Cost of Living and Glastonbury

[Supernintendo Chalmers]

52 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

 

Going back to the conversations from a few weeks back about costs while at the festival. If we're looking at £7 a pint in a pub I can only imagine what a festival pint will cost

I wouldn't pay 90p for Fosters, let alone an additional 90p.

Festival pints are going to be anywhere between £8-£10. Not so much of an issue at Glastonbury because of the open policy but other festivals are going to be hit hard. People are either going to sneak booze in, cut back on intake or just not get a ticket in the first place.

The queues at Glastonbury next year should be interesting. I fully expect to see a load more personal alcohol taken in. Not many are going to fork out a minimum of £200 (say £8 x 5 pints per day x 5 days) just on lager/cider alone. And I'd say those numbers are conservative.

[DeanoL]

On 11/11/2022 at 1:08 PM, clarkete said:

You only thought it was less in demand as you were king of the hill on both sales 😊

In our group on Sunday 112 wanted tickets, plus 19 additional helpers.  18 successful transactions. 

I make that 13.7% succeeded, which given the massive expertise in the group did seem low. 

Mind you on Thursday only 5 succeeded out of 59 attempted. 

NB. All figures strictly back of fag packet by old man with cse1 maths

So nearly everyone got tickets? Honestly I think demand was down based on these big groups. It feels like in 2019 the big groups were posting how only half of them or a quarter of them had actually got tickets. Seen far less of that this year. 

50 minutes ago, Supernintendo Chalmers said:

The queues at Glastonbury next year should be interesting. I fully expect to see a load more personal alcohol taken in. Not many are going to fork out a minimum of £200 (say £8 x 5 pints per day x 5 days) just on lager/cider alone. And I'd say those numbers are conservative.

I didn't realise five drinks a day was the minimum!

[efcfanwirral]

1 hour ago, Supernintendo Chalmers said:

I wouldn't pay 90p for Fosters, let alone an additional 90p.

Festival pints are going to be anywhere between £8-£10. Not so much of an issue at Glastonbury because of the open policy but other festivals are going to be hit hard. People are either going to sneak booze in, cut back on intake or just not get a ticket in the first place.

The queues at Glastonbury next year should be interesting. I fully expect to see a load more personal alcohol taken in. Not many are going to fork out a minimum of £200 (say £8 x 5 pints per day x 5 days) just on lager/cider alone. And I'd say those numbers are conservative.

I wonder if there'll be more cans sold at the bars (hopefully kept cold...) instead of pints? Guessing its a bit more cost effective to buy those in in bulk, might be wrong though? 

[Supernintendo Chalmers]

23 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

I didn't realise five drinks a day was the minimum!

It's in the ticket Ts & Cs

[Supernintendo Chalmers]

1 minute ago, efcfanwirral said:

I wonder if there'll be more cans sold at the bars (hopefully kept cold...) instead of pints? Guessing its a bit more cost effective to buy those in in bulk, might be wrong though? 

That makes sense to me. Would that be more favourable than paper cups for recycling? 

[p.pete]

25 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

So nearly everyone got tickets? Honestly I think demand was down based on these big groups. It feels like in 2019 the big groups were posting how only half of them or a quarter of them had actually got tickets. Seen far less of that this year. 

I didn't realise five drinks a day was the minimum!

Think you're misreading that - 18 successful transactions should probably read 3 transactions got 18 tickets - so hardly any of them successful.  That surprises me as I'd of thought a group that large should be far more successful - so still a high demand.

[Leyrulion]

2 hours ago, Supernintendo Chalmers said:

I wouldn't pay 90p for Fosters, let alone an additional 90p.

Festival pints are going to be anywhere between £8-£10. Not so much of an issue at Glastonbury because of the open policy but other festivals are going to be hit hard. People are either going to sneak booze in, cut back on intake or just not get a ticket in the first place.

The queues at Glastonbury next year should be interesting. I fully expect to see a load more personal alcohol taken in. Not many are going to fork out a minimum of £200 (say £8 x 5 pints per day x 5 days) just on lager/cider alone. And I'd say those numbers are conservative.

I was pleasantly surprised with festival prices this year. £6 Glastonbury and Boomtown, even wilderness was "only" £7 (although being crew took some of the sting out of that one)

 

[Jose Pose]

Demand was definitely up, the site literally broke, that hasn’t happened in the last few years, and we’ve had a couple of 30 minute sell outs.

