Well folks, this is the end of an era. The lottery is gone, and with it, the way we work together in Town Park on a community basis may change as well. With the lottery, at least the drawings were random, so you had just about as good of a chance as any scalper to win, and if scalpers wanted to game the odds in their favour, they needed multiple addresses and credit cards, which made it inconvenient. On top of that, since we as a community worked hard to educate people not to purchase tickets from scalpers, many did not find TBF a profitable venue for ticket resale.
The other important thing to remember about the lottery was this, these were only for Town Park tickets, not for general festival tickets or camping at other sites. People who needed just 4 day passes or single day tickets did not enter the TP Lottery.
See Tickets is owned by Vivendi, which also owns Universal Music Group. Vivendi is a huge media conglomerate, based in Paris. Since they own UMG, it is always possible this may have an impact on the talent presented at the festival, but there is nothing yet to substantiate this. Here is their English web site,
https://www.vivendi.com/en/, though quite a bit is still in French.
Now we are moving to a first-in first out virtual cloud based queuing solution. You can read about how it works here.
https://queue-it.com/first-in-first-out-queueing-feature/The idea is that this is supposed to be "fairer" because each person online receives a unique ID the second that they log in, and requests are processed in that order. Supposedly, this system will improve your "experience of waiting" because you will be kept informed of your progress and have a more pleasant waiting experience. Again, the logic is, if you sit there and hang on to your connection for hours, you are obviously motivated and determined to buy the "product". Another feature of this system is that for high volume, they could open up the queue say an hour or two before the sale. So, for folks like Leslie, you may be looking at spending hours on your computer sitting in a virtual queue at 2 AM.
Another question I have is this. Do we have to set up an account with See Tickets or PB with a form of payment before we even begin this queue process?
I know PB is trying to do the best it can to be fair to us. I just feel this system is open to more abuse than the lottery. First, if all types of tickets go on sale at once, people looking for just TP tickets will be overwhelmed. Next, the queue system can also be gamed. While you can filter out the most obvious bots, there really is nothing in place for scalpers to ask multiple "helpers' to log on using multiple machines, and get past any "capcha" screens if necessary. Then identify which computers have the highest spots in the queue.
Next, we have to deal with the reliability of our internet connections over the period of waiting in the queue. If you lose your connection, you have lost your spot in line. If you try and do this with a mobile phone, good luck to you.
What really seems to have driven this decision was the overwhelming amount of work that PB staff had to accomplish with the old system. Now, they have just outsourced this work.
As for RFID, it is OK with me. As long as the wristbands can put up with the heat, cold, showers, jumping in the warm river, etc... that is fine. If not, then PB will have lots of unhappy festivarians.
My 2 cents, and we hope the TP camps can work together to make this a positive experience for all.
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