There has to be a better way to allocate tickets

[DeanoL]

2 minutes ago, brettredmayne said:

The main issue and probably has been covered in many threads is the booking page doesn't hold your tickets and it can still sell out. 

Is it the main issue or is it just a mild annoyance?

[Sargey Babes]

I was very much in two minds about it during the purchasing proccess this morning. 

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

3 minutes ago, Sargey Babes said:

I was very much in two minds about it during the purchasing proccess this morning. 

You’re very fortunate, I wouldn’t have been wasting time on Twitter at 9:06. 

[Sargey Babes]

I was in the queue by that point, it was out of my hands but yes, I feel very fortunate. 

[DeanoL]

10 minutes ago, Suprefan said:

Im just using a current example of somebody of note making the effort to fight tours and to not make it as easy as waking up 5 minutes before a sale and opening an app. It shocked lots of peoole because if you didnt leave near a city then you had to do something about it.

 

i think centralizing the sale would be an idea. Use wembley stadium and have a few hundred people processing sales and It couldnt be that ridiculous. Again, this is about flipping the sale upside down, it would certainly change how things went. Sometimes the oldest ways are the better ways. Human interaction, real physical tickets, all analog. Technology has always been abused when the chance is given.

Wembley is big but big enough to manage a fully ordered queue of 200,000 people? And police it? And international people have to fly over or they're out of luck I guess?

And when does the queue "open"? A week before? Rent Wembley for a week? Not cheap. But you open it just the night before and you probably already a queue for a queue that's as big as the festival and that you can't police because it's not a real thing. I appreciate you're thinking outside the box but if you think through the practicalities it genuinely doesn't make sense. And if you apply enough mechanisms around it to make it work (have people register to queue in advance, and slots and stuff) then what you end up with is basically a reverse auction:

1) email everyone registered asking how long they would be willing to stand in a queue for

2) the top 135,000 people in terms of durations they said they could queue for get invited down to Wembley, then have to stand still for as long as they said they did

3) tickets are issued after each person reaches their stand still time

It's ridiculous, but basically exactly what you're proposing, but you at least known there won't be more than 135k people to manage and if you go and do your time you get a ticket.

[Garrett_Salas]

16 minutes ago, Suprefan said:

Im just using a current example of somebody of note making the effort to fight tours and to not make it as easy as waking up 5 minutes before a sale and opening an app. It shocked lots of peoole because if you didnt leave near a city then you had to do something about it.

 

i think centralizing the sale would be an idea. Use wembley stadium and have a few hundred people processing sales and It couldnt be that ridiculous. Again, this is about flipping the sale upside down, it would certainly change how things went. Sometimes the oldest ways are the better ways. Human interaction, real physical tickets, all analog. Technology has always been abused when the chance is given.

cmon lads. read this stuff out loud back to yourself and realise how crazy it is.

[Yeo-vile idiot]

I managed to get my own tickets in the main  sale  for the first time in 8 years. Both I and friends have been lucky in the resale several times meaning I’ve not missed a festival since I first went in 94. Even though I hate the angst of ticket day I think it’s as fair as can be.

[august1]

winning a bare knuckle fist fight with Ronnie Pickering should be the qualifying criteria.

Or that online helicopter game if you survive 3 minutes you get to the landing page.

[Sargey Babes]

Some kind of a "bucking bronco" ride, hold on long enough and you get a ticket, certainly might not be a fairer system than the one we have but perhaps it might give a much needed boost to those who aren't lucky enough to have gotten tickets? And I say that as a man with little to no upper body strength. 

[Digi]

1 hour ago, Zoo Music Girl said:

Children under 12 don't need tickets do they? So you're talking about families with teenagers primarily. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to go to a festival with my parents when I was a teenager. I'm wondering how many people that is realistically.

That said the system is probably the fairest it can be. The only change I'd make is, as others have said, to make the website a bit more stable so payments don't fail at the last minute which I know from experience is gutting. 

