Ticket tips and Tricks for 2025 festival

[rubenz]

I don't really understand how the ticket queues work. How does it decide where you go in the queue if everyone piles in at the same time at 9am? 

[Pipine]

It assigns a random place in the queue for each queue ID.  

[incident]

24 minutes ago, rubenz said:

I don't really understand how the ticket queues work. How does it decide where you go in the queue if everyone piles in at the same time at 9am? 

 

Using the technology that See have recently brought in, there's a few different ways they could implement a queue.

 

The way that they did it for the Sam Fender sale, was a "waiting room" system - basically join the "queue" some time before the sale time, and then when the moment comes it allocates a random place in the queue to everyone waiting. Anyone who turns up after that point automatically joins the back of the queue (so is likely too late).

 

Theoretically they could also do it as a straight queue - with the system set to "open" at a nominated time, and queue position determined by the order people hit the server after that - "at the same time" doesn't really apply here - the queue software will know what order people "arrived" in, even if the difference the tiniest fraction of a second and so far smaller than anything perceptible to humans.

Edited 17 hours ago by incident

[rubenz]

So if they did a similar thing with glasto you could join the queue at the start and then be randomly allocated 300000th in the queue and you'd know straight away you had no chance!

 

I hope they keep it the same F5 frenzy as usual.

 

 

[incident]

Just now, rubenz said:

So if they did a similar thing with glasto you could join the queue at the start and then be randomly allocated 300000th in the queue and you'd know straight away you had no chance!

 

I hope they keep it the same F5 frenzy as usual.

 

The technology they're using does have the capability to show queue position, as seen on Ticketmaster and other places, but for the Sam Fender sale at least See kept that turned off so there was no way to determine an accurate position.

 

They just showed a progress bar, which as with any other progress bar can't really be trusted and is only as useful as the context you're able to put it in. Whether they keep it like that for other ticket sales is anyones guess - I keep refering to the Sam Fender sale because it's the only marker we currently have but there's certainly scope for them to do things differently.

[rubenz]

Ah I see, cheers for the info!

 

[dotdash79]

12 minutes ago, incident said:

 

The technology they're using does have the capability to show queue position, as seen on Ticketmaster and other places, but for the Sam Fender sale at least See kept that turned off so there was no way to determine an accurate position.

 

They just showed a progress bar, which as with any other progress bar can't really be trusted and is only as useful as the context you're able to put it in. Whether they keep it like that for other ticket sales is anyones guess - I keep refering to the Sam Fender sale because it's the only marker we currently have but there's certainly scope for them to do things differently.

Those queue position progress bar this are only relevant from the position you are in the queue to the front. 
 

e.g. you are 500 in the queue and your friend is 1000, and you move forward 500 places your progress bar would be complete but your friends would only be half way. Even though you have moved the same number of places. 

[t0paz]

Unlike Ticketmaster, there was no need to login to join the see queue for the Sam Fender sale. That meant I could have multiple devices with different spots in the queue. So you could be 500,000th in the queue and theoretically still get a ticket.

 

The queue does have the possibility to slow the sale down too. When you get to the front you have a few minutes (5?) to use that space before it passes onto the next person. If a group of 6 all join the queue and one of them buys tickets at 9:01, all the other 5 queue entries are still live and if they get a space they will then block that space for that amount of time, assuming they’re not buying for others etc. Multiply that by having lots of devices/browsers per person and you will get a lot of dead time drawing out the sale.

 

We probably won’t know until the coach sale but I’m starting to think the queue was something they had to do for a shared sale with Ticketmaster and not going to be in use for Glasto.

[doogie]

One major issue with the queue is that if the servers get overwhelmed (as they probably will be for Glastonbury), you may struggle to join the queue in the first place, and by the time you actually get anything other than a white screen, the sale may already have started and then you'd have no chance.

 

This happened with the Oasis sale on Ticketmaster.

[fraybentos1]

3 minutes ago, doogie said:

One major issue with the queue is that if the servers get overwhelmed (as they probably will be for Glastonbury), you may struggle to join the queue in the first place, and by the time you actually get anything other than a white screen, the sale may already have started and then you'd have no chance.

 

This happened with the Oasis sale on Ticketmaster.

it did aye but people were still getting tickets at mid afternoon so even if you did have errors at the start could often still get in

 

it certainly rewarded perseverance

 

[doogie]

12 minutes ago, fraybentos1 said:

it did aye but people were still getting tickets at mid afternoon so even if you did have errors at the start could often still get in

 

it certainly rewarded perseverance

 

 

Yes, but bear in mind there were over a million tickets available for Oasis across the multiple venues and dates.  There may only be a tenth of that number available for Glastonbury.

