Ticket tips and Tricks for 2025 festival

[incident]

4 minutes ago, Gnomicide said:

Got this a few days back...

 

 

I should say for clarity that I don't know for sure that they *are* changing it.

 

What I do know for certain, is that they've made an underlying change that adds the *ability* to change it (to a queue).

[Gnomicide]

1 minute ago, efcfanwirral said:

So I did wonder based on the wording of the article last week about the 20 seconds https://glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/info/#tickets--how-to-book

But I doubt that means anything...

 

I think that's just the usual method, though? Limited number have access, you need to refresh at the same time as one becomes available. Which is why manual refreshing improves your chances.

[CaledonianGonzo]

3 minutes ago, incident said:

 

I should say for clarity that I don't know for sure that they *are* changing it.

 

What I do know for certain, is that they've made an underlying change that adds the *ability* to change it (to a queue).

 

Maybe that's part of the Eventim purchase.

 

Fairly sure Emily's on record as saying the existing system is the fairest method and that's why she favours it.

[UncleJunior]

31 minutes ago, CaledonianGonzo said:

I do have a theory that Queue-IT or whatever it's called does look at the time you enter the waiting room.

Ticketmaster one doesn’t for sure.

[efcfanwirral]

8 minutes ago, UncleJunior said:

Ticketmaster one doesn’t for sure.

Yeah it's definitely random, found that one out during the oasis sales based on when friends got in etc as so many were trying 

[parsonjack]

32 minutes ago, Crazyfool01 said:

Or which clock does see operate too 

Like pretty much all web commerce services they'll be running an NTP (Network Time Protocol) server which itself syncs with a very accurate public time service....mainly atomic based.  We're talking milliseconds of differential between their time and ours tbh.....way less than could be beaten by a key press I'm afraid....other than by pure luck.

[Crazyfool01]

Just now, parsonjack said:

Like pretty much all web commerce services they'll be running an NTP (Network Time Protocol) server which itself syncs with a very accurate public time service....mainly atomic based.  We're talking milliseconds of differential between their time and ours tbh.....way less than could be beaten by a key press I'm afraid....other than by pure luck.

or anything automated ? 

[incident]

4 minutes ago, Crazyfool01 said:

or anything automated ? 

 

They'll probably be getting thousands of hits every millisecond. If it does turn out to be a case of getting in the queue at the right moment (which is my current deduction, but still far from certain), then even if you're synced exactly with the time See are using (which there's no way of being sure of), then there's still variables that make it difficult if not impossible to guarantee you hit within the right fraction of a second regardless of whether it's automated or manual - network latency and server response times will play a part in it.

[Crazyfool01]

Just now, incident said:

 

They'll probably be getting thousands of hits every millisecond. If it does turn out to be a case of getting in the queue at the right moment (which is my current deduction, but still far from certain), then even if you're synced exactly with the time See are using (which there's no way of being sure of), then there's still variables that make it difficult if not impossible to guarantee you hit within the right fraction of a second regardless of whether it's automated or manual - network latency and server response times will play a part in it.

thanks 🙂 

[Crazyfool01]

Ticket Nerves start to kick in .... 

[stuie]

48 minutes ago, incident said:

 

They'll probably be getting thousands of hits every millisecond. If it does turn out to be a case of getting in the queue at the right moment (which is my current deduction, but still far from certain), then even if you're synced exactly with the time See are using (which there's no way of being sure of), then there's still variables that make it difficult if not impossible to guarantee you hit within the right fraction of a second regardless of whether it's automated or manual - network latency and server response times will play a part in it.

 

It's definitely worth a try and very simple to do...

[Superscally]

22 minutes ago, stuie said:

 

It's definitely worth a try and very simple to do...

What is? Do it for me if you can. Ta x

[parsonjack]

1 hour ago, incident said:

 

They'll probably be getting thousands of hits every millisecond. If it does turn out to be a case of getting in the queue at the right moment (which is my current deduction, but still far from certain), then even if you're synced exactly with the time See are using (which there's no way of being sure of), then there's still variables that make it difficult if not impossible to guarantee you hit within the right fraction of a second regardless of whether it's automated or manual - network latency and server response times will play a part in it.