Me ? I've been taking my son since he was 16. He's 24 now and we still go together. Others in our friends group go with their kids too. It's not unusual for us at all. He's been my #1 gig buddy since he was about 8 and would have a right face on if I went to a gig for a band we both like without him and vice versa ?

[MEGATRONICMEATWAGON]

2 hours ago, EasyUserName said:

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? 

Well, the same as any other group of 5 people who would like to go together. Why are families prioritised when it comes to tickets? They go into the process like everybody else. 

[Zoo Music Girl]

1 minute ago, Digi said:

Me ? I've been taking my son since he was 16. He's 24 now and we still go together. Others in our friends group go with their kids too. It's not unusual for us at all. He's been my #1 gig buddy since he was about 8 and would have a right face on if I went to a gig for a band we both like without him and vice versa ?

Cool, wasn't at all having a go! I just don't like hanging out with my parents but I am sure you are much easier to ge ton with  

I was more making the point that people were talking about the groups of six being for families, but they seemed to be talking more about young kids with references to needing babysitters etc, so was just saying it's families with teenagers and above only that are relevant to the argument as young uns don't need tickets.

[MEGATRONICMEATWAGON]

2 hours ago, 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. 

Yeah, I see your point, but the spread of bookings would be greater, faster or not, if it is indeed random.

[gigpusher]

I think the system is fair and I say that as someone who failed to get tickets today. I do think they could make some slight tweaks that might make it even fairer but a weighted bunfight is better than a ballot. 

The changes I would make is I would make the bunfight just to enter your details and leave the payments for another time. If you get through and manage to enter your reg details then you could get an e-mail giving you a time frame of about 5 days to pay your deposit. The payment side is always the most flaky bit and most likely to fall over in busy periods and causes most frustration. I would also maybe reduce the group sizes down to 4 people to give more groups chances of success. 

 

[ghostdancer1]

52 minutes ago, Suprefan said:

Im just using a current example of somebody of note making the effort to fight tours and to not make it as easy as waking up 5 minutes before a sale and opening an app. It shocked lots of peoole because if you didnt leave near a city then you had to do something about it.

 

i think centralizing the sale would be an idea. Use wembley stadium and have a few hundred people processing sales and It couldnt be that ridiculous. Again, this is about flipping the sale upside down, it would certainly change how things went. Sometimes the oldest ways are the better ways. Human interaction, real physical tickets, all analog. Technology has always been abused when the chance is given.

sorry, but this is literally the dumbest idea i've heard so far. aside from the logistics involved of organising it, you immediately exclude basically every international punter, anyone that can't afford to travel to London, and everyone that can't afford to take the time out to do it.

[Suprefan]

59 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

How is technology being abused with the current method?

Everyone using 20 devices each which in turn makes the servers crash and causing people more trouble than they bargained for

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

3 minutes ago, Suprefan said:

Everyone using 20 devices each which in turn makes the servers crash and causing people more trouble than they bargained for

It’s clearly not possible to use anywhere near 20 devices each, that would be completely counter productive anyway. Who seriously has 20 devices?

3-4 each is probably about normal, and an option that’s available to everybody. It’s not cheating.

[Suprefan]

5 minutes ago, ghostdancer1 said:

sorry, but this is literally the dumbest idea i've heard so far. aside from the logistics involved of organising it, you immediately exclude basically every international punter, anyone that can't afford to travel to London, and everyone that can't afford to take the time out to do it.

So? You want to give more people chances, if you live in the uk, thats your advantage. Again, what did people do before online sales  of tickets for the festival became the standard? They had to show up themselves and buy a ticket from a ticket outlet or go to the festival site itself before sell outs became consistent. Whats so different about doing this now? We have been spoiled by having everything at our fingertips. Instant gratification is a crutch now like same day delivery from Amazon. Earning something rather than feeling you’re entitled to it is a better way to go. 

