Scalpers Gotta Live!

Yep, I had the page that said: You have 6 minutes to complete this transaction... I added my credit card, double checked all the info, and got: This event is sold out. So... I didn't add my CC info fast enough apparently. And that 6 minutes to complete was just a tease.

I was done filling everything out at 11:00pm Mountain time,so 1 minute after I got the ticket on my screen.

I wish worlds was about the best of the best competing, and not: whoever is lucky enough to get their **** filled out the fastest...

I see you were able to get one later in the thread, but weren't they holding seats for Regional winners already anyway? Unclaimed Regional winner seats were part of lot of new ones they opened for various events so that window passed already but you probably didn't need to do anything other than contact them in the first place.

Spots held for US regionals... I won a Canadian Regional's.

Ah, didn't realize it was US Regionals only.

So many tickets were sold and much were happy

Good good, it is all going according to my plam

For them to sell in under a min is strange.

I've seen events with hundreds of openings sell out in seconds online. It's not that strange.

For them to sell in under a min is strange.

I've seen events with hundreds of openings sell out in seconds online. It's not that strange.

it's not a concert that is drawing tens of thousands though, it's an event that had maybe a hundred or two tops that would be still trying to make a legit effort to go and be willing to do so at 1 am eastern time on the dot.

Does anyone know how many seats there are for worlds?

This looks to me like there's a problem in the system that results in too many tickets being reserved. When a system yells you you have x minutes to complete your transaction, it's supposed to be holding a ticket for you, which it will release if you back out or your time expires. That should guarantee you that ticket assuming you can complete the form fast enough.

If somebody gets that reserved ticket window and then is subsequently told the event is sold out, it probably means the system is reserving too many tickets.

This could be caused by any number of programming mistakes, but given the assumption that this company has their stuff minimally together, it's probably about scaling. If they're handling the increased demand by cloning their database onto another server, maybe ticket TK421 was promised to people on both Server A and Server B before they had a chance to compare notes. Or even if that's not an issue, if they're handling the "Check whether there are tickets available to reserve" step and the "Reserve this ticket" step in different database transactions, another customer's reservation could be processed in between checking and claiming, resulting in a double claim.

The thing where people can sometimes get in even after being told it's sold out is almost certainly because of phantom reservations being released after their sales fail: "Well a minute ago we had 120,000 holds on 100,000 tickets, so I told you we had no tickets available, but now we have 99,998 holds, so I guess we have 2 tickets available."