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Apparently you should just sit and take it
@Glastowatch is annoyed about people expressing their frustration:
And so begins the moaningThey link through to a Facebook group which more-or-less grunts its frustration:
glasto ticket fiasco thousands left unhappy people gloating about getting 16 on one person ACCOUNT YET 1000'S TURNED AWAY PREHISTORIC COMPUTER SYSTEM 1 COMPANY TO HANDLE IT..SURELY THIS IS AGAINST WHAT THE TRUE MEANING OF GLASTONBURY IS...JOKE IS NO BETTER THAN TESCO A FILTHY GIANTIs that really "moaning"? Isn't it understandable frustation? Sure, not everyone who wants tickets will get tickets, but is it really necessary to force them to spend hours on a Sunday morning battering a fallen-over computer system in order to let them down? Is it moaning to expect a company selling tickets that cost well over a hundred quid - and who extracts a healthy 'booking' fee - actually works? Does Glastowatch really think you should just shut up and shrug?
Perhaps if someone took notice of the 'moaning' in the previous years, there wouldn't be a bunch of these ungrateful, whining ticketless ingrates around now?
[UPDATE: This post originally started with a reference to Michael Eavis attacking Seetickets, which was actually me being duped by a fake account.]
13 comments:
http://twitter.com/GlastoWatch/statuses/26268605169
and
http://twitter.com/GlastoWatch/statuses/26268680362
To be honest, I very much doubt there's a server/company/group of companies that could deal with the demand. When you have, I imagine, well over half a million people trying to get tickets, of course there will be queues and disappointed people! There's not really a lot that can be done about it I don't think.
Well I got my ticket :D Bring on Glasto 2011 :):):) x
Well.. they are moaning. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - but I don't see anything in Glastowatch's tweet that even suggests them moaning is a bad thing.
What part of his tweet sounded "annoyed" to you?
agree with bella127.... See's server works well under the pressure of so many hits at same time, I only got a failed to connect twice, in the 4 hrs I was trying for a ticket, with the rest of time connected to See's server, in an automatically refreshing queue.
There are only 137500 tickets, and maybe at least double that trying, so there will always be disappointment to any event that sells out.
At least between see & GFL they have virtually eliminated touts.
This is ace! I'm the person who 'gloated about getting 16 tickets' and you know what, I love the internet and how its full of complete sh*t
What people don't know is 8 of us tried for 4 solid hours like everyone else, with 1 lucky person managing to load up SeeTickets website on 5 occasions over 4 hours.. no idea why it worked that way but it did.
We all made a pact like many others that if one person gets through, you buy your mates their tickets when you have bought your own... this was no different.
One person account? what does that mean? nothing, it was 16 tickets bought over 4 hours by the same IP and thats it.
Moaning tw*ts
I have no problem with all the people who were buying multiple tickets.. it allowed people who had already purchased theirs to then buy them for other people, which is how I got mine in the end!
Was just really annoying though how some people were unable to get a working page at all, yet others were getting them over and over! just luck i guess though!
Agreed that the system doesn't work very well, but I seriously doubt any IT solution could cope with the number of people hammering it repeatedly like they did today. Many people I know were also using more than one computer to get through, myself, well I was using 3! I got to the "you're in a queue" twice before 10am, on different pc's, only to have both then refresh to a blank screen, then about 10.20 one locked on to the queue page, followed 10 minutes later by the second. I didn't actually get through to the payment screen for well over an hour after this. The 3rd pc never even got as far as a queue page.
I know of many others who were using more than one computer, and some that were using 3 or 4, so lets just double the estimated number of people trying to get through online to be conservative - 1/2million computers constantly trying to load from one server repeatedly for a few hours - I would imagine smoke coming from most servers and that is enough traffic to cause a DNS failure on most large corporate servers and bring the whole thing crashing down!
