Sweet bleeding Jesus. What a frustrating morning. Like about a billion other people, I attempted to buy Splendour in the Grass camping tickets from moshtix this morning. Despite getting to work early, logging into the site around 8am, from 8.30am onward I experienced constant drop outs. I’m jealous of the people that actually got to the ‘buy tickets’ screen – cause I never even got that far. Several times I got to about position 1,000 in the queue before receiving a server time out and booted back to the end of the queue. The above graphic was the screen I got greeted with time after time after time.
This is the first time I’ve attempted to buy Splendour tickets since about 2005. I think it’s the nail in the coffin for me. I don’t care about the line-up anymore, the whole setup is rancid. I realise that lots of people want to go, and systems are under great stress, but why are these problems consistent. It’s not exactly like the massive server load was unexpected? I’m annoyed that the queuing system seems fundamentally flawed. No wonder the moshtix facebook ‘fan’ page is filled with streams of abuse (though, I note strangely enough a lot of the abuse is 'disappearing') (*edit* they won't be able to sensor the Courier Mail's comment section though).
From now on, I'm sticking with worthwhile festivals like Golden Plains.
2 comments:
Surely festivals could take a different approach to ticketing...
There is just no need for everyone to be artificially queuing to get tickets online.
If I ran a festival tickets sales would be as follows:
- SUBMIT INTEREST: Fill in a form that you want to buy 1-4 tickets. Anyone could have the opportunity to do this over a period of a week or so.
- ALLOCATE AND INFORM: On a certain date the system randomly allocates tickets to those who have submitted interest and an email is sent to the those who have been successful.
- MAKE PAYMENT: Those who get an email have a week to go to the website or a physical location and make their payment.
- REALLOCATION: Anyone who doesn't go through with the ticket purchase looses their offer after the week deadline. These 'available' tickets are then randomly distributed again.
How simple is that?
No queuing, no server load issues all at once... how can it be that complex!
Yeah, I think thats a more equitable system. At the moment, people are taking time off work to try get tickets and the system fails them.
From what I can remember Glastonbury operates similarly (could be wrong here).
I thought that they could have at least separated the camping and non-camping ticket sales to reduce server load.
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