[fraybentos1]

3 minutes ago, doogie said:

 

Yes, but bear in mind there were over a million tickets available for Oasis across the multiple venues and dates.  There may only be a tenth of that number available for Glastonbury.

yeah fair point. I have no clue how many people try for Glasto, maybe like 500k people? But millions of devices, browsers, sessions etc

[doogie]

15 minutes ago, fraybentos1 said:

yeah fair point. I have no clue how many people try for Glasto, maybe like 500k people? But millions of devices, browsers, sessions etc

 

So we should expect all the usual white screen chaos whether they use the queue or not.

 

Moral of the story: if they're using the queuing system, join the queue as early as you possibly can.  Don't wait until 8.55am.

 

 

Edited 3 hours ago by doogie

[kalifire]

24 minutes ago, doogie said:

Moral of the story: if they're using the queuing system, join the queue as early as you possibly can.  Don't wait until 8.55am.

The queues I’ve been part of didn’t award or even recognise early attendance to the ‘waiting room’ (the queue for the queue). It assigned you a random spot when tickets were officially on sale (i.e. 9am), whether you logged in at 7:30am or 8:59am. 

Edited 3 hours ago by kalifire

[doogie]

6 minutes ago, kalifire said:

The queues I’ve been part of didn’t award or even recognise early attendance to the ‘waiting room’ (the queue for the queue). It assigned you a random spot when tickets were officially on sale (i.e. 9am), whether you logged in at 7:30am or 8:59am. 

 

You're right, but what I'm thinking is that if you leave it until shortly before the sale starts, you're more likely to get a white screen and you won't end up getting allocated a place in the queue until after 9am, by which time you'll be at the back with people who logged on late.

[fraybentos1]

11 minutes ago, kalifire said:

The queues I’ve been part of didn’t award or even recognise early attendance to the ‘waiting room’ (the queue for the queue). It assigned you a random spot when tickets were officially on sale (i.e. 9am), whether you logged in at 7:30am or 8:59am. 

He's meaning get in early before it totally breaks like it did for Oasis. 

[kalifire]

Ah, I see. That makes sense. Still don’t think they’ll be queuing people just yet though. 

[parsonjack]

I think if it's going to break it'll break for everyone, and that joining the waiting room early will have negligible benefit.

[doogie]

8 minutes ago, parsonjack said:

I think if it's going to break it'll break for everyone, and that joining the waiting room early will have negligible benefit.

 

If you do get allocated a queue ID, it may be worth copying it into Word or something, so you can try and paste it back later to retrieve your spot in the queue if it all turns to sh*t.

[efcfanwirral]

13 hours ago, dotdash79 said:

Those queue position progress bar this are only relevant from the position you are in the queue to the front. 
 

e.g. you are 500 in the queue and your friend is 1000, and you move forward 500 places your progress bar would be complete but your friends would only be half way. Even though you have moved the same number of places. 

speed does help show what's happening, if you're halfway through at 9.05 then you probably have a decent chance, but if you've barely moved by 9.15 its probably not happening

[incident]

Just now, efcfanwirral said:

speed does help show what's happening, if you're halfway through at 9.05 then you probably have a decent chance, but if you've barely moved by 9.15 its probably not happening

 

If the progress bar was a true and honest reflection of what's happening - then yes.

 

But in most cases and especially for this one, progress bars cannot be trusted. On the Sam Fender sale, the progress along it was very uneven to say the least - I found it sitting at near zero for a while, then suddenly jump to nearly complete.

[parsonjack]

39 minutes ago, doogie said:

 

If you do get allocated a queue ID, it may be worth copying it into Word or something, so you can try and paste it back later to retrieve your spot in the queue if it all turns to sh*t.

Definitely.

[SilverLining]

I love the randomness of just refreshing - queues can surely be hacked by bots etc. My brother uses a queuejump bot as he collects random limited clothing drops (and other things) and it has never ever failed buying him what he needs - pisses me off but if its that or not going, I know what I'll be doing.

[paulshane]

2 hours ago, parsonjack said:

I think if it's going to break it'll break for everyone, and that joining the waiting room early will have negligible benefit.

 

websites can break in all sorts of interesting ways - remember the live at worth farm lockdown gig? I joined early, signed in with my password, then the login sever expired, but I and many other early birds watched the stream fine, but nobody else could join becuase the login page was massivly overloaded and stopped processing logins.

 

 

[Crazyfool01]

3 minutes ago, paulshane said:

 

websites can break in all sorts of interesting ways - remember the live at worth farm lockdown gig? I joined early, signed in with my password, then the login sever expired, but I and many other early birds watched the stream fine, but nobody else could join becuase the login page was massivly overloaded and stopped processing logins.

 

 

We streamed it on here via zoom to @squirrelarmy tv. 😂 where he was able to get it . I had to ask people to be silent when they joined the zoom call 🙂