Ticket queing

[fullfathom5]

1 hour ago, Neil said:

its a terrible idea, you've made clear you really want to go to glasto, with random allocation you'll lose out to someone who's not too bothered about going.

 

the system as it is now, rewards people who try hard (who are probably people who really want to go).

100% agree 

[Avalon_Fields]

28 minutes ago, Neil said:

i presume in that instance everyone has to wait while the thousands of people before them do their full transaction?

 

Yes. They have a tracker so you know where you are in the queue. At its worst it is something like 120,000th in the queue, and every few minutes it goes down by a couple of hundred, but it slows down the closer you get. It’s a peculiar form of torture.

[HotChipWillBreakYourLegs]

2 hours ago, kemosabe said:

To an extent. It also rewards big groups trying together too. I dunno how you change that though. 

 

Maybe if there was a way of better preventing a machine or unique IP from getting back on the booking page it would be a bit more diverse than the large groups.

 

Or having a ticket buying login linked to your registration which prevents you from buying tickets once yours has been allocated.

 

Probably ways to game this too though.

[UEF]

Glastonbury, like all good socialist organisations, rewards hard work, charges you a fortune to get in, and builds a big wall around itself to keep out undesirables. 

[The Orgazoid]

The only system that everyone would universally perceive as fair is one where everyone gets tickets, but of course that isnt possible so you'll always get people complaining its unfair, ballot or otherwise. People always want whatever system isn't the one that failed them, the balot thing is almost like less privileged people voting for brexit, a misguided belief that anything must be better than what you currently have.

 

I get the argument the current system favours big groups, but in reality the only people that are really and truly disadvantaged by it are people with literally no friends or family. I appreciate that those people do exist, but in reality its relatively rare, for everyone else they have the ability to rope in friends and family, if they don't then its on them.

[-TLR-]

it always makes me laugh every year when, at about 9.30 or so, the calls start up for a lottery system for tickets...

 

as if people think, for some unfathomably stupid reason, that lottery based allocation would somehow automatically mean they got tickets.

[DeanoL]

2 hours ago, Avalon_Fields said:

Yes. They have a tracker so you know where you are in the queue. At its worst it is something like 120,000th in the queue, and every few minutes it goes down by a couple of hundred, but it slows down the closer you get. It’s a peculiar form of torture.

I think that's just a case of not putting the resources in to serve more than a few people at once.

For example when tickets for The Lion King in Birmingham went on sale, they went up at 9am, I forgot about it and logged in at around noon, was told there was a 12 hour queue. It dropped down a bit, and I got a message saying I could now go in and get tickets at around 10pm, after waiting 10 hours. 

After which I proceeded to book tickets on the front row for a random Tuesday night later in the run.

 

Tickets were still available the following days and weeks. It's a much more complicated transaction as people were browsing for the best seats on particular days and such, but it wasn't demand that was causing a queue, it was the site only being able to handle a hundred or so people on at once.

[DeanoL]

12 minutes ago, The Orgazoid said:

The only system that everyone would universally perceive as fair is one where everyone gets tickets, but of course that isnt possible so you'll always get people complaining its unfair, ballot or otherwise. People always want whatever system isn't the one that failed them, the balot thing is almost like less privileged people voting for brexit, a misguided belief that anything must be better than what you currently have.

Yeah we weirdly never get any posts of here of "I slept in, logged in at 9.30 and didn't get tickets, a ballot would be better" - y'know, the actual people who would do better out of a ballot!

 

Quote

I get the argument the current system favours big groups, but in reality the only people that are really and truly disadvantaged by it are people with literally no friends or family. I appreciate that those people do exist, but in reality its relatively rare, for everyone else they have the ability to rope in friends and family, if they don't then its on them.

Even those people can just pay people to try for them. Which is the issue I think we're going to see in the coming years, in that people will just use bot farms (or even cheap labour farms in China) to get their tickets. At which point all the large groups will start crying foul and how it's unfair someone has an army of 200 people trying for them, which at the same time having a group of 200 people trying for each other.

(This literally happened with the main sale last year)

 

I suspect that's what might ultimately lead to a change in system.

