User blog:Peteparker/SDCC Epic Fail Again

So I, like many of my comic-fan friends, set an alarm to wake up early today to buy our 4-day passes to San Diego Comic-Con 2011. I rolled out of bed at five minutes to showtime, and was loading the site just as the clock struck the hour.

As many of you now know, the SDCC site was instantly down spitting out errors loading left and right. As the minutes progressed, the SDCC site actually opened up, but only due to the ticket sales and registration all happening on another site, hosted by a company called 'Epic'.

I sat at the computer refreshing the page and trying various combinations of new tabs with page reloading to try to see some progress. When my wife woke up, she continued trying while I showered and drove to work. At work, I continued to try to get into the registration site until 9:30, when the sales of the passes was closed by SDCC pending investigation.

Like many other fans, I had been worried since the last registration that there was such a demand they would sell out quickly this year. Just as we had feared, pushing the date off created more of a panic, which resulted in more people flooding the site (again) than they were prepared for. I suspect that they may have even been prepared for more than the amount of people who had tried earlier this month, and the delay caused more chaos than they expected.

In any case, rumors now fly as to if the handful of people who made it through the registration process will even get their passes, and SDCC has not posted a new date as to when the remaining passes will be made available.

Many fans have suggested using a much larger company to sell the passes such as Ticketmaster, but SDCC has always had a very specific registration process. Every pass that is purchased is registered to a single person to prevent ticket scalping and extremely high priced passes being sold on the likes of eBay. With this many problems, and two rounds of failure under their belts, many people don't see any other option. Some even feel that a lottery for registration times would be the only course of action.

In the end, after two and a half hours of page refreshes, I have no passes to show for it.

&mdash; Nathan (Peteparker) (Earth-1218) (talk &bull; contribs &bull; email) 19:15, November 22, 2010 (UTC)