There has to be a better way to allocate tickets

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

4 minutes ago, Cream Soda said:

Yes but it would take longer to get through everyone and so give others more of a chance

But the sale would in theory take longer, it’s all relative.

120k/6 = 20,000 chances

120k/2 = 60,000 chances

A group of 30 trying for 15 couples on a big spreadsheet would have three times the chances to get through and buy tickets. For those that are in big groups and are organised I really think is as broad as it is long.

Collectively only 15 of the 30 would need to get through to get all the tickets.

I may be completely wrong but it just seems like swings and roundabouts to me.

Edited October 6, 2019 by Deaf Nobby Burton

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

Just now, Cream Soda said:

Of course trying in a group you are going to have more chance overall, but if the sale took longer it would give singles/couples more of a chance to get lucky.  I do think limiting it to 2 is a bit tight, maybe 4 would be a happy medium

I’m just playing devils advocate here, but that means you’re advocating changing it so that it favours singles/couples rather than groups of friends and families.

And that’s ultimately the crux of it, the current system is the fairest over all, the majority of changes people suggest are changes that make it fairer for them personally, which actually means it’s less fair. 

 

 

[robillustrates]

13 minutes ago, UEF said:

Turning the already semi-political "pick 5 best friends" into "pick one friend and fuck the rest"... jesus

A buddy system is much kinder than 6 close friends form a ticket group but what if you have 7 friends interested or 8, those 1/2 people are shafted. In a buddy system it's fair game and doesn't prioritise the 6 over the rest.

[alibear]

Would people go into a ballot by paying the whole cost up front? Or perhaps a bigger deposit (maybe £100-£150)? If you weren't successful your money would be returned, less a small admin fee which, as someone suggested above, could go to charity. Would deter people from making multiple entires as it'd be an even bigger outlay and you couldn't shift tickets if more than one entry was successful.

...and I also didn't get a ticket this year. I was a little bitter, but realise this is the first time I've tried and not got in, so shouldn't feel too hard done by, I know it had to happen eventually. I just remember that only 2-3 years ago Emily said there were a million registrations, meaning interested has increased massively in a very short space of time. 

I'm pretty sure they introduced the deposit system to encourage people to buy tickets when it wasn't selling well? It's a completely different landscape now. I'd happily save the £265 to buy a ticket if I had to, but they'd probably have to give a lot of notice to enable people to do so.

It's not that I think the current system is unfair as such, I just think it at least needs to be looked at again given the demand. I dunno, it's just easy to wonder if there's a better solution when you're feeling a little hard done by!

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

1 minute ago, Cream Soda said:

I'd say being able to buy 4 tickets still caters for groups of friends and families...I mean you have to have a limit somewhere.  As I said, I'm not really advocating anything as I don't have an issue with the current system, but if they were going to make changes I would definitely prefer this over a ballot.

It’s fine by me, I was only in a four today anyway, and then I got 6 for another group.

[robillustrates]

Four would probably be fair. doubt it would slow the sell out time by much, an extra 10 mins at most probably.

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

People also have to appreciate the Festival is a business and PR is a very real thing that they have to consider.

Can you imagine the absolute hammering they’d get in the press if they asked people to pay the full balance up front without knowing an act?

Anyone how goes knows that’s not an issue, but they’d get crucified in the mainstream media.

Why on earth would they put themselves in that position?

[Suprefan]

In the end, if you are meant to go, youll get a ticket. After actively trying for the better part of this decade i finally broke through and got tickets for 2017, which ended up being the perfect year to go for myself. Then it was a matter of Really wanting to attend this year for the 50th, and voila, tickets secured almost at the last moment before it sold out. i dont know if ill go again, but i dont know how i would feel if i lived in the uk and had this happen year after year for most of your life. it would be utter torture to keep getting denied.
 

It likely would make me just go to all the other fests and make one  the main one that i would enjoy attending over glasto. A friend of mine had gone 25 years straight and then “retired” cause 25 had been enough. Dont know how he did it, but if its your year, you get a ticket. 

it would be interesting to look at See’s ticketing data and find out how many people end up being a new attendee every year by crossing checking reg numbers and how many times theyve gotten a ticket. The data could be skewed because maybe some vets get a new reg number and keep attending, but there has to be some information out there. 

[MadScientist]

5 hours ago, TheGoodWillOut said:

Only suggested change I would recommend is the holding area, you can be in here at 9.00 on the dot and sit there, yet someone can try at 9.15 and get through. Rather than hold, make it a queue 

Only thing with this tho any other way of doing it means anyone in an area with faster internet speeds has the advantage because they’d access the site at 9am a millisecond faster than someone who lives somewhere with poorer speeds

[MEGATRONICMEATWAGON]

23 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

People would still have spreadsheets with groups of two on them. They would all just work through the sheet buying two at a time rather than 6. I’d hazard a guess big groups with spreadsheets would end up being as broadly successful as they are now.

