2024 Ticket Buying Tips

[TheGoodWillOut]

1 minute ago, BBC7BBCHEAVEN said:

I doubt anyone would be willing to admit to it. Why risk losing a ticket, even with anonymity on here.

People might have had theirs bought through the method and not even know (just someone in their group got "lucky" and through multiple times)

I know, i was being sarcastic. Just makes me laugh when you see social media full of vids etc making out people are some kind of ticket guru. 

[J3mmo]

I still think this is the better way, generally speaking, above a ballot system. No system will ever be 100% fair and the current system does favour those who are better off (with access to better/more equipment) and those who are more IT savvy. And while these go against the so called "ethos" of the festival that is increasingly more just USP or commercial hook rather than an actual moral ambition (at least for the vast majority involved) it won't change until the festival is full of wealthy computer scientists or friends. A ballot also has things that can be done to weigh in others favour if they have the time/skills/resource

They just need to learn each year and try and improve, but first they probably need a reason to

[discgoesmic]

9 minutes ago, NotAnInsider said:

I think we are due a change - and I say that as someone who has been successful 5 ticket sales on the trot.

Success in the current system is becoming less about luck and more by the resources you have available; more devices, faster internet and more people. All things that favour a particular demographic at the expense of another which isn’t what the festival is about and isn’t good for its long term health.

I question how many are actually tying for tickets. If we take the 2.5 million the BBC claim but say the average person has 5 connections (taking into account some who are just one vs those who are very organised with 20+) then it could well be that there are fewer than 500,000 actual humans attempting. 

I play the game; I have over 10 connections trying to bag me a ticket across various devices and networks and it’s successful so far. But I recognise it’s unfair and you have to acknowledge that there is an environmental impact to all this in terms of scaling up the server capacity. 

Now there are huge groups of 100s of people who don’t know each other aside form ticket day and known exploits its feels like time for a change. I don’t think a queue or a ballot system is the answer, Glastonbury needs something bespoke. Perhaps something like:

• 9am on ticket day: log in, enter up to six registrations into a pre ballot. Individual registrations may only be in one entry and each person may only have one registration each.
• 9.30: ballots are randomly assigned the opportunity to pay a deposit, with payments processing in order.

It still rewards being there at the right time, but it removes the impact of having 10s of connections and 100s of people trying so that the little, less tech savvy person still has a chance. Whatever the answer maybe, it does feel the days of the current system being fit for purpose are numbered. 

All good points, especially regarding people who don't know each other trying for tickets. But from the view of GFL, they sell the festival out 8 months ahead of the event (excluding resale) so why make any changes? They have a social media swell of disgruntled buyers for a few days and it dies down again.

Tickets are known to be hard to get and if anything I think this adds to their status, so arranging anything brand new would likely have bigger overheads when you take into account development costs etc.

Edited November 20, 2023 by discgoesmic

[J3mmo]

9 minutes ago, NotAnInsider said:

I think we are due a change - and I say that as someone who has been successful 5 ticket sales on the trot.

Success in the current system is becoming less about luck and more by the resources you have available; more devices, faster internet and more people. All things that favour a particular demographic at the expense of another which isn’t what the festival is about and isn’t good for its long term health.

I question how many are actually tying for tickets. If we take the 2.5 million the BBC claim but say the average person has 5 connections (taking into account some who are just one vs those who are very organised with 20+) then it could well be that there are fewer than 500,000 actual humans attempting. 

I play the game; I have over 10 connections trying to bag me a ticket across various devices and networks and it’s successful so far. But I recognise it’s unfair and you have to acknowledge that there is an environmental impact to all this in terms of scaling up the server capacity. 

Now there are huge groups of 100s of people who don’t know each other aside form ticket day and known exploits its feels like time for a change. I don’t think a queue or a ballot system is the answer, Glastonbury needs something bespoke. Perhaps something like:

• 9am on ticket day: log in, enter up to six registrations into a pre ballot. Individual registrations may only be in one entry and each person may only have one registration each.
• 9.30: ballots are randomly assigned the opportunity to pay a deposit, with payments processing in order.

It still rewards being there at the right time, but it removes the impact of having 10s of connections and 100s of people trying so that the little, less tech savvy person still has a chance. Whatever the answer maybe, it does feel the days of the current system being fit for purpose are numbered. 