What he said ^ 😂

[Suprefan]

11 hours ago, efcfanwirral said:

Yeah it's definitely random, found that one out during the oasis sales based on when friends got in etc as so many were trying 

 

Ticketmaster queue is only first come first serve  if you ever encounter the scenario of an additional concert being added to a tour. But only when you  see the new listing the moment its on the website and join up  so youll just be a very low number most likely. I had that happen the other week for Dua Lipa. I knew a 3rd date was coming and just kept refreshing the Tm search results til it was there. Jumped on and was 10th in the queue. Tried another device 30 seconds later and was 400th. But it possibly differs on the uk version too or it may not.

 

Still dont know why anyone would think the queue would be first come. If that was the case you could find a way to beat the system and skip everyone. If theres ever a sale change I am sure it wont happen til the sale for 27 goes down. They cant make everyone guinea pigs right now and then go into a fallow year with tons of people complaining about the onsale. Easier to introduce a new system on the comeback because you give yourself 18 months to figure it out.

[StoneCircle]

Just had a spot of practice for ticket day! Booked my Sainsbury's Christmas delivery shop, system crashed but all good after 15 minutes of F5! 😂

[tarw]

I suppose that it might answer the perennial question of how many people try for tickets.  

[parsonjack]

I'm starting to also think nothing is likely to change in the buying process for this year.  I monitor the Internet Archive for pages prefixed glastonbury.seetickets.com and the only URL of any interest picked up since May is this one which was live on Sept 4th.

 

https://glastonbury.seetickets.com/event/glastonbury-2025-ticket-coach-travel/worthy-farm/4500011

 

If there were major changes ahead I'd be expecting to have seen other URL's/pages being tested in a live environment, plus this page follows the long standing format so suggests it's being readied for use this year.

[incident]

1 hour ago, tarw said:

I suppose that it might answer the perennial question of how many people try for tickets.  

 

It'd give them a more accurate count of how many devices. Probably not translatable to people though as it stands.

 

3 minutes ago, parsonjack said:

I'm starting to also think nothing is likely to change in the buying process for this year.  I monitor the Internet Archive for pages prefixed glastonbury.seetickets.com and the only URL of any interest picked up since May is this one which was live on Sept 4th.

 

https://glastonbury.seetickets.com/event/glastonbury-2025-ticket-coach-travel/worthy-farm/4500011

 

If there were major changes ahead I'd be expecting to have seen other URL's/pages being tested in a live environment, plus this page follows the long standing format so suggests it's being readied for use this year.

 

In terms of the actual prices once you get into the site, I agree. Any substantive changes of that nature would have shown themselves (or at least, we'd have seen indicators) by now.

[fraybentos1]

20 minutes ago, parsonjack said:

I'm starting to also think nothing is likely to change in the buying process for this year.  I monitor the Internet Archive for pages prefixed glastonbury.seetickets.com and the only URL of any interest picked up since May is this one which was live on Sept 4th.

 

https://glastonbury.seetickets.com/event/glastonbury-2025-ticket-coach-travel/worthy-farm/4500011

 

If there were major changes ahead I'd be expecting to have seen other URL's/pages being tested in a live environment, plus this page follows the long standing format so suggests it's being readied for use this year.

is this your understanding of what went wrong with the workaround last year and how the ticket sale changed for that year? (stolen from reddit)

 

:

 

They changed their infrastructure this year. In previous years, there were five servers. When you accessed glastonbury.seetickets.com you would hit one at random:

 

https://i.imgur.com/jmU5Twu.png

 

So you would be randomly routed to each one, and depending on the capacity of the one you were hitting you may get through to the booking page, but more likely you'd be kept at the holding page:

 

https://i.imgur.com/2I0kyal.png

 

However, they obviously had a lot of problems with capacity last year so decided to change things. This year they placed a new, high capacity queue/load balancing server in front of the 5 primary backend servers, the only job of which was to take a hell of a lot of traffic and distribute people to the backend servers if they were lucky:

 

https://i.imgur.com/9yNqbla.png

 

However, what they forgot to do is to block access directly to the main servers, so if you were savvy enough to realise what they'd changed (the DNS records / IP addresses of all of these servers are publicly available) you could work out that you could change your local hosts file so that when you went to glastonbury.seetickets.com you would be routed to one of the backend servers directly:

 

https://i.imgur.com/aAvyHiQ.png

 

And because there was so much less traffic on these servers than previous years (thanks to the big queue server sitting in the way) you'd basically be let straight into the booking page and able to buy tickets.