But surely it would be way harder in groups of 2, don't you think? If you have a group of 50, they only need to get through 8.33 times. With 50, they'd need to get through 25 times to secure such a huge chunk of tickets. It should spread the tickets a bit more.

[robillustrates]

I like the way you assign it to fate and that you really wanted to go so you got lucky.

but I'm pretty sure 2 million plus people also really wanted to go to Glastonbury this morning who aren't going as it stands.

[robillustrates]

1 minute ago, MEGATRONICMEATWAGON said:

But surely it would be way harder in groups of 2, don't you think? If you have a group of 50, they only need to get through 8.33 times. With 50, they'd need to get through 25 times to secure such a huge chunk of tickets. It should spread the tickets a bit more.

I agree if you broke the system down to pairs, those spreadsheet groups would have to break down to smaller numbers as well, sub groups to stay on top of their system of getting tickets through and confirmed. It would still operate and work in a similar manner. But organising pairs from 70 plus people would be chaos while tickets are on sale, but split that down to 20,20,25 and its manageable again.

[august1]

 

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

1 minute ago, MEGATRONICMEATWAGON said:

But surely it would be way harder in groups of 2, don't you think? If you have a group of 50, they only need to get through 8.33 times. With 50, they'd need to get through 25 times to secure such a huge chunk of tickets. It should spread the tickets a bit more.

But there are only so many slots on the booking page, if people buy 6 at a time then assuming the site can only handle so many bookings at once then they would sell faster than if they could only buy two. So you could get fewer but have more chances to get through again.

Or another way to look at is that it will take much less time to process bookings for two tickets than it would for 6, so the tickets would be selling in smaller numbers but at a faster rate. 

[Suprefan]

3 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

People also have to appreciate the Festival is a business and PR is a very real thing that they have to consider.

Can you imagine the absolute hammering they’d get in the press if they asked people to pay the full balance up front without knowing an act?

Anyone how goes knows that’s not an issue, but they’d get crucified in the mainstream media.

Why on earth would they put themselves in that position?

i think most people wouldnt mind paying it all up front at this point. The only true commitments you get from the deposits are international attendees. Uk residents have more flexibility travel wise with it and if they were on the fence at least they had a week to pay off the balance in april. Another thing would be that if everyone paid up front all that money could get shoved into a bank account that could accrue interest and youre making some extra funds until you have to actually spend that money on logistics.

[robillustrates]

Just now, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

But there are only so many slots on the booking page, if people buy 6 at a time then assuming the site can only handle so many bookings at once then they would sell faster than if they could only buy two. So you could get fewer but have more chances to get through again.

Or another way to look at is that it will take much less time to process bookings for two tickets than it would for 6, so the tickets would be selling in smaller numbers but at a faster rate. 

You'd get more of a bottleneck presumably because of the smaller numbers of tickets being processed compared to the queue, 50 slots selling 6 tickets compared to the same selling 2 tickets, it would be faster but the volume of tickets going through is probably less.

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

1 minute ago, Suprefan said:

i think most people wouldnt mind paying it all up front at this point. The only true commitments you get from the deposits are international attendees. Uk residents have more flexibility travel wise with it and if they were on the fence at least they had a week to pay off the balance in april. Another thing would be that if everyone paid up front all that money could get shoved into a bank account that could accrue interest and youre making some extra funds until you have to actually spend that money on logistics.

Regardless, my point is they’d still get absolutely hammered by the press for it, and why would they want that when the current system works perfectly well for them?

[DeanoL]

For those suggesting reducing it to two tickets per transaction, why not one? I mean, that’s twice as good as two for the reasons listed here isn’t it? But people are saying 2 as that’s the number they want to go with. Same as people saying 4 or 6.

There are some crazy suggestions here that solve problems that can be much easily solved elsewhere. You don’t have to make the max number of tickets 2 to slow down the sale. You reduce the number of people let through off the holding page even further. The rate it’s set at is so it sells out in 25-30 minutes. They could make it 5 minutes. The technology is there. They just choose not to. 

I agree it’s worth doing something to put off the “pay the deposit and wait for the announcements” folk but asking people for the whole amount upfront is ridiculous when that problem could be solved by just not announcing anything until day after balance window closes. 

[EasyUserName]

41 minutes ago, MEGATRONICMEATWAGON said:

...  Limit the tickets to 2 per person, spread the sale of tickets out more, stop people hoovering them up six at a time.

