The OC Register on the BlizzCon debacle
by Adam Holisky 
Aug 14th 2008 at 6:00PM
WoW Insider's own Mike Schramm recently talked with Tamara Chuang from the Orange County Register about the trials and tribulations of the recent BlizzCon ticket sales for an article she wrote concerning the debacle. Mike is in some good company, with executive editor of GameSpy.com David Kosak also contributing to the analysis of Blizzard's failure. Yesterday, Mike wrote an in-depth account of the problems we all faced obtaining tickets to the event.The OC Register article makes a good point noting that some major events, such as the World Series, have had ticketing problems in the past. However, it is also pointed out that other sites such as NBCOlympics.com still stay up even under the pressure of lots of traffic.
With Mike Morhaime's apology late last night, and his offering up 3,000 additional tickets via a lottery, it will be interesting to see what this does to appease the fans in the long run. It is good to see that this issue is getting some wider coverage outside of the game and fan sites. While bad press isn't exactly good, it usually leads to things being better the next time around.
Filed under: Bugs, Blizzard, News items, BlizzCon
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Evan Aug 14th 2008 6:16PM
arn't 3000 tickets being sold in a lottery system thingie?
mirilene Aug 14th 2008 6:14PM
Look,
It sucked and im not happy. A bunch of my friends cannot go with me to the con (I got lucky monday night, dont ask me how).
This is ridiculous though. What do you want them to do? YES, they have lots of money. That doesnt mean that they need to spend a billion dollars on everything they do.
Its a #$(*!ing con for 12 THOUSAND people. Thats a pretty GD small con compared to most and a rounding error compared to the WOW player base, to say nothing of the SC and Diablo fans. This was destined to be a problem.
No one has any idea if ticketmaster would have really been able to stand up to it or not and frankly, i would have declined it if i were in charge of ticketmaster. its not worth the headache for 12000 tickets. Not to mention it would have all just been scalped anyway. Plus, who the hell sells con tickets through a third party?
Seriously though, what is blizzard suppose to do? Build a Google style server farm to support the sale of 12000 tickets which were going to sell out in 24 hours or less anyway?
They want to have a fun, intimate gathering with a few thousand fans. They dont want a Pax or SDCC and if they limit attendance and limit the scope of things, maybe for five minutes, they can enjoy themselves at their own convention with the fans that support them.
I dont know how to make what happened easier, but i know the absolute wrong answer is to build a system that can handle millions of people spamming "buy now" and F5 relentlessly for 12,000 tickets
rick gregory Aug 14th 2008 6:20PM
Well, yes, Ticketmaster almost certainly could have handled this precisely because they HAVE built the systems to deal with such floods of traffic.
You're right, it doesn't make sense to build a system to handle that volume for a once per year 12,000 person event. That's why you outsource that function. In fact it's EXACTLY the kind of situation where you outsource - makes no sense to build in house, can be done out of house.
Pzychotix Aug 14th 2008 6:32PM
And you know Ticketmaster can handle this load, how?
Alexa shows Blizzard.com spiking up to 4 times the load of Ticketmaster for WWI. 4 times what your server usually handles is not something I expect anyone to handle.
Manatank Aug 14th 2008 6:44PM
Thank you for pointing out what seems obvious to me. I think the massive out lash is really just because a lot of fans who wanted to go really really bad can't go. There's only 12,000 spots. No ticket system would change that. Chances are if you wanted to go, a reliable system wouldn't have changed your odds of getting a ticket.
A lot of people seem upset at Blizzard for something they supposedly should have been able to foresee and avert. I have a feeling that if they had been one of the 12,000 who got tickets they would not be quite so upset about it.
rick gregory Aug 14th 2008 6:53PM
@Pzychotix,
Because TM handle loads like that all of the time.
The Blizzcon vs WWI comparison is irrelevant. Compare Blizzcon to the traffic of, say, a Paul McCartney concert or last year when all the tweener girls in the US wanted Hannah Montana tickets - those kind of events are insane, they appeal to FAR more than the 10m people who play WoW and they're repeated over and over as tickets for concerts in each city go on sale. Heck most of the time tickets for multiple cities go on sale They've sold 10s of thousands of tickets in an hour for concerts etc. Also, remember that much of the Blizzard.com traffic was people trying repeatedly to get tickets and thus refreshing the page. If the transaction had gone through the first time, that spike would be MUCH smaller.
