Ticket tips and Tricks for 2025 festival

[Crazyfool01]

Just now, JoeyT said:

 

Didn't Dibs get yours?

nope ... @Simsy did 

[parsonjack]

4 minutes ago, rebus said:

 

No, but it never told you about that in the ticket buying guide so there would be folk with no tech skills not even doing that and therefore at a disadvantage to others who "gamed" the system by refreshing.

 

There's this thing called 'The Internet' now.....you simply type in 'Tips for getting Glasto tickets' and you'd be amazed at what you can learn.

 

The absence of planning an attempt to get tickets for the hottest festival on the Planet could hardly be regarded as 'gaming the system' for those that do.

[fraybentos1]

18 minutes ago, JoeyT said:

About 80% of the attendees last year

slightly hyperbolic there

[rebus]

6 minutes ago, parsonjack said:

 

There's this thing called 'The Internet' now.....you simply type in 'Tips for getting Glasto tickets' and you'd be amazed at what you can learn.

 

The absence of planning an attempt to get tickets for the hottest festival on the Planet could hardly be regarded as 'gaming the system' for those that do.

 

Couldn't agree more, you do what you have to do to get a ticket.  I guess the only thing is when does "gaming" become "cheating"?

 

As soon as the new system was announced and there was no logon of any kind required it was always going to be gamed.

Edited November 18 by rebus

[Jack.194]

1 hour ago, Nobody Interesting said:

From the festival themselves:

""We take seriously any suggestion of these systems being exploited and are working with our ticket sellers, See Tickets, and their service providers to review and combat any alleged attempts to bypass or manipulate the queue process.""

Let's hope they do this and close the open doors.

 

I will also guess they are reading this and other sites so know what to look for and where.

I’m sorry, but does anybody actually think they care? I would hope they do, but realistically I don’t think they do. The festival sells out yearly, and incredibly quickly, and the method people got their tickets (ethical or not) never realistically has an impact on the composition of the crowd.

 

It would be amazing if Glastonbury cared deeply enough to make the system as fair as they could for everybody, but they have shown they clearly don’t by opting out of certain options they had to maintain fairness through Queue-It/See Tickets - somebody mentioned this in more detail earlier.

 

Also there is absolutely no chance ‘they’ are reading forums/reddit etc. for information. If the ‘they’ is individuals working directly for the festival I’m sure they have little to no say in the technical side of the sale, apart from maybe EE herself who I’m sure has a lot more on her plate. Or if the ‘they’ is people working for See Tickets, or Queue-It, they’ll already be aware of loopholes in their system, and either can’t or won’t do anything about it - for whatever reason.

 

Also, in terms of things being ‘fair’ or not, the standard seems to be that if you get more devices, and more people to help that’s fine. But if you look for more information from different sources, and try to ‘hack’ the system, then that’s not fine. Why is that where the line is drawn?

On top of all of this, why does morality have to be attached to the issue. I can understand why people don’t like touting, and selling queue places etc. anything to do with making a profit from people needing a product in this situation I am against. But, anything else I think is fine. Say somebody personally bought downloaded and set up a ticket selling bot after spending hours researching it - is this not just an example of somebody putting ‘more’ effort in to getting tickets, in the same way somebody clicking F5 lots of times, but no more than 60 times a minute is putting in more ‘effort’ than somebody who hasn’t sourced this information and doesn’t know to do it?

 

If your answer to this is ‘but some people already have the tech knowledge to manipulate the system, and that’s not fair.’ Why stop there? It’s also not fair that some people 2 devices with different connections and others without a laptop/computer can only buy tickets on their phone.

To conclude, I’m sure the festival don’t care, but have to look like they do. I think ticket touting is bad and shouldn’t be allowed, but everything else is fair game.

 

FYI - A friend got my tickets, I opened up a sh*t load of tabs on different profiles through Chrome, and got through on one of them for another group. The past years when I have been successful it has been through pure luck/through help from a syndicate.

[incident]

9 minutes ago, fraybentos1 said:

slightly hyperbolic there

 

More than slightly.

