The Blizzcon ‘08 Ticket Fiasco

On July 29^th Blizzard Entertainment officially announced the 3^rd annual Blizzcon gaming convention to be held Oct. 11-12, 2008 in Anaheim, CA. 

Apparently no one was ready for the pounding their online store would take when the tickets went on sale Aug. 11^th.  It crashed. Hard.  So hard that it was not even scheduled to be back online until 12pm PDT on the 12^th, it actually made it back online at 12:50pm. 

Once the store was operational the frenzied fans that had been waiting for what seemed like an eternity flocked to the site in droves to try and get their hands on tickets.  Many were quite disappointed!  The tickets were “sold out” in less than 15 minutes.

Many fans proceeded to do what they do best…bitch, whine, threaten to cancel their accounts, and in general blame Blizzard for all that is wrong in their lives. 

This went on for hours and hours until a Blizzard rep. said, “Oh wait a minute we do have more tickets after all”.  Hmmm…not sure where the “small reserve” of tickets they pulled out at that point came from, but they scheduled a grand re-opening of the Blizzcon ticket sales for 8pm PDT to sell off the newfound treasure.

At 8pm as thousands of fans pounded the refresh buttons on their browsers…the site crashed…again.  All you saw when refreshing was a transformer-like yellow robot and a statement that the site was “down for maintenance”. 

Ok, now I understand it happening once because they didn’t expect the volume of traffic and the extreme demand for these tickets, but again??  Ugg! 

So, they were able to fix their problem a bit quicker this time, but this small reserve of tickets was sold out in a matter of a few minutes, so fast in fact I don’t know how it is humanly possible to type that fast! 

Anyways, to sum it all up…just a couple short weeks and thousands of unhappy fans later Blizzard has announced they will be holding a “lottery” for the additional 3,000 Blizzcon ’08 tickets they have managed to secure or if you have a couple grand to spare and trust complete strangers implicitly you could buy them on e-bay right now!  I will participate in the lottery, yes.  I may also go buy a ticket for my state lottery at the same time.  The way I see it my odds are about as good either way!