perfidy

I didn't try to buy World Series tickets this morning when they went on sale at 10 AM MST. The Rockies, in their questionable wisdom, opted not to allow any sales via phone or box office and went exclusively with online sales. The rationale behind this is that it gives every fan an equal opportunity to buy their tickets.

"What about ticket brokers?" we asked.

"We're limiting sales to only 4 per person. That will stop people from buying up hundreds or thousands of tickets at a time and reselling them," they said.

"But what about people who can write programs to do this automatically?" we asked.

"Hey, look...bunnies!" they said.

And then, after the "box office" was open for approximately two and a half hours, the vendor's server suffered catastrophic failure after trying to swallow about 8.5 MILLION hits. That's 1500 hits a second, folks. Now, I know the Rockies are a super-popular team around the world, but I'm finding it a little rough suspending my disbelief that there were really that many people trying to snag one of the 22,000 tickets for sale. That's about twice the population of the entire state of Colorado. Even if there were a tenth that amount with everyone hitting the site ten times during the first two hours, that's still a ridiculously large sum of people trying to get to watch a team that (honestly) nobody really cares that much about outside of our nice square borders.

The more conspiracy-minded have advanced the theory that this is a Denial-of-Service attack by Red Sox fans. Or Arizona fans. Or Giant Evil Space Robots. In the meantime, the Rockies and the ticket vendor are still trying to figure out what to do.

[wik] It occurs to me that when dealing with a sporting event of this magnitude, going with the lowest bidder for ticket sales might not have been the smartest thing to do.

[alsø wik] Ticketmaster routinely deals with huge venues and events. And online sales are second-nature for them. Cleveland was going to use them if they beat the Sox.

[alsø alsø wik] I am not, nor have I ever been an employee of Ticketmaster.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] The title of this post refers to the countdown page every potential buyer was redirected to, informing them that the page would automatically refresh when the timer reached zero and try to connect once again.