Ticket tips and Tricks for 2025 festival

[The other Bellboy]

19 hours ago, Alvoram said:

10 minutes I think, but I've seen some people suggest they were backspacing for even longer than 10 minutes!!! So there's a chance that even that wasn't working properly.

You wouldn't want it much less than that though, due to the server issues, payment issues and how painfully slow the site can get in general, especially on a mobile device. I think when all said and done, after all of the blocked screens that I had to refresh through, and entering the data, then processing payment etc, I was a good 5 minutes just doing one. 

There was no way the backspacing and repeating only lasted 10 minutes in total, I had a lot of issues getting through the access denied screen and so by the time I had completed the purchase I must have been very close, if not out of the 10 minutes, then after getting the tickets I jumped around the room a bit to celebrate, grabbed a drink and then decided to go back to the phone and take some screen shots of each page. Went back, expecting to just get the page before so I could take a picture of that, but went to the reg numbers page. I cleared this manually then entered my spare reg number as a test, expecting it to kick me out but it didn't, so I went to the next page - no access denied this time, still expecting to get kicked out, but again all good, then got the payment screen and as this was my NZ reg number I went and got my NZ card. Now I was realising that this could actually work, so I decided to get a reg number for someone who would want to go, so I went to my emails, found the number, then went back again to try and change the reg, but got the all tickets have been allocated message, so I went forward again, entered the payment details and proceeded - all the time thinking that it would get stopped. The only message I got was that an order had already been placed by this email address and did I still want to continue, I did and that was it, all done. There's no way I did all of this in 10 minutes, none what so ever.

I only booked 2 tickets the first time and 1 the second (since cancelled with SEE), so my affect was small, and I never expected that it was going to be allowed. But from what I saw, if you got through early enough and without any issues, i believe you could have placed multiple orders easily

 

[hoopy67]

Been catching up on this thread.

 

Got a ticket this year and my views are the same last year (when I missed out):

 

The blame for the utilised loopholes lies with SeeTickets. It's a case of hating the game rather than the player. I doubt many people would reject a ticket bought for them which was obtained via an exploit.

[incident]

6 hours ago, Splodge said:

If I came out of the Sunday sale without a ticket I would be praying that (aside from fixing the obvious bugs such as the “rejected queue number” one) they didn’t touch a thing for the resale.

 

I disagree with this. From my perspective the system "as is" has gone too far in terms of being gameable and exploitable, to the extent that just on that basis alone I'm delighted I don't have to do it again come April. While I can and did take actions that contributed to success this time around, I think possibly in April and if not definitely for the next festival it'd be necessary to go much further just to get comparable results.

 

The basic problem is that they way they've set it up, from now on this sale is 100% an arms race - far more than it ever was or could have been before. If nothing changes then very quickly it's going to get to the point where it becomes unlikely to get tickets without to be blunt far more effort than it's worth - thousands of sessions, generated Queue IDs, it's all been covered in this thread over the past few days, generally much further across "the line" than I'm willing to go.

[jonnytee1]

13 hours ago, Ryan1984 said:

I did 11 consecutive Glastonburys from 2003 to 2015 (2006 and 2012 were fallow years, right?) and have no tech know-how/only ever bought two tickets in that time. Very lucky and privileged to do that many through sheer perseverance. I think maybe one of two were down to success in the resale.

I'll stick to my original point in that, that is extremely lucky but well done you! Happy for you 100%

 

I must also add that if anyone does get tickets for Glasto in any way  -  I would not begrudge them or call them names however disappointed  I was unlike some others on this thread who have been a bit close to the mark (not you)

 

Mind you on the other hand, i wouldn't gloat too much that i am going anyway  -  just live happily in my little bubble 

[NotAnInsider]

12 minutes ago, incident said:

The basic problem is that they way they've set it up, from now on this sale is 100% an arms race - far more than it ever was or could have been before. If nothing changes then very quickly it's going to get to the point where it becomes unlikely to get tickets without to be blunt far more effort than it's worth - thousands of sessions, generated Queue IDs, it's all been covered in this thread over the past few days, generally much further across "the line" than I'm willing to go.

Sums it up.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if the same WhatsApp groups that were taking payment for guaranteed tickets are operating again; there is clearly good money in it for them and by not cancelling last years tickets its become worth them investing in more methods to game the system.

 

All these exploits are detectable; Queueit stores a load of data about each queue_id - it's how they understand how it's working and where they can improve it. They can easily go back and see the devices that spun up a bunch of queue_ids and cancel those tickets.

 

They weren't tough enough last year and as a result it's quickly getting out of hand as a result. IF they don't act now where does it end? Does it even end? 