Of course, I do have sympathy with those that didn't get tickets, many of whom would have been trying for the first time and not realised how frustratingly tedious it is to sit for hours waiting for a screen to load. But let's face it, if see tickets had even doubled there capacity of servers to cope with the demand, it would just have meant that tickets would have sold out in 2 hours instead of 4, and there would still be the same number of people pissed off that they didn't get tickets!
My advice to people who didn't get them for the resale and for future years is to get organised and get as many people as possible to share details so that the max number of chances of getting through are used.
Perhaps the only fair way of dealing with the demand is to put all applications into a hat, having screened them first for duplicates, and pull them out one at a time. Though logistically dealing with the numbers involved you'd need a hat the size of an olympic swimming pool and 100's of staff working 100's of hours to do this.
I guess the learning from this is - life isn't fair, or alternatively, - get together, get organised, get positive and be a winner! You choose your own mantra here guys!
See ya at the Cider Bus those who got lucky, and good luck to those who wanna get positive at the resale!
@cez_uk
I don't see anything in Glastowatch's tweet that even suggests them moaning is a bad thing
And, indeed, @glastowatch say they weren't annoyed.
But in what way is 'you're moaning' ever anything other than a slapdown? (Except in a sexual context. That's a different sort of moan.)
Thatcher'll be saying she used 'moaning minnies' as a way of applauding their tenacity. Complaining is a neutral word; moaning
On a broader point:
I don't think it is a problem that can be solved by IT alone. The organisers just need to accept that they're currently selling tickets through an unfair lottery, and examine a way to turn it into a fair one.
Why not take a register of interest to buy a ticket as the starting point, give people ten days to sign up with their payment details, and then on 'sale' day, choose from that list at random as to who will get tickets?
Yes, people will still be disappointed, but everyone would at least be working to the same random factor, instead of making it reliant on luck if you're able to hit the servers at the right time, or your web connection holds up, or you're not up against a gang of fourteen people reloading two laptops each. This is meant to be one of the British cultural highlights, and yet the audience is determined through not-even-first-come-first-served.
Or, if they must do it like that, why not bring in someone with the computing capacity to be at least better placed to cope with the level of demand? First come first served is one thing, 147th come but served because the guy ahead of you in the line had his screen freeze when he tried to put in his card details sucks.
Did Simon H B just make this up due to alcohol abuse and boredom?
Yes. Yes, that'd be it, Reading Festival 2011. It's like you're peering in through the window. If only I'd not been so smashed as to forget to close the curtains, eh?
"Or, if they must do it like that, why not bring in someone with the computing capacity to be at least better placed to cope with the level of demand?"
I chime in every year saying pretty much this. All the people doubting that any IT system could withstand the usual Glastonbury ticket onslaught – do Apple's or Amazon's systems fold on a product launch? Of course not. Does Yahoo! push 400TeraBytes through its systems every *day*? Yes, they do. High traffic, high performance web systems aren't impossible by any stretch. The question is, can it be made economical for a once-a-year system? I think it can. Perhaps it could even be done on a shoestring with the availability of cloud systems, as I said last year.
So why haven't they done this yet? Maybe they just don't care. I mean, they always sell out anyway. Or maybe whoever they partner with every year continually screws up – a distinct possibility, too.
You're entirely right, though, in that most of the problems could be ameliorated with better design. Creating a phased system that offloads all of the information they need from you *before* the exact on-sale time, so that you can simply click a button to purchase tickets the second they become available, would improve things hugely. Partnering with someone who has experience in designing and operating high-demand websites would no doubt help, too, I'm surprised that they can't find anyone who'd create something for them in exchange for advertising and the potential prestige of doing it well.
If they could run it properly and make a first-come-first-served system that actually worked, it would make a lot of people very happy. It might sell out in minutes, even seconds, but then this'd be something to be proud of, rather than the current mess that they serve up every year.
Who knows, maybe they'll get it right for 2012, eh? I doubt it.
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