 

They've since patched this hole, you can no longer directly access the backend servers through glastobury.seetickets.com, you get an access denied response, so this is likely never going to work again, it was just a side-effect of them recently changing their setup and not fully considering the holes in it.

[parsonjack]

24 minutes ago, fraybentos1 said:

is this your understanding of what went wrong with the workaround last year and how the ticket sale changed for that year? (stolen from reddit)

 

:

 

They changed their infrastructure this year. In previous years, there were five servers. When you accessed glastonbury.seetickets.com you would hit one at random:

 

https://i.imgur.com/jmU5Twu.png

 

So you would be randomly routed to each one, and depending on the capacity of the one you were hitting you may get through to the booking page, but more likely you'd be kept at the holding page:

 

https://i.imgur.com/2I0kyal.png

 

However, they obviously had a lot of problems with capacity last year so decided to change things. This year they placed a new, high capacity queue/load balancing server in front of the 5 primary backend servers, the only job of which was to take a hell of a lot of traffic and distribute people to the backend servers if they were lucky:

 

https://i.imgur.com/9yNqbla.png

 

However, what they forgot to do is to block access directly to the main servers, so if you were savvy enough to realise what they'd changed (the DNS records / IP addresses of all of these servers are publicly available) you could work out that you could change your local hosts file so that when you went to glastonbury.seetickets.com you would be routed to one of the backend servers directly:

 

https://i.imgur.com/aAvyHiQ.png

 

And because there was so much less traffic on these servers than previous years (thanks to the big queue server sitting in the way) you'd basically be let straight into the booking page and able to buy tickets.

 

They've since patched this hole, you can no longer directly access the backend servers through glastobury.seetickets.com, you get an access denied response, so this is likely never going to work again, it was just a side-effect of them recently changing their setup and not fully considering the holes in it.

 

Sort of.

 

They've had load-balancing for a long time so it wasn't just deployed as a result of demand problems in recent sales.  It's pretty much standard for any web-commerce where demand needs to be distributed evenly across back end servers.

 

The Hosts hack wasn't (as far as I remember) about pushing your browser direct one or other of the 5 back end servers, as doing so would give no significant advantage over anyone else - those servers being already massively loaded with bona-fide traffic and session requests.  It was more about someone identifying other servers in the See set up that would service booking requests, but that were outside the public DNS pool.  By using Hosts and avoiding DNS allowed you to target those other servers directly, subsequently obtaining sessions to buy tickets on what were much lighter loaded platforms.

 

...and yes....this particular avenue of pleasure was spotted by See and patched before the Local ticket sale and since.   

Edited October 16 by parsonjack

[Ayrshire Chris]

On 10/14/2024 at 6:29 PM, Crazyfool01 said:

Ticket Nerves start to kick in .... 

yes, plans made for sale day, no distractions, registrations checked, family told not to disturb us. Not much else to do apart from getting nervous! 

[stuie]

17 minutes ago, Ayrshire Chris said:

yes, plans made for sale day, no distractions, registrations checked, family told not to disturb us. Not much else to do apart from getting nervous! 

 

you'll be fine... it was rubbish last year anyway, everyone left early and won't be coming back! 

 

[Avalon_Fields]

45 minutes ago, Ayrshire Chris said:

yes, plans made for sale day, no distractions, registrations checked, family told not to disturb us. Not much else to do apart from getting nervous! 

Good luck! Didn’t you say 2024 was likely your last? (I may be wrong), and would you consider hospitality tickets again if need be? Cheers 

[Ayrshire Chris]

31 minutes ago, Avalon_Fields said:

Good luck! Didn’t you say 2024 was likely your last? (I may be wrong), and would you consider hospitality tickets again if need be? Cheers 

Yes, probably maybe, possibly our last, but then never say never! Hospitality was fine  and if offered would take them if I had to. 

[stuie]

Every year is the last one until the next one 🙂