It’s that time of year again; let’s just hope you had your mouse ready.
Four day passes are sold out. Some indiviual-day passes are gone too, including Saturday, according to TicketLeap's checkout system, as many on Twitter inform the world they finally got their prized tickets.
Comic-Con started selling tickets for 2011 Registration at 9:00 a.m., and shortly after registration opened the site went over captivity asking would-be buyers to “try again momentarily”.
Was anybody surprised? Of course not.
Twitter lit up with people chiming in with predictable frustration, causing the hashtag #sdcc to become a worldwide trending topic.
“My first year at
#SDCC was 2009, and I don't recall buying a ticket being THIS bad. This is ridiculous”, tweeted
@IntempestaNox.
Early tweets had stories of near success; “I GOT THE BUY SCREEN FOR HALF A SECOND! Then tried to proceed and got comiccockblocked.
#sdcc”, said green_queen.
Other tweets aimed at Ticket Leap (Comic-Con’s ticket seller) went as far as to say that if this sort of thing happens every registration they might just give up all together.
“Losing my motivation for
#sdcc”, said @Lizzapower.
“Unfortunately, buying tickets for @
comic_con from @
ticketleap is this close to becoming more hassle than it's worth”, said one tweeter.
“I'm thinking I may finally follow through on my threats and skip
#SDCC this year. I know- the world sobs”, wrote another.
Others came to Twitter with novel ideas about simply paying more to avoid the whole process, like @woan wrote in his top tweet, “I think most of us would prefer to pay ticketmaster surcharges than go through another
#sdcc ticketing attempt.”
Nearly minutes after starting this post some lucky buyers finally got their tickets, after fifty minutes of refreshing the buying page, “ We got them! We are going to COMICCON!!
#sdcc” said, @
bethfury and plenty of others.
So what have we learned via twitter from this year’s Comic-Con ticket chaos?
Some lessons include trying Google chrome for better refreshing, having the F5 key handy or, “when hitting refresh choose resend not cancel, it will slowly progress you thru even if capacity errors on the way”, said @
conradcheslock .
All of which brings us to the real point.
”If Comic Con "needs" to move from San Diego because the Convention Center is too small -- then why can't they figure out how to sell tickets for the event here?”, wrote viewer Jim Zix in an email to us.
"Clearly [they] can't handle the 110,000 guests expected for this year -- and they want to move to a bigger place, and sell more tickets”, Zix theorized.
It’s an interesting theory, but some, including Zix, feel the entire ticket fiasco, which gets larger year after year, is put in place to show city planners that Comic-Con is in need of more space, and without it, the event will move to venues more well equipment.
Venues are hoping for just that. Back in March places like Anaheim took to Facebook trying to lure the comic event of the year to their convention center.
Whatever the reason for the capacity overload and ticket delays, the only thing we know for sure was summed up nicely by tweeter @iceyblade, “The longest lines at #sdcc this year won't be for Hall H or Ballroom 20. It will be for tickets for next years Comic-Con.”