You posted this about the same time as me, good post

[gfa]

34 minutes ago, mouserat said:

I know everyone hates a lottery (especially those who have successfully got tickets this way) but if it was up to me I'd make it:

1x lottery entry per person, max groups of six - up-front £100 cost per person.

If you're not lucky, you get £50 back but lose £50 to one of the festival's charity partners. 

It's not a free lottery so hopefully removes some of the 'casual' applicants which seems to be the biggest counter-argument against a lottery, and it raises more money for good causes. 

Almost certainly not a perfect solution and I'm sure loads of people would hate it but I don't see how you get a level playing field from the current system.

This is horrendous

9 minutes ago, NotAnInsider said:

I think we are due a change - and I say that as someone who has been successful 5 ticket sales on the trot.

Success in the current system is becoming less about luck and more by the resources you have available; more devices, faster internet and more people. All things that favour a particular demographic at the expense of another which isn’t what the festival is about and isn’t good for its long term health.

I question how many are actually tying for tickets. If we take the 2.5 million the BBC claim but say the average person has 5 connections (taking into account some who are just one vs those who are very organised with 20+) then it could well be that there are fewer than 500,000 actual humans attempting. 

I play the game; I have over 10 connections trying to bag me a ticket across various devices and networks and it’s successful so far. But I recognise it’s unfair and you have to acknowledge that there is an environmental impact to all this in terms of scaling up the server capacity. 

Now there are huge groups of 100s of people who don’t know each other aside form ticket day and known exploits its feels like time for a change. I don’t think a queue or a ballot system is the answer, Glastonbury needs something bespoke. Perhaps something like:

• 9am on ticket day: log in, enter up to six registrations into a pre ballot. Individual registrations may only be in one entry and each person may only have one registration each.
• 9.30: ballots are randomly assigned the opportunity to pay a deposit, with payments processing in order.

It still rewards being there at the right time, but it removes the impact of having 10s of connections and 100s of people trying so that the little, less tech savvy person still has a chance. Whatever the answer maybe, it does feel the days of the current system being fit for purpose are numbered. 

gfa 2000, 2001, 2002 and so on will all be entering said ballot

won't work - a ballot is stupid easy to exploit

they will sort this out and the resale will likely go smooth

[czuk]

10 minutes ago, BBC7BBCHEAVEN said:

I doubt anyone would be willing to admit to it. Why risk losing a ticket, even with anonymity on here.

People might have had theirs bought through the method and not even know (just someone in their group got "lucky" and through multiple times)

I doubt there's much risk admitting it on here - See server logs will show if people did get tickets on a non-glastonbury server

[BBC7BBCHEAVEN]

6 minutes ago, gfa said:

This is horrendous

gfa 2000, 2001, 2002 and so on will all be entering said ballot

won't work - a ballot is stupid easy to exploit

they will sort this out and the resale will likely go smooth

That's easily fixed by requiring a deposit as mentioned above.

Obviously some people will splash out, but it would at least limit it in some way. 

Pre-pay your £50 deposit, get it back, or £45 if unsuccessful. Seetickets can even make money from it.

[NotAnInsider]

6 minutes ago, discgoesmic said:

But from the view of GFL, they sell the festival out 8 months ahead of the event (excluding resale) so why make any changes? They have a social media swell of disgruntled buyers for a few days and it dies down again.

 

Same reason we have the registration system in the first place - the Eavae care about the long term future of the festival over a yearly sell out. They knew that if touting carried on it would only have one type of attendee and that's no good a few years down the line. 

With exploits now known on the current system it won't be long before we see scams originating to guarantee a ticket. Festival will definitely act then.

6 minutes ago, gfa said:

This is horrendous

gfa 2000, 2001, 2002 and so on will all be entering said ballot

won't work - a ballot is stupid easy to exploit

they will sort this out and the resale will likely go smooth

You can mitigate that one pretty easily. Registrations are manually approved as it is, so it's not a challenge to pull up all existing registrations at that address and see if they are the same person. Sure there are fringe cases like twins, people with multiple address but they can be dealt with (such as forcing tickets to go the registered address with a long drawn out system to change it after allocation). Won't be perfect but there are huge flaws with the current system too.

Perhaps all we really need is a pre-batching of registrations before the current refresh fest, but only allowing one session per group. 

[incident]

13 minutes ago, czuk said:

I doubt there's much risk admitting it on here - See server logs will show if people did get tickets on a non-glastonbury server

Yep. If they desire to do so, then they could reliably and easily identify every single transaction affected.

They probably will do as well, albeit just for their own information. Don't expect them to start cancelling tickets as that'd shine more of a light on something that is - at least in large part - their own fault.

[Nick_]

As a person in his sixties who would just like to buy one ticket before my health deteriorates enough that I can't realistically attend, I find all this discussion of groups, syndicates, spreadsheets, multiple connections, IT hacks etc very saddening.  I've tried for four years now, but have not been allowed to buy yet.

[Memory Man]

The only incentive to change is bad press i reckon

its indisputable that some tickets were bought via backdoor methods but the full extent will never be made public

however the festival will be aware and looking to hold See responsible for ensuring it doesnt happen again

[stuartasmith85]

4 minutes ago, incident said:

Yep. If they desire to do so, then they could reliably and easily identify every single transaction affected.

They probably will do as well, albeit just for their own information. Don't expect them to start cancelling tickets as that'd shine more of a light on something that is - at least in large part - their own fault.

This seems like the key part to me - no-one was really hacking anything, the IP addresses in question were easily publicly available - presumably, at some point, it just occurred to someone to see if the other servers worked, and they did. 

Glastonbury fans fuming as people appear to work out hack to buy more tickets (ladbible.com)

Suspect they will be under pressure to close this out now, though.

Edited November 20, 2023 by stuartasmith85

[DeanoL]

 

23 hours ago, The Nal said:

100s of people bitching at See on Twitter at 9.05am. Not pressing F5 clearly if theyre tweeting. 

But its Seetickets/Glasto/Emilys fault.

Auto refresh.

20 hours ago, Crazyfool01 said:

FML this looks complicated 🙁

Problem is it's not, it's pretty rudimentary which is why it's a problem.

18 hours ago, BBC7BBCHEAVEN said:

My understanding (not much!) from other posts on it is that this is also a load balancing issue, it's basically forcing the login to a server that has less access and you get through? I don't really see the difference from this and 2013, the method seems the same with the host file etc.?

In 2013 if I'm remembering right, you could "ping" the sales page, which basically means saying to the server "hey, what IP addresses are you on?" and it would return two different addresses. But if you put the URL in the browser, you only ever got sent to the one address. So people figured "why not force it to the other one?" and that worked. I remember checking it myself at the time as no way was I just going to force connect to a random IP address because anyone could just set up a website that looked like the Glasto one and use it to harvest card details.

This time around people used an address that SeeTickets used elsewhere and it just so happened to work. I appreciate it's a subtle difference, but the difference is that in 2013 the system was literally advertising the second address, it was publicly available information. But then the load balancer was pointing people in just one direction. It's sort of like if you're in a (real life) queue and there are big signs up saying "USE BOTH LANES" and then someone is stood there directing everyone to the left. If you ignored them and went to the right... bit cheeky but it did say "USE BOTH LANES". 

This year is more like people going to the "5 items or fewer" lane in the supermarket with a trolly full of 20 things. You can do it. It does work. You're very unlikely to be challenged. But at the same time, you are breaking the rules.

 

[DeanoL]

11 hours ago, BBC7BBCHEAVEN said:

Well noone can say for sure that's the problem. 

Could have been 80% or tickets sold, could have been 8%

 

We can to a certain extent, because there's no way that server could be processing more requests than the main one, otherwise that would be the busy one you couldn't get through on, and the main one would be easier! So it's absolutely less than 50%. But yeah, beyond that it's hard to know.

[Nick_]

23 hours ago, Badlands said:

Tell you what though, I'll never understand those who are on here at 9:05 complaining that they cannot get through. If you're not putting the graft in, dont be surprised if you dont come out with tickets on the other side.

What is the "graft" that one is required to do?  

[The Nal]

2 minutes ago, Nick_ said:

What is the "graft" that one is required to do?  

F5

A lot of people seem to log on at 9am and when they dont have a ticket by 9.05 they're on Twitter telling Seetickets that their son is crying. 

Edited November 20, 2023 by The Nal

[Leyrulion]

21 minutes ago, NotAnInsider said:

With exploits now known on the current system it won't be long before we see scams originating to guarantee a ticket. Festival will definitely act then.

This is already happening via WhatsApps. £50-£100 a go apparently.

[BlueJeansAndWhiteTshirts]

3 minutes ago, Leyrulion said:

This is already happening via WhatsApps. £50-£100 a go apparently.

What are they giving you for your money? Entrance into a syndicate?

