The Rockies are in the World Series this year, which means that there are at least two games played in Denver. For some reason, the Rockies decided to only sell tickets to the game online, claiming it would be the most ‘fair’. Fair to ticket brokers and people with a room full of computers at their disposal, perhaps, but not fair to many die-hard fans who don’t have high-speed Internet connections.
The first attempt to sell tickets online failed spectacularly. Paciolan, the company contracted to do ticket sales overestimated their ability to handle the load and their servers did not fail gracefully. Paciolan and the Rockies management lied and said that an ‘external malicious attack’ brought the site down. If by that you mean, millions of people tried to buy tickets and the server couldn’t handle the load, then perhaps that’s true. They regrouped and decided to try again the next day.
Today appeared to most to be more of the same. I had three computers that all got nothing but server timeout errors, except one that was waiting to connect from 12:00 sharp to 2:30, when the games sold out. I knew two people who managed to get tickets to the game. One of them appeared to get lucky, went through the normal process and bought tickets.
The other person who I know put on his grey hat, and bought enough tickets to max out his credit card. The servers that were handling the ticket requests were labelled ev1.evenue.net through ev15.evenue.net. He found that by using IE (because of the way it sends back cookies – using other browsers on edited server URLs would give errors) and editing the server URLs and using a lot of computers on a really fast network connection, he could find a server that wasn’t too busy to handle requests. This strategy worked well enough that he managed to max out all of his credit cards purchasing World Series tickets. I would have done the same to try and buy tickets, but since I don’t have Windows running natively anymore I tend not to run IE.
There seems to be a lot of bile directed at Jay Alves, the Rockies spokesperson, which he doesn’t deserve. He doesn’t make the news, and if Paciolan is lying about the problems that they’re having, that doesn’t give him much to work with in confronting the press. I do wish he would stop saying that the Rockies are even more frustrated than the fans. They’re not. They get to go to the games.
I am amused that everyone that I know who ‘played by the rules’ was shut out of ticket sales, but the person who his hacker hat on was able to buy until his credit card was maxed out. I think it’s a safe bet that most of the tickets went to brokers and will be auctioned off on the secondary market. I don’t want to sound conspiratorial, but with MLB getting a cut from secondary market sales on StubHub, MLB probably likes it that way.