for them because now they cannot.

Lnk64

@ryohazuki: I wasn't arguing with you or out to pwn anyone, that's a little dumb to do on the internet as the person you intend to pwn will continue about thier way sticking to thier mantra no matter what. I think I made some confusion about my post with the last paragraph i typed.

I'm in agreements with you that this is how the system worked (or didn't depending on how you look at it) and that it is a bad system and that you were just explaining the way it worked. I just added on to the explanation. The last paragraph i posted wasn't at you personally, just a "you" to the average user who would respond with something like that.

Lnk64

I'm so glad I have tickets.

BlackMage66652

I think events like this should have tighter security on ticket sales, if that's the right word. When it comes to consoles (like the Wii), it's not as if they're discontinued. If you want one, just wait to pick one up and don't give in to the scalpers on Ebay - that's what I did and I actually got a great deal because I found someone who needed to get rid of theirs. Since there are usually a limited number of passes for any given venue, though, I was really hoping they'd do something like checking photo ID for every single person, not just the one who bought the passes.

I'm too lazy to scroll up and find the comment I'm responding to, so pretend it's just a rant. Which it is.

Lorch

@Mike Fahey: Damn, that sucks man. Blizzard should have known, that they'll have super heavy traffic on their site. It's expected. Maybe a radio show will give those tickets away, if they have them, on a contest or something. We'll still find out about whatever other announcements like release dates for their 3 big games/expansion during Blizzcon, just not right away.

zerokoolpsx

@Taurus_McGee: Welcome to the joys and wonders of capitalism. If people werent stupid enough to buy it at a higher price, they wouldnt be selling them like that.

svenhoek

in a word, unacceptable.

For blizzard, the company who handles 10million accounts, for them to have a simple Secure HTTP database crash like this is unacceptable.

I'm hoping there is a second chance ticket here, cause alot of blizzard's friends are SOL

huginn

Blizzard really Konami'd it. My hopes for said convention: Release date for SC2, Heroes for SC2 (similar to WC3), Diablo canceled for WC4.

Punkateer

Tyreal looks obese in that photo

FlashIV

Wow. If I knew they'd sell for that much on eBay, I'd have tried getting one myself just to sell it. Not like I go to conventions often.

Furude

"...causing me to wake the neighbors with the very loud shouting of a word that rhymes with duck."

Cluck?
Luck?
Flunk?
Plunk?
Skunk?
Spuck? Is that even a word?

I'm sorry Blizzard botched this whole thing up. I won't bother mentioning that you could of bought tickets to PAX months ago, and while not exactly Blizzcon, I'm sure there might be a couple Blizzard fans you could hook up with there. You could probably get your friends in too.

As someone who attended 2 EverQuest Fan Fairs, I know how much fun it can be to just geek out about your favorite game for 3-4 days (and nights). Hopefully Kharma will strike down the eBay'ers and those who get to go will get rained on. a lot... then stuck by lightning, etc.

Android8675

Regardless of the insanity, I think that Blizzard treats their fans better then most other game studios. This is just a big wake up call for Blizzard to really consider making the con accommodate the mass amount of fans. They vastly underestimated the admissions which should have been obvious in the first place that there would be way more then 14,000 people wanting to get in.

I think they have the money to span the con to more days if there is no large enough space, they could have the tickets separated by days. Though there are larger places to use, definitely.

taikerr

Am I a bad person, scanning for comments that have been de-voweled?

citaro

@ryohazuki: asperberger's or full-on autist?

StratfordX

I would love to know what okenny said.

I guess it's good we have a PM function.

Actually, maybe I don't want to know....

Billkwando

To be perfectly honest it was handled badly but it's not all their fault. The amount of stress placed on the servers they had running the sales site must have been off the scale and they're used to running MMO's not ticket sales. Releasing them in batchs wouldn't help either considering the amount of people trying to buy them. Even if there's 14k tickets if you have over 100k people trying to buy them and you release them in 1k batchs then you're only reducing the load by 1% each time. Even less considering that it's probably a lot more than 100k. In my opinion next time they should just outsource the ticket sales to websites more used to dealing with the strain of handling that many potential customers.

Odin

Well, Fahey, you have only one chance; find a Sam Fisher suit and go in all ninja-style.

Believe it.

Jonn

Don't forget people who make money off tickets twice: First sell them for crazy amounts on eBay, ticket only, then once the BlizzCon is over, sell the in-game pets and stuff for even crazier amounts of money.

robur