Start dusting off your capes! San Diego Comic Con is right around the corner. Tickets for San Diego Comic Con went on sale Saturday morning from their website for the event on July 21st-24th. But, if you were one of a million geeks trying to get one, it is too late. If you were hoping to get a ticket and now hold a grudge against the few 1,000 people that did, fear not, revenge is yours.
Last year, the fine people that work the site http://www.comic-con.org/cci/ found that the seemingly “small” convention was larger than expected when thousands of geeks rushed to multiple computers from around the world to get a ticket and swiftly crashed their ticket buying system, over and over again. In response to this ticketing issue, they gathered, brainstormed and came up with a new plan for ticket sales venue. This year, they used TicketLeap at http://www.ticketleap.com/ only to find, once again, the need for tickets is much greater than they anticipated. I won't even mention the previous two "test runs" on November 22nd and December 15th, 2010 for ticket sales, they failed even worse. The third time was a semi charm.
Food for thought: Ticket sales online should not be this hard or are they preparing us for the long, time consuming elbow-to-elbow lines for our favorite cartoonist autograph seen every year at Comic Con?
Last year, the fine people that work the site http://www.comic-con.org/cci/ found that the seemingly “small” convention was larger than expected when thousands of geeks rushed to multiple computers from around the world to get a ticket and swiftly crashed their ticket buying system, over and over again. In response to this ticketing issue, they gathered, brainstormed and came up with a new plan for ticket sales venue. This year, they used TicketLeap at http://www.ticketleap.com/ only to find, once again, the need for tickets is much greater than they anticipated. I won't even mention the previous two "test runs" on November 22nd and December 15th, 2010 for ticket sales, they failed even worse. The third time was a semi charm.
Food for thought: Ticket sales online should not be this hard or are they preparing us for the long, time consuming elbow-to-elbow lines for our favorite cartoonist autograph seen every year at Comic Con?
Within moments of opening the TicketLeap site for sales, it crashed, lagged and even triple charged some people who tried to refresh the screen. I was one of many who received the “over capacity” error that initially showed up. We were told not “to click the go back button” but to instead click the refresh or F5 button to get into the screens we needed to order.
It wasn’t long before the next error screen popped up and we all let out a large grumble that could be heard around the world. We knew at that moment that this was not going to be an easy task. I can say that this was one time my FPS gamer playing skills came in handy in the real world. We were some refresh clicking maniacs.
Ater seeing this messsage, the logical choice was to call them, right? Wrong. I attempted this method many times only to get a "all lines are busy, please try your call again later" automated message.
Hybrid: All this has happened before and will happen again. Again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again.~Battlestar Galactica
I spent three hours of my Saturday morning trying to get tickets. It was one of the most frustrating things I have ever tried to accomplish. For a geek like myself, it was like trying to kill a boss in a game but he never really dies. I got to the main screen numerous times to search tickets of my choosing. Mostly to find 9 out of 10 times they were sold out. If I did get a ticket drop down menu, I would click to pay and get one of the two error messages, literally over 100 times. Did I only click refresh 100 times this notorious Saturday morning? No. I guestimate I hit refresh, click click click, well over 1000 times. I eventually got help from Robert Odum (Twitter @Cldstrife). He made it past all the screens for ordering and agreed to help me get my golden 4 day pass. Cheers buddy; I owe you a cold frosty six pack!
What is next? Planning costumes and a really cool road trip to San Diego! I will keep you updated and when it is finally time to put on my cape, I will post photo galleries.
Hybrid: All this has happened before and will happen again. Again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again.~Battlestar Galactica
I spent three hours of my Saturday morning trying to get tickets. It was one of the most frustrating things I have ever tried to accomplish. For a geek like myself, it was like trying to kill a boss in a game but he never really dies. I got to the main screen numerous times to search tickets of my choosing. Mostly to find 9 out of 10 times they were sold out. If I did get a ticket drop down menu, I would click to pay and get one of the two error messages, literally over 100 times. Did I only click refresh 100 times this notorious Saturday morning? No. I guestimate I hit refresh, click click click, well over 1000 times. I eventually got help from Robert Odum (Twitter @Cldstrife). He made it past all the screens for ordering and agreed to help me get my golden 4 day pass. Cheers buddy; I owe you a cold frosty six pack!
What is next? Planning costumes and a really cool road trip to San Diego! I will keep you updated and when it is finally time to put on my cape, I will post photo galleries.
Until then, ComicCon has another year to try and get the servers prepared for what has proven to be a onslaught of traffic and unhappy customers like me and one of my favorite people, @StarFleetMom (Twitter).
To read my LA Times quote, go to: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/02/comic-con-ticket-sales-cra...
To see a frustrated geeks Twitter go to: http://twitter.com/TrekJen
To see a frustrated geeks Twitter go to: http://twitter.com/TrekJen