[ghostdancer1]

Just now, Suprefan said:

So? You want to give more people chances, if you live in the uk, thats your advantage. Again, what did people do before online sales  of tickets for the festival became the standard? They had to show up themselves and buy a ticket from a ticket outlet or go to the festival site itself before sell outs became consistent. Whats so different about doing this now? We have been spoiled by having everything at our fingertips. Instant gratification is a crutch now like same day delivery from Amazon. Earning something rather than feeling you’re entitled to it is a better way to go. 

I don't.

The system as it is is fair and by far the best system put forward.

Your proposals cause far more problems than they solve, and for what? So people don't have to look at a blank webpage for 30mins.

[uscore]

I don't think they should change the system, I've yet to hear of a better one.

The only tweaks I can think of would be to hold back a bigger %, say 5% for a lottery,  instead of the silly 50 pairs of tickets they've announced.  

But basically there is no system that isn't going to leave a lot of people unhappy, because more people want tickets than there are tickets.  The only way you'll fix that is if they somehow make the site even bigger.  Or they book Mumfords and Sons again and it rains and looks awful on the telly and loads of people get sick or something.  Probably just booking Mumfords would do it.  

[Mash011]

8 minutes ago, Suprefan said:

So? You want to give more people chances, if you live in the uk, thats your advantage. Again, what did people do before online sales  of tickets for the festival became the standard? They had to show up themselves and buy a ticket from a ticket outlet or go to the festival site itself before sell outs became consistent. Whats so different about doing this now? We have been spoiled by having everything at our fingertips. Instant gratification is a crutch now like same day delivery from Amazon. Earning something rather than feeling you’re entitled to it is a better way to go. 

ok boomer

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

I think a ballot would probably solve the issues of oversubscription in the long run. People would get so disillusioned with never going they’d eventually become disconnected from it and largely forget about it.

But that would be awful for the festival and ultimately all of us.

[Havors]

10 hours ago, adamski said:

I have a better way to allocate tickets......

Same as now, but you enter your registration details at 09:00 and then go into the queue. Will mean that every registration will then have only one device/browser in the queue (multiple entries of the registration details banned).

One of the big problems is the vast majority of people will have multiple browsers/devices trying so if 600,000 people try with 5 browsers/devices each that is 3,000,000 sessions. If everyone is trying for 6 tickets, and one person enters registration details for those 6 and go through, then you only have 100,000 sessions. This would mean a better experience for all, as the servers would cope better, and the people going on their own would have the same chance as groups of 30.

Either that or just give me tickets.

Have to admit I quite like that idea... registration can only me logged once then it's a free for all who gets connected to server first etc like it is now

[EasyUserName]

29 minutes ago, MEGATRONICMEATWAGON said:

Well, the same as any other group of 5 people who would like to go together. Why are families prioritised when it comes to tickets? They go into the process like everybody else. 

Of course. I'm fine with that, & currently a family of 5 (or even 3) would have the same chance as anyone. If they reached the registration entry page, all is fair.

I was only commenting on suggestions that it be changed to 2 people. You say "why are families prioritised ..." - they're not at the moment (& fairly so), but a reduction to only 2 tickets per sale would (in my opinion) go the opposite way.

[Havors]

1 hour ago, JoBalls said:

For me the only issue with the system is that it should work once you actually get through - in our group we got through three times during the time tickets were on sale, but twice the payment page crashed when we pressed “Buy Tickets” and we lost our slot. If the site had worked properly we would have had our whole group going, but instead now only 6 of us have tickets and the rest are trying in the resale. Obviously I still count myself as being incredibly lucky to have tickets but at the same time I am gutted for my family and friends who didn’t get theirs when they were so so tantalisingly close. I’ve seen a lot of others commenting on here, twitter and Facebook that they had the same problem too, so it’s not an isolated issue. 

Very good point. They need to fix the technical issues of the payment process at the end... a dedicated server or something. 

I like the idea of logging in with a registration number/numbers before the sale and onle one instance of the number can be logged .

Then come 9am it's a free for all but you dont have to have multiple devices and 2.4 million sessions overloading the server.