*Might* they fail? Sure. But it's FAR more likely that they will not. And if the alternative is a halfassed inhouse effort, Ticketmaster or some other professional outsourcing agency....
mirilene Aug 14th 2008 7:03PM
who says they didnt try to outsource it?
Small # of tickets + raving lunatic fans (you DO read general and customer service forums, im assuming) = more trouble than its worth in my book.
At the same time, maybe they figured "how bad could it be?" After all, last year took 3 days of chill selling to hit the bottom. Course, we didnt exactly expect an expansion or SC2 either. when we bought tickets in june.
Blake Aug 14th 2008 7:07PM
"And you know Ticketmaster can handle this load, how?"
They sell tickets for the largest concerts and other events, they have the infrastructure to scale and handle almost any size event. I have tried to purchase Baseball playoff games through Ticketmaster and what they do is open up at a set time (say 8am) and put everyone in line. If you try and refresh, you lose your place in line. I've been in the queue for up to an hour before, but when they were ready for me and could handle my transaction, I got in, got the tickets, paid for them, and was done. But during the whole process, I knew I was in line with thousands of other people and they would get to me when they could handle it. They didn't just open the flood gates to thousands of people and their damn F5 button.
Pzychotix Aug 14th 2008 6:29PM
NBCOlympics.com also has other companies paying multimillion dollar contracts to keep the site up. Exclusive worldwide advertisements anyone?
Blizzard does not get these benefits.
Go go unfair comparisons.
Blake Aug 14th 2008 7:08PM
Yeah, comparison to NBC Olympics.com is pretty lame and about the worst one they could make.
Runya Aug 14th 2008 6:36PM
Yes, this event sucked. 2 days (or was it 6 hours?) to sell 12,00 tickets is some heavy load for sure
That said, Mr. President's apology goes a long way. (with me, at least)
The 3000 extra tickets are a bonus
vlad Aug 14th 2008 7:20PM
what a stroke article. ooooh mike. lets all stroke his ego because he was quoted in an article with some gamespy dude by a 3rd party tiny local paper that no one cares or even knows about outside that 50 mile radius.
covering your own staffs accomplishments is not news. its tacky.
Jamesisgreat Aug 14th 2008 8:54PM
Frakkin hell Vlad - why do you even read this site? Just about every single comment you post (and you seem to post on just about every single article) is either moaning about how MMO covered it this like, 5 minutes ago, or is just general trolling. Really mate, it's get old - either lighten up or just go have little troll babies with Zul'jin somewhere else!
AD Aug 14th 2008 7:57PM
Ticketmaster for a event like Blizzcon, please tell me you are kidding. Remember the Hannah Montana fiasco, where the tickets were selling out 10 minutes after the box office opened? Everyone was mad, because reselling sites was buying them all up in matter of seconds.
I can guarantee that would happen if Blizzard used Ticketmaster.
Juju Aug 14th 2008 8:50PM
Guys, all they had to do was load test the store before selling the ticket. It's very simple. It's standard IT procedure.
Trying to say, "Oh, how could they have expected all that traffic" is silly. That's just it -- a good programmer ALWAYS tests the system against way more than it can handle. Not doing that is bad practice. It makes things like this happen.
dan Aug 15th 2008 2:11AM
They may very well have load tested. Unless you've seen statements that say otherwise you can't assume. Any number of other factors could have been at issue instead (other reasons for server failure, low estimation of load, a bug in the cart api, etc.).
Jeni Aug 15th 2008 8:51AM
It's a little amusing to see people QQ over this. 10 million players, 12 thousand tickets. Not everyone can get it. Everyone's upset that they won't get that ugly mount with the weird murloc on it.
Neil Aug 15th 2008 11:28AM
What bothers people is not that they didn't get tickets. If I had tried buying a ticket ten minutes after they became available and I saw that they were sold out, I would have been irritated but I would have said "well, other people showed up before me, so that's why they got them."
But for the site to be fluctuating like that, on and off, collapsing intermittently under the load ... it is incredibly frustrating, and gives people the feeling that there's no fairness to who gets the tickets and who doesn't, that it's all pure luck.
If pure luck is the system that Blizzard wants to use, then using a lottery for the entire batch of tickets would be fine. But since they essentially promised us "first-come first-served" and instead delivered "come-and-maybe-get-served", they clearly made a mistake and it's one that shouldn't happen again.