San Diego Comic Con Ticket Disaster Doesn’t Stop Record Sellout Time

On Saturday, after two failed attempts of trying to get their tickets out, San Diego Comic Con sold out of all tickets in one day.

Tickets were released at 9am PST and TicketLeap, the company handling distribution this time, had already crashed by 8:58am. (For some reason they allowed people to go the registration page an hour before registration started, clogging the servers.)

Some Sad Geeks will not be going to Comic Con This year

TicketLeap took to Twitter, saying that all we needed to do was keep refreshing our browsers and power through. This determined geek personally spent over an hour refreshing browsers on 2 computers to get his tickets.

TicketLeap had an interesting method for showing their inventory on the site. (EX: I put 3 tickets in my cart; those tickets are marked out of inventory for 15 minutes. During those 15 minutes the tickets do not show and the site actually says that there are not enough tickets that match the request. If I’m not able to purchase my tickets, due to the constant refreshing, those tickets are placed back in the inventory and the “not enough tickets” notice is removed until it happens again).

Some people weren’t so lucky and spent the better half of the day refreshing their browsers and complaining on Twitter – blaming the world, San Diego Comic Con, TicketLeap, God, everything.

Then the news from the Comic-Con Twitter kept coming in: All 4 days sold out. All Saturday passes sold out, then Friday, and then Thursday were announced to have been sold out that day, which came as kind of a shock because normally those are held back for later sales.

Then Sunday was announced gone. The day when NO ONE goes to Comic-Con, except to clean up, sold out on the first day of ticket sales. It seems as if the Geek World hulked out and smashed puny ticket sales records. Checking the #SDCC hashtag on Twitter should net you a few choice responses.

While it’s a great thing to hear that the San Diego Comic Con has expanded so much, many people are left in the lurch by poor control over the ticket sale process. So who’s to blame for the debacle that has left frustrated geeks “conned” out of tickets? Personally, I feel TicketLeap, the start up company that Comic-Con brought in to help them out after EPIC botched it up last time, has no fault in this. I lay the blame on the management team of San Diego Comic Con, for not keeping pace with the growth in demand. If anything, this is a sign that the management for the event needs to modernize, open up better communication with the people who keep it in business and, God forbid, have someone else that’s used to running a convention this size (NAMM comes to mind) take over. In the meantime, geeks who were not fortunate enough to navigate the confusing ticket raffle process will have to stoically take announcements of guest panelists on the chin, or try these 6 other ways to get into SDCC, which surprisingly don’t include selling your soul to Satan.

Any GAS fans out there got lucky and got tickets, or were you also frustrated and defeated by the ticket catastrophe?

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