All entries for Thursday 07 May 2009

Seetickets – Meet the proffesionals

Anyone that’s ever tried to get tickets for a hugely popular tour or festival will be aware of how awful Seetickets’ system for handling events attracting loads of buyers is. In short, there is no system. You just get locked out and have to keep refreshing. Because why bother creating a system to handle it when it only happens 5 or 6 times a year. It’s the same reason most UK businesses don’t have air conditioning.

But there’s another company out there. They’re a video games company, and they run their own convention. It’s hugely popular, and loads more people want to go every year than there are tickets available. Last year was a disaster, as the sheer volume of people brought down the servers, tickets were allocated unfairly and lots of people got very upset. So this year they’re implementing a new queue system, designed to offer tickets on a first-come, first-served basis without crashing the servers. So far, so pedestrian. Ticket Master have used a queue system for a while but in busy times it’s often difficult to even get in the queue, or it stalls, etc. So why will this be any different?

Well the company involved is Blizzard who just so happen to also run a small game called World of Warcraft, the biggest online game in the world. Few companies have more experience in dealing with large numbers of multiple different connections from thousands of people simultaneously. It’s their raison-detre so I’m fascinated to see exactly how they solve this problem that has plagued companies like See for years, and perhaps we’ll finally get some software that can handle these sort of numbers and be licensed out to other ticketing sites in the future.

Dean Love : 07 May 2009 00:06 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem