TicketMaster's Fan2Fan is now Fan2Bot

mpedone · April 2024

RatherStarved said:

I like the fact that you know your seats in advance now and if life happens and you can’t make the show you’re not prevented from selling. I also like being able to hunt for face value tickets that I would otherwise never have had a shot at. The system isn’t perfect but I still prefer it to the mystery envelope at will call and lost money if unable to go. The main thing I’d like to see is the ability to resell below face.

And go back to prioritizing shows, or, at the very least a show-by-show drawing.

RatherStarved · April 2024

mpedone said:

RatherStarved said:

I like the fact that you know your seats in advance now and if life happens and you can’t make the show you’re not prevented from selling. I also like being able to hunt for face value tickets that I would otherwise never have had a shot at. The system isn’t perfect but I still prefer it to the mystery envelope at will call and lost money if unable to go. The main thing I’d like to see is the ability to resell below face.

And go back to prioritizing shows, or, at the very least a show-by-show drawing.

For sure. Eliminating priority was idiotic. And I don’t know if it’s been proven that drawings weren’t show by show but if they weren’t that’s beyond idiotic.

mpedone · April 2024

RatherStarved said:

mpedone said:

RatherStarved said:

I like the fact that you know your seats in advance now and if life happens and you can’t make the show you’re not prevented from selling. I also like being able to hunt for face value tickets that I would otherwise never have had a shot at. The system isn’t perfect but I still prefer it to the mystery envelope at will call and lost money if unable to go. The main thing I’d like to see is the ability to resell below face.

And go back to prioritizing shows, or, at the very least a show-by-show drawing.

For sure. Eliminating priority was idiotic. And I don’t know if it’s been proven that drawings weren’t show by show but if they weren’t that’s beyond idiotic.

Proven? No, but it fits the results the best (without assuming coding errors/malfeasance).

Zod · April 2024

Lerxst1992 said:

Zod said:

schaefferlax said:

jimjam1982 said:

Long thread to catch up but at the end of the day...there is no way to 100% put a stop to scalpers/bots outside of unified laws and restrictions.

The current system is the best in a long time. yes you have to be fast to get F2F. yes it sucks that bots gobble up non-transferable tickets and put them on resale sites and sell TM login in info. Is it overwhelming and near impossible for 10c to manage - yes, can't hold it against them for not browsing those sites and revoking tickets it would be a never ending battle. it sucks more that no legislation exists to end scalping as its been a problem since the 19th century...

This still beats the crap out of of post cards and camping out overnight.

TM/Seat Geek/Vivid/Stub Hub whatever, they don't care because they charge fees based on % so they will never try to stop it.

The rabbit hole to resolving the scalping/resale issue is deep indeed.

10C could just tell TM that F2F buyers need to have a 10C membership. Literally could be 2 boxes to verify member number and last name to prevent a bot just putting in a random number until it works. Some other kind of verification could be used if it needed to extend to non-10C members. F2F is POINTLESS if it is possible for the tickets to end up on stubhub for 3x...

At this point, with the technology we have, the only reason fans are getting boxed out is due to the greed of 1) TM and 2) the band. As much as it pains me to say that.

I think it's more complicated than that. All Fan2Fan is, is TM's reselling platform locked into a price. They'd probably have to spend a bunch of $$ to rewrite the code, to input 10c info, then more code to sync it into the 10c datebase.

There are never going to spend that $$ or spend that effort for a single band.

Plus all scalpers would have to do is buy a single membership.

Resellers are always going to find a way, unless there's no transferring and no reselling.

Seems fairly easy to stop the fan 2 bots buying tickets.

All they would have to do is set up code with a couple of rules. For example, fans that want to buy F2F within the first 72 hours of a Fan2Fan ticket being posted to Ticketmaster, need to have a TM account established for at least a year and to have attended a show in the region that matches the address for which is on their account information within the last three years. Accounts with resales above face value are not valid during the first 72 hours of a F2F ticket being posted.

Plus, all of the “verification process” in the “verified onsale” should also apply here.