[bennyhana22]

1 hour ago, UEF said:

Glastonbury, like all good socialist organisations, rewards hard work, charges you a fortune to get in, and builds a big wall around itself to keep out undesirables. 

Haha

 

Deserved more 👏🏽 

 

Ben

[Beerqueen]

20 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

Yeah we weirdly never get any posts of here of "I slept in, logged in at 9.30 and didn't get tickets, a ballot would be better" - y'know, the actual people who would do better out of a ballot!

 

Even those people can just pay people to try for them. Which is the issue I think we're going to see in the coming years, in that people will just use bot farms (or even cheap labour farms in China) to get their tickets. At which point all the large groups will start crying foul and how it's unfair someone has an army of 200 people trying for them, which at the same time having a group of 200 people trying for each other.

(This literally happened with the main sale last year)

 

I suspect that's what might ultimately lead to a change in system.

But the 200 people are trying for 200 tickets.  It's not as though 200 people are trying for 1 person.  But I realise that could happen.

[CaledonianGonzo]

This year our tickets were secured by our least prepared mate who arrived into the fray at 9.30 and got in on his first click.

[DeanoL]

On 4/19/2024 at 4:15 PM, Beerqueen said:

But the 200 people are trying for 200 tickets.  It's not as though 200 people are trying for 1 person.  But I realise that could happen.

Yeah but as soon as one group is successful, they start trying for another group, which increases their odds, so that group get tickets, then try for another group, and then it tends to snowball from there.

It's why you often hear in big groups either no-one got anything, or maybe one or two groups nabbed tickets just before they went off-sale, or the entire group got tickets. It just needs a couple of groups to be lucky to get tickets in the first five minutes and then it snowballs from there.

[Physical_graffiti]

Re Chinese bots. Did that definitely happen? I've seen no evidence that happened. Is that just random speculation? genuine question.

 

Re. being allocated a place in a queue - will that be less fair, as in people will utilise bots/vpns to have a million devices attempting to join a queue at the same time? (forgive my lack of technical speak/knowledge)

 

Re. it favouring big groups - yes, but that's part of the determination/effort surely? None of us actually know 70 people who are going, but spending time connecting with friends of friends, joining facebook groups/forums to increase your group size....yeah that's a huge ballache to do, but that's part of why the current system is the least worst, no? It rewards ballache!

 

 

[AdrianH]

Not seen the booking page in more than a decade now. I can sympathise for those who are frustrated by the process as if it was down to me, I'd not have attended the festival since 2013 despite trying in a F5 refreshing frenzy every sale/resale. A queueing system would be much worse though.

[HotChipWillBreakYourLegs]

23 minutes ago, Physical_graffiti said:

Re. being allocated a place in a queue - will that be less fair, as in people will utilise bots/vpns to have a million devices attempting to join a queue at the same time? (forgive my lack of technical speak/knowledge)

 

 

 

 

If seetickets could manage a single unique login based on a person's registration then this problem wouldn't arise.

 

It would need to handle 2.5 million simultaneous logins.

Edited April 22 by HotChipWillBreakYourLegs

[aj6658]

There is simply no fairer system than the one we have purely because demand far far exceeds supply. 

 

In reality, the only way for tickets to be easier to get is by other festivals getting better and taking demand away. Currently there is nothing on the scale and vibe of Glastonbury to compete with it. Probably Bestival Summer of love year was the largest and similar vibe that could siphon demand. 

 

 

[Nice hymer]

It feels like bot farms (or big groups paid or otherwise) are beginning to make a noticeable impact.

There certainly seems to be a growing number of large groups in attendance.

 

I was reading somewhere (might even have been here) that Liverpool has some large scale operations going on, which is why they are so well represented at the festival (kind of makes sense?).

 

Our experience seems to be changing. Our group of 20-30 has been consistent for a number of years.

This year we've fallen well short, only eight tickets, two of which were coach tickets that we've never bothered with before.

For the most part, we didn't get close, perhaps outgunned by the bigger groups?

 

 

 

[Physical_graffiti]

30 minutes ago, Nice hymer said:

It feels like bot farms (or big groups paid or otherwise) are beginning to make a noticeable impact.