People aren’t suddenly using a load more devices now compared to October 2019, people have been using tons of devices for years, things like iPads aren’t new by any means, most people will have phone, laptop, iPad, possibly access to other laptops and work laptops - these are not new things. The festival even made a big point of people not using multiple devices this year, so has clearly been the norm in the past.

Of course if demand was up, and every extra person is trying on an average of three devices then that will naturally have had an impact.

Edited November 16, 2022 by Jose Pose

[Simsy]

1 hour ago, p.pete said:

Think you're misreading that - 18 successful transactions should probably read 3 transactions got 18 tickets - so hardly any of them successful.  That surprises me as I'd of thought a group that large should be far more successful - so still a high demand.

No, it was 18 transactions and 100+ tickets. Most of them were after the "sold out" tweet, when presumably people were starting to give up so it was easier to get into the site (there must have been a fair bit of demand, but not necessarily from people who keep F5-ing until the death).

[Crazyfool01]

28 minutes ago, Jose Pose said:

Demand was definitely up, the site literally broke, that hasn’t happened in the last few years, and we’ve had a couple of 30 minute sell outs.

People aren’t suddenly using a load more devices now compared to October 2019, people have been using tons of devices for years, things like iPads aren’t new by any means, most people will have phone, laptop, iPad, possibly access to other laptops and work laptops - these are not new things. The festival even made a big point of people not using multiple devices this year, so has clearly been the norm in the past.

Of course if demand was up, and every extra person is trying on an average of three devices then that will naturally have had an impact.

How do you know that ? The site might have broken because of the new payment authentication rules or any other reason .. I also suspect more people using refresh software it took me 5 attempts to get it all processed so rather than a simple transaction I was effectively blocking someone else for a period of time . 

[Jose Pose]

7 minutes ago, Crazyfool01 said:

How do you know that ? The site might have broken because of the new payment authentication rules or any other reason .. I also suspect more people using refresh software it took me 5 attempts to get it all processed so rather than a simple transaction I was effectively blocking someone else for a period of time . 

They blatantly said it was sold out to reduce the demand so they could actually sell the remaining tickets. The site was clearly under a lot more strain than normal, also there is more than enough evidence from people in big groups not getting as many of them as they usually would. There is certainly absolutely no case to say demand was down is there?

Edited November 16, 2022 by Jose Pose

[p.pete]

23 minutes ago, Simsy said:

No, it was 18 transactions and 100+ tickets. Most of them were after the "sold out" tweet, when presumably people were starting to give up so it was easier to get into the site (there must have been a fair bit of demand, but not necessarily from people who keep F5-ing until the death).

Ah, sorry.  So '13.7% succeeded' refers to proportion of the group that managed to get through to get tickets?  Surely for any given group there is a ceiling of 16.6% getting through, after that the tickets have already been bought, so that's amazing!!

[Crazyfool01]

2 minutes ago, Jose Pose said:

also there is more than enough evidence from people in big groups not getting as many of them as they usually would

Erm where ? A couple of posts up is a group where 19/20 got sorted … we won’t ever actually know the answer unless it fails to sell out without a website crash … 

[Jose Pose]

10 minutes ago, Crazyfool01 said:

Erm where ? A couple of posts up is a group where 19/20 got sorted … we won’t ever actually know the answer unless it fails to sell out without a website crash … 

There is more evidence to say demand was up than down, I don’t see any credible evidence to suggest demand was down. You can blame card processing for the site failing, but it’s only an alternative theory to argue why demand wasn’t up, but it is just a theory that cannot be proven, it’s plausible that theory is wrong, and the site failed because demand was up. Nobody can prove otherwise, whilst at the same time the site failing can never be attributed to less traffic.

[sauceageroll]

Is this a smart place to enquire if any kind souls would bring several cases of beer/cider in their transport for me and a mate? We are on a coach from Scotland and limited space. All in the name of reducing costs and those assisting will be paid for the help of course 

[Crazyfool01]

2 minutes ago, Jose Pose said:

There is more evidence to say demand was up than down, I don’t see any credible evidence to suggest demand was down. You can blame card processing for the site failing, but it’s only an alternative theory to argue why demand wasn’t up, but it is just a theory that cannot be proven, it’s plausible that theory is wrong, and the site failed because demand was up. Nobody can prove otherwise, whilst at the same time the site failing can never be attributed to less traffic.

i have never experienced issues with the site like it was .... successful ticket buyer on around 12 occasions ... it crashed at every stage ... 