 

The fact that the server being used for the exploit (which almost certainly had substantially lower resources than the production ones) handled the load without choking makes it a mathematical certainty that a minority of tickets went that way. Exactly what percentage is up for debate - I'd put it in single figures, others might say a bit higher. But you can't even make a case for anything more than about a third as the technology simply wouldn't be capable of handling that many transactions.

Edited November 18 by incident

[Nobody Interesting]

On Efestivals it is written that this site is about keeping the spirit of Glastonbury alive all year long.

 

Reading some of the comments on here I would say that message is dead and buried under a pile of entitlement to do what you want how you want regardless of any moral or ethical condiserations.

[thatTFBguy]

 

4 minutes ago, Jack.194 said:

I opened up a sh*t load of tabs on different profiles through Chrome

 

Did you use guest profiles? Or did you have to create a profile with a fresh email address each time? 

[Flighty Zoo]

22 minutes ago, rebus said:

 

No, but it never told you about that in the ticket buying guide so there would be folk with no tech skills not even doing that and therefore at a disadvantage to others who "gamed" the system by refreshing.

There are crucial differences between the two methods of selling tickets though. The old way had the F5 refresh knowledge passed down over intervening years, so much so that the festival themselves had to tell people to chill out and use one device and let it refresh every 20 seconds because it was likely causing undue strain on the servers which has a negative environmental impact and they can’t be seen to be officially sanctioning that method even if it was never properly addressed until this new system (they know exactly what’s going on). But it was never illegal or a loophole to be exploited, it was literally just circumventing the 20 second countdown to refresh in the hope you’d connect to the reg page. 

 

This new system seemed great on paper. It actually seemed to work really well on the day. And lots of people err’d on the side of caution, including me. However, lots of people are waving it away as “part of the game” when I genuinely think that the festival wanted to transition to a new method to be A) more environmentally friendly and B) more stable and fairer.  But as we’ve seen, that was pointless because the genie is already out of the bottle in terms of multiple devices / it being possible to game the system. 
 

Just FYI, I don’t think anyone is actually blaming GfL themselves for yesterday. It’s just the shoddy implementation by See. Where GfL are at fault, IMHO, is that they’ve not been strong enough at making clear why this new system is in place. If they’re worried about millions of devices and its impact on the environment, then they’d instruct See to ensure that the platform is as exploit free as possible as well as inform the public more emphatically in *more time* that the planet is on fire and maybe just cool it on the 10 devices per household. They’re certainly in your face about it enough during the actual festival (as they should be - climate disaster is real for the U.K.). 

Edited November 18 by Flighty Zoo

[Tiesto13]

The problem that exists is that the ticket buying system has been able to be gamed for years and years now in varying degrees. As someone else said, what's the difference between gaming the system and cheating the system? And given the system has basically been exploited to some extent by people for so long, it means that there is almost zero sense of fairness for the average ticket purchaser. If you know that last year 1000's of people go tickets via a 'hack' last year (and people presumably have been getting tickets for years via this route), why should you be expected not to exploit the system to your advantage this year.  

 

Under the old system, you had various levels of gaming e.g.:

- Group of 6 people with multiple devices/browsers

- Syndicate of 60 people inputting each others credit card details depending on who gets through for each group with everyone running multiple devices/browsers

- Syndicate of 60 people inputting each others credit card details depending on who gets through for each group with everyone running multiple devices/browsers and some tech savvy people running autorefreshers

- People who have been using the hosts exploit for years

 

At what point do you draw the line in the above? Clearly the bottom three all give people an arguably unfair advantage and are exploiting the system to various degrees. The system was never set up for someone to book tickets on behalf of a group that they aren't part of, but people quickly worked out that the system could be easily exploited to allow that. 

 

Under the new system, there are clearly again various levels of gaming the system. Seetickets should be doing better to prevent these, but again, can't really expect people not to exploit these vulnerabilities if they come across them given how much others exploited the old system...

[JoeyT]

5 minutes ago, Nobody Interesting said:

On Efestivals it is written that this site is about keeping the spirit of Glastonbury alive all year long.

 

Reading some of the comments on here I would say that message is dead and buried under a pile of entitlement to do what you want how you want regardless of any moral or ethical condiserations.