TM sells the tickets and scans us into shows. They have all of this info in our accounts. This stops setting up new accounts that are used only once to scalp.

This could be done very simply with code automatically for nearly free.

Your not answering the question of, why would ticketmaster increase the effort put into fan2fan to do this.. lol. they make zero money on fan2fan. They can't charge additional fees like they do for reselling. Fan2Fan was already a bare minimum thing. It's there regular reselling portal with a fixed price. They've already put the least amount of effort into it that they could. I don't think there's any way TM ramps up the complexity and effort.

JBob87 · April 2024

I know I'm in the minority but I detest fan to fan.

I would much rather budget over a period of months to save up for a market value ticket for a show I really want to go to then waste hours of my life F5ing with no guarantee of ever even getting a ticket. And now competing against bots.

My vote would be to go back to fully unrestricted tickets to unlock the maximum inventory possible and allow easy fan trading/direct reselling or make tickets 100% unsaleable and untransferrable to discourage people from hoarding shows they are highly unlikely to go to.

Zod · April 2024

JBob87 said:

I know I'm in the minority but I detest fan to fan.

I would much rather budget over a period of months to save up for a market value ticket for a show I really want to go to then waste hours of my life F5ing with no guarantee of ever even getting a ticket. And now competing against bots.

My vote would be to go back to fully unrestricted tickets to unlock the maximum inventory possible and allow easy fan trading/direct reselling or make tickets 100% unsaleable and untransferrable to discourage people from hoarding shows they are highly unlikely to go to.

yah, I don't think F5 for weeks/months on end is great, nor the disposableness of tickets when you can throw them back into the pot without losing money. I still don't think I'd want to see open season on 10c tickets.

Maybe go back to the 2018 for 10c tickets (no fan2fan, you can transfer 1 ticket, no transfers), but leave it as a free for all for non-10c tickets?

SHZA · April 2024

JBob87 said:

I know I'm in the minority but I detest fan to fan.

I would much rather budget over a period of months to save up for a market value ticket for a show I really want to go to then waste hours of my life F5ing with no guarantee of ever even getting a ticket. And now competing against bots.

My vote would be to go back to fully unrestricted tickets to unlock the maximum inventory possible and allow easy fan trading/direct reselling or make tickets 100% unsaleable and untransferrable to discourage people from hoarding shows they are highly unlikely to go to.

The option of paying a higher price is available to you on stubhub and with "PJ Premium"

Lerxst1992 · April 2024

Zod said:

Lerxst1992 said:

Zod said:

schaefferlax said:

jimjam1982 said:

Long thread to catch up but at the end of the day...there is no way to 100% put a stop to scalpers/bots outside of unified laws and restrictions.

The current system is the best in a long time. yes you have to be fast to get F2F. yes it sucks that bots gobble up non-transferable tickets and put them on resale sites and sell TM login in info. Is it overwhelming and near impossible for 10c to manage - yes, can't hold it against them for not browsing those sites and revoking tickets it would be a never ending battle. it sucks more that no legislation exists to end scalping as its been a problem since the 19th century...

This still beats the crap out of of post cards and camping out overnight.

TM/Seat Geek/Vivid/Stub Hub whatever, they don't care because they charge fees based on % so they will never try to stop it.

The rabbit hole to resolving the scalping/resale issue is deep indeed.

10C could just tell TM that F2F buyers need to have a 10C membership. Literally could be 2 boxes to verify member number and last name to prevent a bot just putting in a random number until it works. Some other kind of verification could be used if it needed to extend to non-10C members. F2F is POINTLESS if it is possible for the tickets to end up on stubhub for 3x...

At this point, with the technology we have, the only reason fans are getting boxed out is due to the greed of 1) TM and 2) the band. As much as it pains me to say that.

I think it's more complicated than that. All Fan2Fan is, is TM's reselling platform locked into a price. They'd probably have to spend a bunch of $$ to rewrite the code, to input 10c info, then more code to sync it into the 10c datebase.

There are never going to spend that $$ or spend that effort for a single band.