[Jose Pose]

Just now, Crazyfool01 said:

i have never experienced issues with the site like it was .... successful ticket buyer on around 12 occasions ... it crashed at every stage ... 

Yes, which could more than conceivably be down to demand. More so than anything to do with card transactions.

[gfa]

8 minutes ago, sauceageroll said:

Is this a smart place to enquire if any kind souls would bring several cases of beer/cider in their transport for me and a mate? We are on a coach from Scotland and limited space. All in the name of reducing costs and those assisting will be paid for the help of course 

Ask closer to the fest, i'm sure someone would be happy to but its very far out! 🙂 

[sauceageroll]

Just now, gfa said:

Ask closer to the fest, i'm sure someone would be happy to but its very far out! 🙂 

Thanks 👍🏻 I’ll be sure to do so 

[Skip997]

13 minutes ago, sauceageroll said:

Is this a smart place to enquire if any kind souls would bring several cases of beer/cider in their transport for me and a mate? We are on a coach from Scotland and limited space. All in the name of reducing costs and those assisting will be paid for the help of course 

This post has made me nostalgic.

Once upon a time it was very common to see people selling cans of beer, esp in the Stone Circle, I've done it myself. Also people wondering around selling pouches of duty free baccy brought in from abroad. A mate of mine had this great sales pitch which somehow worked " cans £1.50 each or three for a fiver", the amount of people who took the 3 for a fiver option was staggering.

The introduction of Customs and Excise on site soon put pay to this.

[Fred Zepplin]

Demand could be 200000, 1 million or 10 million it doesn't really make much difference to how long it takes to sell out. As long as demand is higher than number of tickets available it will sell out within 30 mins ish. Obviously this year with the technical issues it was longer 

[incident]

3 minutes ago, Jose Pose said:

Yes, which could more than conceivably be down to demand. More so than anything to do with card transactions.

Increased demand could definitely be a factor. For sure. It probably was at least partially that. But to say it's more likely to be that than anything else understates or underestimates just how much extra workload the SCA authentication will have put on the servers compared to the October 2019 sale - it's a vast difference.

I'm pretty confident in saying that SCA was the single biggest factor in the site failing, and by some distance. SCA adds a whole new dimension into the sale process and trying to negotiate thousands of interactive transactions per minute obviously fucked things up. Whereas if it was just purely demand levels - they're set up to cope with that these days.

Basically - if the sale had simply taken longer than usual without the failures, I'd agree with you that it was demand (throttling the sale rate to instead serve more "busy" pages). But all the errors within the process and especially around the payment pages suggests it was much more than that.

[gfa]

21 minutes ago, sauceageroll said:

Thanks 👍🏻 I’ll be sure to do so 

will do you one better, pm me now and then bump it in June 🙂 we've got 2 cars going up will be happy to take your crates for you (you'll have to come with us and grab them from the car though - there's no table service in the fields!)

[DeanoL]

17 minutes ago, incident said:

Increased demand could definitely be a factor. For sure. It probably was at least partially that. But to say it's more likely to be that than anything else understates or underestimates just how much extra workload the SCA authentication will have put on the servers compared to the October 2019 sale - it's a vast difference.

I'm pretty confident in saying that SCA was the single biggest factor in the site failing, and by some distance. SCA adds a whole new dimension into the sale process and trying to negotiate thousands of interactive transactions per minute obviously fucked things up. Whereas if it was just purely demand levels - they're set up to cope with that these days.

Basically - if the sale had simply taken longer than usual without the failures, I'd agree with you that it was demand (throttling the sale rate to instead serve more "busy" pages). But all the errors within the process and especially around the payment pages suggests it was much more than that.

One possibility is the holding page is configured to let X people through per minute, rather than keeping a total number of X people on the system and doing one-in, one-out.

The SCA thing made every transaction take longer, but they hadn't actually accounted for that when making the holding page. So more people were let in than the system could cope with.

[Ayrshire Chris]

For those in worthy view and Sticklinch just fill the car, if that’s how you got there, with cans and booze, it’s easy to access the car park to re supply your stocks.  Ideal if you like warm lager and cider. might also be useful for those who have pals staying there but are camping on site😉

Edited November 16, 2022 by Ayrshire Chris