There certainly seems to be a growing number of large groups in attendance.

 

I was reading somewhere (might even have been here) that Liverpool has some large scale operations going on, which is why they are so well represented at the festival (kind of makes sense?).

 

Our experience seems to be changing. Our group of 20-30 has been consistent for a number of years.

This year we've fallen well short, only eight tickets, two of which were coach tickets that we've never bothered with before.

For the most part, we didn't get close, perhaps outgunned by the bigger groups?

 

 

 

Where's the evidence for this though? Beyond conspiracy theories about Liverpool made up on here. Is it not more difficult because there is more demand than ten years ago?

[DeanoL]

2 hours ago, Physical_graffiti said:

Re Chinese bots. Did that definitely happen? I've seen no evidence that happened. Is that just random speculation? genuine question.

 

Some people claimed they had done it. I mean you're right, they could have been lying though, we don't have the receipts. But it was people claiming they had done it, rather than people claiming other people must have done it because they didn't get tickets.

 

I didn't try for tickets this year, but if I was trying in future I'd definitely set up a small bot farm. It's fairly trivial to do if you know what you're doing, and cost-wise is very small proportion of the ticket price.

[DeanoL]

2 hours ago, Physical_graffiti said:

Re. it favouring big groups - yes, but that's part of the determination/effort surely? None of us actually know 70 people who are going, but spending time connecting with friends of friends, joining facebook groups/forums to increase your group size....yeah that's a huge ballache to do, but that's part of why the current system is the least worst, no? It rewards ballache!

I mean, to an extent. The people *organising* those groups definitely deserve tickets if its based on effort because it's a tonne of work. But that's maybe one or two people per group. There's then 10s or 100s of others that are just benefitting form that organisation.

[gfa]

Calling bots chinese is ridiculous

 

Its just people with tech jobs who know what they are doing. Its not the hardest system to beat, you just need a lot of browsers to increase your odds to near 99%. hardly rocket science

[Nice hymer]

Is demand still increasing? From what I've seen, registration numbers appear to have topped out at around 2.4-2.5m.

 

With the festival increasing capacity, you could argue that there's falling demand per ticket.

 

I haven't knocked up spreadsheets or anything but from the figures I've seen in the press, demand per ticket appears to be pretty consistent over the last decade (registrations increasing, capacity increasing).

[DeanoL]

18 minutes ago, gfa said:

Calling bots chinese is ridiculous

 

Its just people with tech jobs who know what they are doing. Its not the hardest system to beat, you just need a lot of browsers to increase your odds to near 99%. hardly rocket science

I think I confused that by talking about two different things. For those who aren't techy, hiring actual people to try for you in cheap labour markets like China is also an option.

[Agis]

I think the system is flawed but the best of a bad lot as it does seem to encourage extra effort on behalf of those who are actually successful and therefore I guess ensures a festival full of people who care about being there and are excited by the prospect of it.

 

With regard to numbers if there are 2.3-2.5 million registrations and assuming that ALL of them try to get tickets (which is obviously not the case but..) then with 210,000 tickets (approx?) you have a 1 in 10ish chance of getting a ticket? If you are in a group of 6 then that increase 6 fold?

 

Does that therefore mean that in a group of 6 you have a circa 60% chance of being successful? 

 

Pretty good odds if so.

[This_Fields_Good]

20 minutes ago, gfa said:

Calling bots chinese is ridiculous

 

Its just people with tech jobs who know what they are doing. Its not the hardest system to beat, you just need a lot of browsers to increase your odds to near 99%. hardly rocket science

Now I'm no expert on bots, or modern (purported) techniques to game the ticket system, so please don't shoot me down for inaccuracies, but...
My understanding of bots is of computer apps on networks, NOT people.
And it is not so much an increase in browsers that is needed, but increased IP Addresses to improve your chances.

 

19 minutes ago, Nice hymer said:

With the festival increasing capacity, you could argue that there's falling demand per ticket.

And I do not think capacity has changed for some years.  It is reported to be 135,000 (203,500 incl. workers) and has not increased since 2015, although I believe they have license to increase it by 5000 (maybe 7,500), but have chosen not to exercise that option.