Plus all scalpers would have to do is buy a single membership.

Resellers are always going to find a way, unless there's no transferring and no reselling.

Seems fairly easy to stop the fan 2 bots buying tickets.

All they would have to do is set up code with a couple of rules. For example, fans that want to buy F2F within the first 72 hours of a Fan2Fan ticket being posted to Ticketmaster, need to have a TM account established for at least a year and to have attended a show in the region that matches the address for which is on their account information within the last three years. Accounts with resales above face value are not valid during the first 72 hours of a F2F ticket being posted.

Plus, all of the “verification process” in the “verified onsale” should also apply here.

TM sells the tickets and scans us into shows. They have all of this info in our accounts. This stops setting up new accounts that are used only once to scalp.

This could be done very simply with code automatically for nearly free.

Your not answering the question of, why would ticketmaster increase the effort put into fan2fan to do this.. lol. they make zero money on fan2fan. They can't charge additional fees like they do for reselling. Fan2Fan was already a bare minimum thing. It's there regular reselling portal with a fixed price. They've already put the least amount of effort into it that they could. I don't think there's any way TM ramps up the complexity and effort.

I get it, I am commenting in the center of a great bands universe. The problem with that comment, is PJ has taken responsibility for F2F.

Despite however much we love them, if their stated goal is to give fans a viable option to have access to tickets without scalpers, there is minimum amount of effort required by their organization. They gave us their word, lol. My suggestions could be implemented fairly easily. PJ decided to take responsibility for the program, there is solid evidence their ideas and multiple steps taken to preventing scalpers are incorrect, and there are fairly simple solutions that could be implemented. for the last two months, they should have been viewing the broker sites and screaming at TM as to what eff is going on

“The artist wants to give fans, not scalpers, the best chance to buy tickets at face value. To help achieve this, the tour will be using Ticketmaster's Face Value Exchange where, if needed, you can resell your ticket to other fans at the original price paid. To help protect the Exchange, Pearl Jam has also chosen to make tickets for this tour mobile only and restricted from transfer.”

pjl44 · April 2024

JBob87 said:

I know I'm in the minority but I detest fan to fan.

I would much rather budget over a period of months to save up for a market value ticket for a show I really want to go to then waste hours of my life F5ing with no guarantee of ever even getting a ticket. And now competing against bots.

My vote would be to go back to fully unrestricted tickets to unlock the maximum inventory possible and allow easy fan trading/direct reselling or make tickets 100% unsaleable and untransferrable to discourage people from hoarding shows they are highly unlikely to go to.

I think fully unrestricted is a bad idea. Incentivizes scalpers (or existing 10C members with no compunction about scalping) to flood the 10C lottery. Reduces our chances of getting 10C tickets considerably.

runstaples · April 2024

Just missed section 2 for Baltimore, hope someone here got them!

JBob87 · April 2024

SHZA said:

JBob87 said:

I know I'm in the minority but I detest fan to fan.

I would much rather budget over a period of months to save up for a market value ticket for a show I really want to go to then waste hours of my life F5ing with no guarantee of ever even getting a ticket. And now competing against bots.

My vote would be to go back to fully unrestricted tickets to unlock the maximum inventory possible and allow easy fan trading/direct reselling or make tickets 100% unsaleable and untransferrable to discourage people from hoarding shows they are highly unlikely to go to.

The option of paying a higher price is available to you on stubhub and with "PJ Premium"

I would be very wary of buying non-transferrable tix on Stubhub. I had to use their customer support last year when a seller didn't transfer tickets and it left a lot to be desired to say the least. I was refunded but wouldn't have gotten in to the show if I didn't find someone at the bar with an extra.

And PJ Premium is not the same thing because it is a completely manipulated market by TM. I have no doubt the average show (i.e. not MSG or Philly) like say Portland would have much lower prices in a true open market than PJ Premium as evidenced by the fact that PJ Premium almost inevitably crashes as we get close to the show.

