Category: Burn
Well, the day has come and gone. Tickets for Burning Man 2009 have been ordered. At exactly noon local time, the link popped up on the Tickets page at burningman.com, and, having waited about 45 minutes in queue to place my order, I'm now $440 poorer and cheap-ticket-rich. They should arrive in a month or so.
Everything went extremely smooth for me. The wait time wasn't bad at all, especially considering past years, and the ordering process was relatively straightforward and hassle-free. Others, however, were not so lucky... apparently, after I ordered my tickets, the server took some kind of massive dump and started bailing people's transactions, recording multiple purchases, not ordering tickets at all, et cetera. The message board was chock full o' complaints about various bizarre errors. They were able to freeze the queue and get most of it sorted in about an hour, which is commendable.
I think it went about as well as it could have (server issues happen), but it just makes me wonder... is there, really, an absolutely rock-solid ticketing process anywhere? The Burning Man ticket issues sounded a lot like when I was trying to order the Eagles tickets for the first show they played here. The BM crew must have planned for extra capacity (there was some mention of "extra servers" somewhere on a thread), but it still failed, at least for a while. Maybe it's not a problem that can be solved by hardware; maybe it's the software itself (I have no idea what either Burning Man or the BOK center is using). Anybody got any experience with this?
Well, the day has come and gone. Tickets for Burning Man 2009 have been ordered. At exactly noon local time, the link popped up on the Tickets page at burningman.com, and, having waited about 45 minutes in queue to place my order, I'm now $440 poorer and cheap-ticket-rich. They should arrive in a month or so.
Everything went extremely smooth for me. The wait time wasn't bad at all, especially considering past years, and the ordering process was relatively straightforward and hassle-free. Others, however, were not so lucky... apparently, after I ordered my tickets, the server took some kind of massive dump and started bailing people's transactions, recording multiple purchases, not ordering tickets at all, et cetera. The message board was chock full o' complaints about various bizarre errors. They were able to freeze the queue and get most of it sorted in about an hour, which is commendable.
I think it went about as well as it could have (server issues happen), but it just makes me wonder... is there, really, an absolutely rock-solid ticketing process anywhere? The Burning Man ticket issues sounded a lot like when I was trying to order the Eagles tickets for the first show they played here. The BM crew must have planned for extra capacity (there was some mention of "extra servers" somewhere on a thread), but it still failed, at least for a while. Maybe it's not a problem that can be solved by hardware; maybe it's the software itself (I have no idea what either Burning Man or the BOK center is using). Anybody got any experience with this?