How would it work for families with children aged between 12 & 18?

If you could only get 2 tickets in one session, a family of 5 has a pretty low chance of going. What would happen if say you got 4? 

[DeanoL]

Also if you have to pay upfront and then can’t get a refund at all- that means no resale at all, and tickets belonging to people who truly can’t go are wasted as they can’t be resold. Which actually makes your odds on a ticket worse.

[Steel city camper]

5 hours ago, TheGoodWillOut said:

Only suggested change I would recommend is the holding area, you can be in here at 9.00 on the dot and sit there, yet someone can try at 9.15 and get through. Rather than hold, make it a queue 

This is my only gripe with the system , if you get thru to the reg page you should be in unless you take longer than the 5 minutes your allocated. Earliest I've ever gotten thru at 9.07 today but I'm not going for the first time in 5 years , wounded 

[lukemack]

7 hours ago, burnageblue said:

Why hasn't the festival just done a straight ballot?

The fesitval is so progressive in so many different ways but this system is as bad as it was 15 years ago.  See Tickets still seemingly unable to cope.

Yep I am a bitter about missing out 2 years in a row.

A ballot would be worse, at least in the current form you can give yourself extra chances with having multiple groups/people trying and then multiple devices and browsers.

The systems completely different really from 15 years ago, its not that long ago really (8 years maybe?) where you could just buy a ticket, on ticket day with no real problems.

The 50 balloted tickets they have announced will be interesting, I think an extra day of coach ticket may be agreeable to some people, I could even see the amount your allowed to purchase go down to 5 or even 4 though in the future.

Edited October 6, 2019 by lukemack

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

Demand outstrips supply massively. Not everyone who wants to go can go, that’s a sad but unavoidable fact.

The fairest system would be a ballot, in that everybody who entered would have the exact same odds as everyone else, nothing can be fairer that’ll that bit nobody should actually want that. Being ultra ultra conservative and ultra ultra generous let’s say 400,000 people enter a ballot and they drop the amount of tickets to only two per entry, that would make your odds 400,000/60,000 = 1 in 6.66.

So in the most stupidly optimistic circumstances a ballot would mean you’d get to go once every 7 years, does anybody seriously and honestly want that?

If you REALLY want to go there are plenty of things you can do to increase your chances. There are FOUR sales, there are tons of competitions, you can volunteer.. you can just be organised on the day, you can get friends and family to try for you.

Sure, in a one off sale there will always be people that aren’t that fussed who will get up at 9:15 push a button and get tickets, that’s life. But over a long enough time line the person who REALLY wants to go will go to a lot more Glastonbury’s than the one that isn’t that bothered, and they’ll get to go a lot more often than they would in a ballot.

Edited October 6, 2019 by Deaf Nobby Burton

[Suprefan]

I know its not possible because of the rubbish factor, but Coachella did make itself 2 weekends to meet their demand and its worked up until the last couple years. And if you only let people go to one weekend, that would open up another 130k to being able to have that experience. Again, i know its not feasible. Also, the grass would end up being torn up so badly with the thought of 10 total days of this that a fallow year every 4 years might become a thing. The grass at coachella barely lasts through the first weekend. It finally stayed green this year because there was so much rain in california during the winter, but thats a rarity of course over here. 
 

lowering the ticket limit to 4 or 2 would feel like the only thing they could do to let tickets last longer on the sale. 
 

and if  we were talking extreme circumstances on flipping this sale process upside down? How about you actually make people show up in person To buy a ticket. Before internet sales, what did people do to buy a glasto ticket? Theres a portion of people on here that had that experience 20 years ago and beyond right? What would you say if they made that the process? Im sure plenty of rules would go into place about not letting anyone hold a spot for you in the queue but if theyre using the reg numbers and you had to provide proper id and documents to match the info they have, surely thats something of a safeguard.
 

And the lead booker had to be going also, so there couldnt be people who got paid to queue up and buy for others without paying a deposit themselves. Even though you could make some serious money considering you just dont pay your balance portion and made whatever money from other people who paid you to do it. That means more tickets return to a resale and then sell those leftovers in person also. Just a thought. If see is selling tickets “the old way” still, lets truly make it the onld way via human interaction.

 

Nine Inch Nails did it on their last tour. I queued up 4 hours before the onsale, watched harry and meghan get married on my phone and got my tickets a while later. People stood in queues for 8 hours to buy them in my city and they pretty much sold out in that time. It worked, i was more than happy and willing to do it.

[philipsteak]

Maybe they should do a ballot next year just so afterwards they can say "see, told you"