[hoopy67]

16 minutes ago, incident said:

 

I disagree with this. From my perspective the system "as is" has gone too far in terms of being gameable and exploitable, to the extent that just on that basis alone I'm delighted I don't have to do it again come April. While I can and did take actions that contributed to success this time around, I think possibly in April and if not definitely for the next festival it'd be necessary to go much further just to get comparable results.

 

The basic problem is that they way they've set it up, from now on this sale is 100% an arms race - far more than it ever was or could have been before. If nothing changes then very quickly it's going to get to the point where it becomes unlikely to get tickets without to be blunt far more effort than it's worth - thousands of sessions, generated Queue IDs, it's all been covered in this thread over the past few days, generally much further across "the line" than I'm willing to go.

 

On reddit, someone was hypothesising that SeeTickets didn't turn on out of the box features for Queue-IT and/or akamai. They theorised that turning on these features would have inhibited some of the exploits. Would you agree with that?

 

I ask you because you seem very knowledable! Think we also interacted last year with respect to your analysis on how the host file exploit worked (NB to all: Incident did not use this exploit)

[incident]

1 minute ago, hoopy67 said:

On reddit, someone was hypothesising that SeeTickets didn't turn on out of the box features for Queue-IT and/or akamai. They theorised that turning on these features would have inhibited some of the exploits. Would you agree with that?

 

I neither agree nor disagree, just because I don't know what those features are, or how effective they may be.

 

Until approximately a month ago, I was blissfully ignorant on the subject of Queue-It, having never encountered it before (at least not in a situation where it mattered), so I'm still playing catch-up.

Edited 1 hour ago by incident

[dmilne25]

45 minutes ago, incident said:

The basic problem is that they way they've set it up, from now on this sale is 100% an arms race - far more than it ever was or could have been before. If nothing changes then very quickly it's going to get to the point where it becomes unlikely to get tickets without to be blunt far more effort than it's worth - thousands of sessions, generated Queue IDs, it's all been covered in this thread over the past few days, generally much further across "the line" than I'm willing to go.

 

It was already an 'arms race' lol. Do you not think this was the case when you could have hundreds of sessions/browsers/devices spam refreshing to get tickets? If anything it's toned down a bit now since you get your place in queue and that's it.

 

Generated queue IDs I'll give you thats fair enough, but there have been comparably dodgy workarounds in the past.

[incident]

Just now, dmilne25 said:

It was already an 'arms race' lol. Do you not think this was the case when you could have hundreds of sessions/browsers/devices spam refreshing to get tickets? If anything it's toned down a bit now since you get your place in queue and that's it.

 

Generated queue IDs I'll give you thats fair enough, but there have been comparably dodgy workarounds in the past.

 

It was already an arms race, to an extent, of course. But that was somewhat limited by having to babysit the connections due to the system not being perfect. It didn't reach anywhere near the level it will be.

 

Sounds like you've not thought through what's possible with the new setup.

[rebus]

I think this year caused a lot of people to be more careful because of the new system.  It created fear that if you pushed boundaries then you were going to get recognised as a bot and not get through at all.  

 

What seemed to happen though was the anti bot stuff was very light and it was all about getting as many entries in the queue as possible without worrying too much about unique IPs etc.  Those that were careful had reduced chances.

 

Personally I think See bottled it with the bot detection and went light as the press for loads of people getting blocked would look worse and there would of been far more people complaining. 

[uscore]

it'll be quite good press in a way - the resales will show just how popular the festival has become. Over 19 billion people waiting in the ticket queue.

[rebus]

It probably comes down to a combination of

i) The issue with not wanting places like halls of residence to be at a disadvantage

ii) See tickets not making you log on like Ticketmaster do (having to logon would still create the issue of people having multiple accounts though)

[parsonjack]

16 minutes ago, rebus said:

It probably comes down to a combination of

i) The issue with not wanting places like halls of residence to be at a disadvantage

ii) See tickets not making you log on like Ticketmaster do (having to logon would still create the issue of people having multiple accounts though)

 

I think the festival are also acutely aware of the cost of deploying more measures to deter bots or other 'unfair' ticket buying strategies when every penny eats into the sums that they are able to donate to deserving charities.  Without increasing ticket costs to offset that of course.

[rebus]

9 minutes ago, parsonjack said:

 

I think the festival are also acutely aware of the cost of deploying more measures to deter bots or other 'unfair' ticket buying strategies when every penny eats into the sums that they are able to donate to deserving charities.  Without increasing ticket costs to offset that of course.

 

Apologies all for the offtopicness, but quick Q for parsonjack.

Is the George hotel decent enough for a Tuesday night pre festival stay?  Just booked in there and was just looking to stay somewhere in a small town that had somewhere for a very quiet of course drink and brekkie before driving in on weds morning.