 

Did you get a ticket?

 

What method did you use?

 

Curious to know if this comment is coming from a place of genuine care or bitterness at not getting a ticket.

[incident]

6 minutes ago, Flighty Zoo said:

when I genuinely think that the festival wanted to transition to a new method to be A) more environmentally friendly and B) more stable and fairer.

 

A. There's no argument to be made that the new system is in any way more environmentally friendly. It's using cloud resources all over the world to create, coordinate, and implement the queue.

 

The compute hours required will be substantially (multiples) higher than either hitting the servers directly, or than the previous Azure based load balancer. Even in the best case scenario this is far worse from an environmental perspective, and could only ever be so.

 

B. Possibly. But far more likely is that the Festival didn't set the direction of travel to start with - Given that Queue-It has been implemented across all of the Seetickets sites and this ultimately is "just" a white label Seetickets site.

[ads1980]

43 minutes ago, Crazyfool01 said:

I refused the hack last year and got my tickets the standard way 

What was last years hack? 

[Crazyfool01]

Just now, ads1980 said:

What was last years hack? 

getting in via accessing a server that wasnt being used in the sale 

[Nobody Interesting]

11 minutes ago, JoeyT said:

 

Did you get a ticket?

 

What method did you use?

 

Curious to know if this comment is coming from a place of genuine care or bitterness at not getting a ticket.

 

We got tickets. One laptop each, one phone.
Two windows on one laptop, one on phone and laptop.

Not a bit of bitterness at all = just chunks of being pissed off seeing so many gaming the system whilst seemingly 'getting' what GF is all about.

[fraybentos1]

Just now, Nobody Interesting said:

 

We got tickets. One laptop each, one phone.
Two windows on one laptop, one on phone and laptop.

 

You're meant to stick to one tab!! rule breaker

[JoeyT]

1 minute ago, Nobody Interesting said:

 

We got tickets. One laptop each, one phone.
Two windows on one laptop, one on phone and laptop.

Not a bit of bitterness at all = just chunks of being pissed off seeing so many gaming the system whilst seemingly 'getting' what GF is all about.

 

Two windows was gaming the system wasn't it?

[efcfanwirral]

4 minutes ago, incident said:

 

A. There's no argument to be made that the new system is in any way more environmentally friendly. It's using cloud resources all over the world to create, coordinate, and implement the queue.

 

The compute hours required will be substantially (multiples) higher than either hitting the servers directly, or than the previous Azure based load balancer. Even in the best case scenario this is far worse from an environmental perspective, and could only ever be so.

By adding a second piece of software before the normal site surely there's no way it could be seen as more environmentally friendly? It's only 40 minutes twice, it'd feel very performative if that was part of it. 

 

They'd also publicise it if it was part of the thinking 

[majormajormajor]

If people are so obsessed with it being a completely level playing field, then they should want a ballot.

[ads1980]

5 minutes ago, Crazyfool01 said:

getting in via accessing a server that wasnt being used in the sale 

Didn't that happen quite a few years ago? 

[MilkyJoe]

3 minutes ago, majormajormajor said:

If people are so obsessed with it being a completely level playing field, then they should want a ballot.

But a ballot would be 'gamed' People would just register a load of times to gain an advantage. 

[Nobody Interesting]

3 minutes ago, JoeyT said:

 

Two windows was gaming the system wasn't it?

I refer you to my earlier comment about a chasm of difference between such things and the simple gaming of  asystem to get around the queue.

and your reply is exactly what I knew would come - but I was honest in what I wrote. A shame hinesty is not aloive in many round here.

[Jack.194]

2 minutes ago, majormajormajor said:

If people are so obsessed with it being a completely level playing field, then they should want a ballot.

This - a ballot is the only way to go. It would make it as fair as it could be

[Crazyfool01]

Just now, ads1980 said:

Didn't that happen quite a few years ago? 

yep it did 

[Jack.194]

1 minute ago, MilkyJoe said:

But a ballot would be 'gamed' People would just register a load of times to gain an advantage. 

There would be ways around this