I had to actually cool off a bit before I could write this. WoW Insider does an excellent job of describing the complete and utter debacle that will be known forever as Blizzcon ‘08 Ticket Sales. Now that I’m a little more level headed, I figured I’d post an open letter to Mike Morhaime (president of Blizzard entertainment) describing why I am so frustrated with this situation, so here goes.
————————————————————
Mike,
I have attended both previous Blizzcon’s, and had an excellent time at each event. In both cases, not only did I attend, but my son and my father attended as well. We have all played together for a long time (May 2005 for me), and I am fairly certain that during the first event, we were one of very few groups representing three generations of WoW players. I think this is a great game, and a great community; so much so that I went out of my way to make sure that when I hit level 60 on my first character, it happened sitting at the test stations at the first ever Blizzcon.
Unfortunately this year will be far different. On August 11th, I was primed and ready to buy tickets for what was to be our third Blizzcon in a row. I woke up excited, but it quickly turned to frustration as I determined the website was completely unusable; my existing Blizzard account wasn’t being recognized, I couldn’t create a new one, and I didn’t seem to be able to make it through the purchase process anyway. Due to other commitments I was not able to sit and wait for the situation with the Blizzard store to fix itself, although my father was.
The one thing I haven’t mentioned at this point is that my father has Parkinson’s disease. This causes most everything to be a little more difficult for him, and certainly makes it much more difficult to race through the process of filling in several forms before getting a confirmed ticket order. On two occasions on August 12th, my dad was able to put the Blizzcon tickets into his shopping cart in the Blizzard store, and proceeded to fill in the forms as fast as he possibly could. In both cases, by the time he reached the final confirmation screen, he received the message that the tickets has already been sold out. This brings me to my main complaint about the process used to sell tickets for this event. Unlike sites like TicketMaster, which reserve the tickets in your shopping cart for a set amount of time before they are released back into the pool, the purchasing process for this Blizzcon was left up to luck, and those that could sail through the myriad screens the quickest. Those with disabilities that made this difficult were at a severe disadvantage with this entire process.
In reality, I’m willing to accept that fact that even if the process had happened this year as I described above, maybe I’d still be sitting here without tickets. At least in that case, we’d know it was because we got to the website a little too late, and were unable to add the tickets to our cart before they were sold out, instead of my dad wondering what would have happened if he could have been a little bit faster. Maybe I’m just being overprotective of him, but it really bothers me to think that on some level he’s thinking this is his fault, and that he did something wrong.
Your recent post to the main World of Warcraft site was a good step in the right direction of restoring the communication with your user base, but I’d ask that future Blizzcon’s take a few lesson’s learned into account:
- Please create a partnership with a ticket sales site that is well aware of the challenges in dealing with the kind of demand you are sure to experience.
- The basic law of supply and demand tells me your tickets are way too inexpensive. Anything that sells out this fast is underpriced.
- Take the scalpers out of the picture. Almost immediately after the sold out notice I started seeing tickets on StubHub for $1,500. A strict policy of checking IDs would ensure the folks that actually want to attend the event are the ones buying the tickets. If performed in conjunction with #1 above, this ensures your company is receiving all of this extra revenue and not some random eBay seller.
- Strongly consider growing your venue. Your fan base that is willing to travel to one of these events is apparently huge, and you’re not taking advantage of it.
Tags: blizzcon, mike morhaime, tickets, wotlk, wow