[incident]

11 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

We can to a certain extent, because there's no way that server could be processing more requests than the main one, otherwise that would be the busy one you couldn't get through on, and the main one would be easier! So it's absolutely less than 50%. But yeah, beyond that it's hard to know.

I'd agree with that logic, and given that there were 5 servers in the main pool and 3 in the backup/non-live pool, I think we can safely say that it can't have been more than 37.5% at the *absolute* most.

Realistically - it will have been much less than that given that most of the people using the exploit were all going through only one of those 3 servers (the one documented) and (they claim) weren't seeing Busy messages at any point.

I'd be pretty confident saying that the number of tickets affected is very very unlikely to be more than 10% total (which would be 12,000 tickets) and personally if I had to guess would go a bit below that probably somewhere in the low thousands.

Edited November 20, 2023 by incident

[gooner1990]

Is there ever a year that there isn't a massive kick off about how tickets are sold and the See Tickets website?! 

GFL are dammed if they do and dammed if they don't.

Bottom line, its just ridiculously popular now......my guess is somewhere around 500k want to go each year and that just doesn't equate to tickets available.  Emily Eavis has already said they cant' run the festival on consecutive weekends to help....

The other option to See is something like Ticketmaster and given my past experience of them for big events they are a pile of shite, and would put it as a 'queue' rather than the current F5 system.....

Luckily a kind efester got my ticket this year, but other years I've got in on resales and I also worked as a volunteer in 2019, if you're that desperate to go perhaps try that avenue too? It was a great experience! 

 

[BBC7BBCHEAVEN]

10 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

We can to a certain extent, because there's no way that server could be processing more requests than the main one, otherwise that would be the busy one you couldn't get through on, and the main one would be easier! So it's absolutely less than 50%. But yeah, beyond that it's hard to know.

That's not strictly true though is it?

If you've got the same people repeatedly going straight through and buying tickets (some claimed to have bought hundreds), then there might only be for example 100 people accessing that server but buying thousands of tickets without issue (while hundreds of thousands of people try and access the "normal" server)

[Leyrulion]

49 minutes ago, NotAnInsider said:

• 9am on ticket day: log in, enter up to six registrations into a pre ballot. Individual registrations may only be in one entry and each person may only have one registration each.
• 9.30: ballots are randomly assigned the opportunity to pay a deposit, with payments processing in order.

Your group would just have six registrations each, all registered to each others addresses with different photos. Maybe even slightly different names (shortened versions, middle names etc) if the photo matches you're not asked for ID so it wouldn't be an issue. 

Six opportunities, take the ones that come through. Hell even if you're successful with tickets you don't need you might just pay for them and resell them. 

No fan of the current system but alternatives have hacks that just seem really easy to game. 

Edited November 20, 2023 by Leyrulion

[DeanoL]

1 hour ago, ModernMan said:

It's the same every year really. For the people who don't get them there will always be reasons why and "unfairness", it's draining having these same complaints every year. I think we just live in a generation where many people think they can just have what they want when they want and if they don't get it, it's a "disgrace". 

 

Demand will always outstrip supply and no system will every be perfect. The one used now is as good as it can be. 

I think it was pretty solid for a fair few years but issues have crept back in over the past couple (I was trying for friends yesterday but not doing next year myself). It's definitely not the same every year. The complaints may sound the same, but what they're reacting to is not - which is why this sort of discussion is important to try and establish what is people just whinging versus what are actually genuine concerns. Apologies if you find it draining but they're not compulsory reading!

1 hour ago, briddj said:

It was for me. Clicked back, entered a second set of reg, submit, back in queue, never saw another booking page. 

Wonder if there's a difference between clicking back and chopping off the end of the URL? The latter seems to have worked where the former didn't. But I don't know if that's technically possible.

[Leyrulion]

3 minutes ago, BlueJeansAndWhiteTshirts said:

What are they giving you for your money? Entrance into a syndicate?

They say they can guarantee tickets (presumably via the now known host trick or some other route). Pay the money, hand over card details, get tickets. 

Super open to abuse obviously but I imagine someone will do it.

[billum]

2 hours ago, dulcificum said:

Can you give more details on these? I thought there was hosts file ip address stuff in 2013, I can't see how a typo would help? 

My understanding is that in 2013, there was a typo in the server addresses in the load-balancer, which meant that one of the attached servers was not in use (because its IP address had been typed in wrongly). So when the actual IP address of the second server was discovered, it could be attached to using the hosts file entry and easily bought from