BlizzCon ticket sales got a sad twist this year as tens of thousands of Blizzard followers of the WoW, Diablo and StarCraft franchises were trying to throw their money at Blizzard in order to get a 2-day pass to BlizzCon and failing. The sales frenzy was a lot wilder than last year, when it took 3 days for the tickets to sell out, and Blizzard also kept the communication with the fans at a minimum, making many spend hours on end refreshing the Blizzard Store page.
As one fan expressed it, “the Blizzard Store suffers from lag and instability on a regular Monday, I just knew we would break it,” many fans mirror this opinion and others are just rude. It seems thousands of fans who faithfully were waiting by the opening hours of the sale did not get a chance to buy a ticket, and the feeling of disappointment is obviously very strong.
Mike Morhaime posted a personal apology (see below) for the problems that Blizzard have put the fans through, and in addition, he’s announced that they’ve rearranged their convention hall space and will be able to offer 3,000 additional tickets. To prevent the same situation arising again, these tickets will be sold by a lottery system and only sold to those with an active Blizzard account as of August 12th, 9 PM PDT, the time when the last batch of tickets was officially sold out. The apology and statement are gone right now, but more information should be available shortly.
While there probably are more than 3,000 fans that were turned away by Blizzard’s actions and the ticket store system, this is still a great gesture, and probably stretches the limits for what is even possible to organize with such short notice. Blizzard probably took this rather negative experience to heart and are most serious when they say that they will do what it takes to prevent this from happening in the future.
On a side-note, I think we can count on an even bigger event next year, seeing the reactions of the fans.
While blizzard cant help this particular problem, the second market BlizzCon tickets sell for $500 on the net as a spit in the face on poor fans who didn’t get a ticket.
[BLUE=http://www.blizzard.com/]August 13, 2008
Statement from Mike Morhaime
Blizzard Gamers,
On behalf of everyone at Blizzard, I want to apologize for the challenges and frustrations you experienced while trying to purchase BlizzCon tickets on Monday and Tuesday. BlizzCon is about the positive experiences you all have had with Blizzard games. As a result of this week’s events, the excitement that many of you felt about the show has turned into dissatisfaction and disappointment.
Due to these circumstances, we’ve reevaluated our convention hall space and come up with some solutions that will allow us to offer 3,000 more tickets for sale. We know this will not be enough to satisfy the very high level of demand for tickets this year, but we want to ensure that BlizzCon remains a great experience for those of you who are able to attend. To avoid the issues many of you faced this week, we’ll be selling these 3,000 via a lottery. We’ll post further details once our plans are finalized. Please note that the lottery will only be open to those with an active Blizzard Account as of 9:00 PM PDT on August 12, the time that the “Sold Out” notice was posted.
I, and everyone else at Blizzard, share the frustration and disappointment that many of you have expressed as a result of this process. We’ll do what it takes to avoid this type of situation in the future.
Sincerely,
Mike Morhaime [/BLUE]