SHZA · April 2024

JBob87 said:

SHZA said:

JBob87 said:

I know I'm in the minority but I detest fan to fan.

I would much rather budget over a period of months to save up for a market value ticket for a show I really want to go to then waste hours of my life F5ing with no guarantee of ever even getting a ticket. And now competing against bots.

My vote would be to go back to fully unrestricted tickets to unlock the maximum inventory possible and allow easy fan trading/direct reselling or make tickets 100% unsaleable and untransferrable to discourage people from hoarding shows they are highly unlikely to go to.

The option of paying a higher price is available to you on stubhub and with "PJ Premium"

I would be very wary of buying non-transferrable tix on Stubhub. I had to use their customer support last year when a seller didn't transfer tickets and it left a lot to be desired to say the least. I was refunded but wouldn't have gotten in to the show if I didn't find someone at the bar with an extra.

And PJ Premium is not the same thing because it is a completely manipulated market by TM. I have no doubt the average show (i.e. not MSG or Philly) like say Portland would have much lower prices in a true open market than PJ Premium as evidenced by the fact that PJ Premium almost inevitably crashes as we get close to the show.

Stubhub prices tend to crash as we get close to the show as well. The market rate changes. That's just the nature of a product that becomes worthless after the expiration date. There can be hiccups with using third party sites but the option that you say you want is available to you in multiple formats

JBob87 · April 2024

SHZA said:

JBob87 said:

SHZA said:

JBob87 said:

I know I'm in the minority but I detest fan to fan.

I would much rather budget over a period of months to save up for a market value ticket for a show I really want to go to then waste hours of my life F5ing with no guarantee of ever even getting a ticket. And now competing against bots.

My vote would be to go back to fully unrestricted tickets to unlock the maximum inventory possible and allow easy fan trading/direct reselling or make tickets 100% unsaleable and untransferrable to discourage people from hoarding shows they are highly unlikely to go to.

The option of paying a higher price is available to you on stubhub and with "PJ Premium"

I would be very wary of buying non-transferrable tix on Stubhub. I had to use their customer support last year when a seller didn't transfer tickets and it left a lot to be desired to say the least. I was refunded but wouldn't have gotten in to the show if I didn't find someone at the bar with an extra.

And PJ Premium is not the same thing because it is a completely manipulated market by TM. I have no doubt the average show (i.e. not MSG or Philly) like say Portland would have much lower prices in a true open market than PJ Premium as evidenced by the fact that PJ Premium almost inevitably crashes as we get close to the show.

Stubhub prices tend to crash as we get close to the show as well. The market rate changes. That's just the nature of a product that becomes worthless after the expiration date. There can be hiccups with using third party sites but the option that you say you want is available to you in multiple formats

The market is highly manipulated right now both by TM and lack of open resale, so while the "option is available" it is likely more expensive than it would be in a completely open market. The ideal option would be a direct transfer set up with either a friend or someone on social media which is also not available.

Like I said, I know many like Fan 2 Fan. But IMO it is the worst of both worlds.

Lerxst1992 · April 2024

JBob87 said:

SHZA said:

JBob87 said:

I know I'm in the minority but I detest fan to fan.

I would much rather budget over a period of months to save up for a market value ticket for a show I really want to go to then waste hours of my life F5ing with no guarantee of ever even getting a ticket. And now competing against bots.

My vote would be to go back to fully unrestricted tickets to unlock the maximum inventory possible and allow easy fan trading/direct reselling or make tickets 100% unsaleable and untransferrable to discourage people from hoarding shows they are highly unlikely to go to.

The option of paying a higher price is available to you on stubhub and with "PJ Premium"

I would be very wary of buying non-transferrable tix on Stubhub. I had to use their customer support last year when a seller didn't transfer tickets and it left a lot to be desired to say the least. I was refunded but wouldn't have gotten in to the show if I didn't find someone at the bar with an extra.

And PJ Premium is not the same thing because it is a completely manipulated market by TM. I have no doubt the average show (i.e. not MSG or Philly) like say Portland would have much lower prices in a true open market than PJ Premium as evidenced by the fact that PJ Premium almost inevitably crashes as we get close to the show.

It’s very tempting to”buy” tickets on stub hub or from one of the broker sites (in some cases, much better prices than PJ Premium, go figure) , considering how difficult F2F has been, but like you said, these companies really do not have “inventory” they are simply relying on claims that any person has extra tickets to sell on its platform. Hopefully they have steep penalties to prevent this from happening.

Saying that, about 6.20 PM EDT, saw a single GA for Philly N2. Hope someone here got it. It was gone by the time I saw it.

MM70435 · April 2024

- I admire everyone that has the patience to continue battling the bots. I gave up a while ago. I never had the patience for F2F anyway.
- Every time I see the word bots used I think of the Go Bots. The early precursor to the transformers.
- If these reselling companies really don't have "inventory", then who is actually behind the bots anyway? I always assumed that the reselling sites were the ones controlling the bots.
- Has there ever been GA tickets on these reselling sites in the past? I never paid too much attention before but don't remember ever seeing any.

Lerxst1992 · April 2024

MM70435 said:

- I admire everyone that has the patience to continue battling the bots. I gave up a while ago. I never had the patience for F2F anyway.
- Every time I see the word bots used I think of the Go Bots. The early precursor to the transformers.
- If these reselling companies really don't have "inventory", then who is actually behind the bots anyway? I always assumed that the reselling sites were the ones controlling the bots.
- Has there ever been GA tickets on these reselling sites in the past? I never paid too much attention before but don't remember ever seeing any.

The brokers do have inventory, but there is a lot of cross posting of tickets. So I think I may have bought a pair on stub hub, but you grabbed them first on Gotix.

im with you, I can tolerate 5 mins toggling on FtoF, but the exercise seems long odds.

mpedone · April 2024

MM70435 said:

- I admire everyone that has the patience to continue battling the bots. I gave up a while ago. I never had the patience for F2F anyway.
- Every time I see the word bots used I think of the Go Bots. The early precursor to the transformers.
- If these reselling companies really don't have "inventory", then who is actually behind the bots anyway? I always assumed that the reselling sites were the ones controlling the bots.
- Has there ever been GA tickets on these reselling sites in the past? I never paid too much attention before but don't remember ever seeing any.

I think GA used to be pretty much exclusive to 10C, right? So, any GA tickets that popped up on secondary sites before F2F were being sold by 10C members, and subject to action from the club. Now, someone might sell their GA tickets for face on F2F only to see the buyer turn around and put them on a secondary site at a considerable markup (which is the main reason we'll never see p2p sales with this current structure - way too easy for someone unscrupulous to "sell" the tickets to a non-member (themselves with a different account, or someone related to them) who is no longer bound by club rules to resell at face).

Get_Right · April 2024

Just wait. Tix will be available for most shows. Stick to the forum. People always have extras at the last minute. If you are traveling and want a guaranteed MSG ticket, you might have to pay stubhub prices. But wait, the shows are a long way off. Do not buy into the TM bullshit now.

Lerxst1992 · April 2024

Get_Right said:

Just wait. Tix will be available for most shows. Stick to the forum. People always have extras at the last minute. If you are traveling and want a guaranteed MSG ticket, you might have to pay stubhub prices. But wait, the shows are a long way off. Do not buy into the TM bullshit now.

I have hotel holds for two of the east shows, but they usually expire 48 hours before the show, so it can be very difficult to wait until last minute. And it’s not just TM spewing the bs, when one reads the fan club tour release information.

Very punitive for them to dangle seats at unrealistic platinum prices that just sit there for months with no downward movement in prices, $500 - $700 (MSG $1500) instead of ten c honoring their word (10% inventory at market rates).

Gibson · April 2024

I've always wondered if our constant TM ticket hunting is what's keeping the premium prices where they are? Like, some TM algorithm is saying, "wow, there's still a ton of viewers here, someone is sure to buy the premium seats soon enough!?"

TicketMaster's Fan2Fan is now Fan2Bot

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