Pre-Sale Frustration

I spent an hour and ten minutes getting MSG #1 tickets and eventually got them. I tried for MSG #2 for two and a half hours without any luck. I see that tickets are still not listed as 'sold out', when I am lucky enough to get the page to load all I get is the "Temporarily out of stock" message and on occasion the 'Buy' button.

It seems this may be typical for most people. I understand some technical difficulties (as I am a software engineer) but this is kind of silly.

Has anyone heard an update form someone in charge of the system?

PATIENCE and PERSISTANCE was the key. It took me almost 2 hours of Backspace and Refresh, but I got BOTH MSG shows. Lucky -nope, just patient and diligent.

This smells of a major software bug or infrastructure failure. I've gotten several 404 messages, suggesting that something is going on with their servers (maybe someone trying to fix something).

Maybe no-one is able to get past the 10 minute cart time-out and thus we are always stuck in "Temporarily out of stock"? Pages are loading faster for me now, suggesting lighter loads on the servers, but how come we're still stuck in limbo?

I am extremely surprised that there has not been (as far as I have seen) any effort to inform the users of a problem that obviously exists. I'm not sure if I should keep trying or wait till something is done.

I guess I'll keep trying, some people said they got through....

Worst pre sale experience of my life..got my tics though, took an hour. Got Boston 1 and MSG 2. Just Breathe and Refresh....Refresh...Refresh.....

oona left wrote:

patfear wrote:

The brokers are listing tickets they *think* they'll get with their connections, not what they actually have in hand. Its a speculation market, most of the time they don't even get those tickets listed until someone places an order, then they work to fill the order.

I trust you know more about it than me.

It brought to mind the "news"/common practice concerning bands like Van Halen arranging with TM ahead of time that certain lots of tickets (namely, the best sections in the house) would go directly to ticket agencies. If I recall correctly, TM did the same thing to Springsteen, who was not happy about it at all.

My concern is/was, that the future rights to seats have already been sold to the agencies by TM.

But, if those sites are just listing hopes and dreams at a 40% markup, I guess I should just chill the fuck out already.

There's always some back room dealings going on, and that's part of why PJ does the ticket sales directly to fan club before they release to the promoters.
The biggest problem with ticket sales today is that the promoters never release to the public the # of seats available for a given show as they feel that's like intellectual property. God forbid we know going in there are only 5k seats total to buy and that's why a show sells out in under 5 mins in a venue that might have a capacity of 20k, so then we all could question where the other 15k seats went.

I give PJ credit for trying to do right by their fans, but it sucks when you go to a site and spend hours *hoping* to get 2 seats in an unknown location, based on what your member # is, although they've done some interesting things of late to correct that problem of the same people always getting front row center seats.

The infrastructure has always been questionable at best IMHO for pre-sales, they know when a pre-sale is coming, they've seen in the past there have been problems, but they don't hold their hosting company up to the standards that we come to expect. I mean is it *really* that expensive to put additional backend servers online to handle a pre-sale load, especially for a known amount of time? We always ask the same questions at every pre-sale and we never seem to get real answers.

I suggest either two things. Go back to old school mail order...OR take the model of two sucessful bands and their presale, Dave Matthews band, where as you put in for the shows you want, give your CC# and hope the lottery is pulled in your favor or use whatever system NIN used for presale tickets, because it was excellent. It is a complete joke that the fan club of one of the most sucessful & WEALTHY bands in the world has the most horrible server/website/system of presale tickets.
I WILL gladly pay ticketmaster the extra fees for a normal website and a better chance to get tickets.

After being a member of the ten club for a total of almost 16 years I'm ready to end the membership.

Patience is really all you need (and a super fast connection like I have at work) and regardless what the 10c email said, it best to have a few different browsers/tabs open that are all logged into the store because your cart is available once you are logged in for all instances. For MSG1 I got tix by 3:09 EST, for MSG2 I had them ordered by 6:30 I added them to my cart via an instance in Chrome and was able to hit the submit button in a Firefox instance.

I do like the DMB system, but I like how this system it is all in my hands and I have had good luck with the on sale via 10c this way, but not with the lottery process they have used sometimes.

pandora wrote:

I vote for that time we got into a drawing for the tix- you sign up for the shows you want and put your cc on hold for those shows and its charged after you get a yes or no email. There is no stress with that. .

There is still the stress of waiting and wondering if you will get a ticket or not, whether you will have to go to general sales or not. OK.. so you're not refreshing 100 times.

pandora wrote:

I I guess because they don't know when the tickets are all sold out?? .

Once all available tickets are in the process of being purchased (eg 1000 pairs available, 1000 people pressed the 'Buy' button and tix in their cart), tickets will be 'temporarily out of stock'. It's not because they don't know if the tickets are sold out or not, it's because some purchases may not go through, therefore the tickets are back for grabs. Once all purchases have gone through, they know and you get the 'sold out' message.

pandora wrote:

I End the bad karma this place is oozing with now.

People are being quite OTT. Remember, there are a lot more wanting tickets than there are tickets (well, at least for certain shows...). You hear all the moaning and outrage but not much from those that got tickets. It went extremely smoothly for some.

The ordering process was very frustrating. Took me nearly a half hour of refreshing to finally get tix. Even when I got to the checkout I had to keep refreshing. Seems that there's got to be a better way to do this.