It’s hard to put my frustration and anger into words. I’ve been trying to get Blizzcon tickets for 2 days. I tried at 5:00am on monday. Not on sale yet. My wife tried all day monday. The Blizzard store would allow her to get all the way to the final “confirm order” page and then kick her back out to the beginning. Or the website would not come up at all. Or it would give an XML error. Or it would show a picture of a murloc and say “an error has occurred”. I got home at 5:00pm and tried the rest of the evening. Same issues. At 9:40pm they finally announced that the store would be closed for the night.
I woke up on Tuesday morning and tried again. 5:00am. No dice. The wife tried from 6:30am to 7:30am. Still closed. She had to go to work and I can’t get to the site from work so I had to have a friend’s wife try all day. The store was offline for most of the day. I left early tuesday, getting home around 3:00pm. Tickets are sold out. SHIT!
A little while later, a glimmer of hope!! An announcement on the forums that a small number of tickets will be available at 8:00pm PST. Starting at 7:30pm I sat there refreshing the page. At 7:50 the site goes down for maintenance again. At 8:10pm I can’t reach the site at all. I have IE and Firefox open, refreshing like a madman. I can’t get www.blizzard.com to come up, can’t get *anything*. I was on the World of Warcraft forums at the same time and I could see people posting messages like “OMG I GOT ONE” and then, about 8:15pm, “WTF? SOLD OUT!”. About that time I was finally able to get the Blizzard store to come up, only to confirm the fact that the tickets were sold out. Now I get to explain to my 13-year-old World of Warcraft fanatic son why we don’t get to go.
The way Blizzard handled this entire situation has been shoddy and amateurish. This company makes $100 million per month!!!! The first time they had issues they should have taken the site down, fixed it, and brought it back up only when it was ready. As much as I despise Ticketmaster, I would have gladly paid an extra $15 fee per ticket just to have the process handled professionally. Thousands of people sat at their computers for 36 hours frantically hitting F5 hoping for the Blizzard gods to shine upon them and grant them a chance to purchase a ticket. It was ridiculous. Now the tickets are showing up on Ebay for triple the price so I just feel all warm and fuzzy knowing that I couldn’t get a ticket but some fucking lowlife scalpers could.
I stuck around the forums for a few more minutes last night and I thought I’d share with you some of the frustations people had with Blizzard. Click on the pictures to see them full-size.
First we have Ozdocklii from the Drakkari server:
Simple and to the point. F U CK YOU BLIZZ, indeed.
Up next is Maric, also from Drakkari:
Very eloquent and original. Not content with a simple “Fuck blizzard” or “Blizzard sucks”, he kicked it up a notch with “EAT A BUCKET OF HORSESHIT BLIZZ”
Finally, we have Dvt from the Agamaggan server:
This post is a legendary example of perfect “Nerd Rage”. Lack of capitalization and punctuation? CHECK! misspellings because he typed it too fast? CHECK! Hoping the perpetrator dies in a fire? CHECK! Physical threats they would never have the balls to follow through on in real life? CHECK! It’s like he read the collective minds of thousands of WoW players worldwide and vomited our combined thoughts onto the forum.
Dvt from Agamaggan, I salute you…
Anyone in Elko got 2 extra tickets???
6 responses so far ↓
1 Darvisham // Aug 13, 2008 at 1:44 pm
I know your pain. I have a three-day/week schedule set up with Mondays being my primary day off and Fridays as a telecommute. I thought “Great! The 11th is my day! I’m going to Blizzcon! Awesome! I didn’t sleep Sunday night. 12:01am, I am at my computer. Ah. Nothing yet. But I sign up for my store account, call it good and start checking every 15 minutes with mind-numbing dailies in between. At 10 minutes after they go on sale, I’m in the queue, filling out my info. Name, Last Name, Character Name, Faction, Server, Game Preference, Done. Sweet.
Oops Murloc. WTF? “Back” doesn’t actually take me anywhere but back to the Murloc. Close browser. Open Internet Explorer. Repeat performance. Jump to the Mac and try Safari. No dice and ultra-slow performance. Ugh. Back to the PC and I get through various stages that always end in that damned Murloc. Roughly two dozen times did I manage to enter my credit card info, and each time the Murloc waved his mocking little flag. “Oops!” Site shutdown. To the forums! Ah, there’s technical difficulty. The site will be up later, but no tickets have officially sold yet. Relieved, I sleep.
6pm rolls around. Awake and groggy, I stumble to the computer desk and pop on the monitor. Refresh. Ah. No murloc, but an SCV unit. Still feeling good about it. Things will be solved. I’ll have my tickets. Up until 12amish before I head back to sleep for work on Tuesday. Awake at 8:00. SCV is still staring at me with its orange metallic appendages locked in place. Fine. A buddy doesn’t have to go to work until 3:00, so he’ll try throughout the day till then.
I go to work, secure in my hopes that tickets will be procured. 3:00pm arrives with a kick in the stomach. Sold out. Site wouldn’t even let him get to the credit card information page.
Dejected.
Round three came later that night. 8:00. I’m at work. My friend is with me. Baracuda blocks our path to the store from the office, so good friend is given my password/username for the store. Ah. Nope. The Trifecta of Suck is complete.
Now I’m cruising eBay and Craigslist looking at a slew of scalpers charging at least triple the purchase price.
Gee thanks, Blizz. Way to think things through and serve the masses who support you. So tempted just to delete my account and yank the IV out completely. But it’s not likely. *sigh*
2 Steve // Aug 13, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I was in Never-Going-To-Play-This-Stupid-Game-Again mode last night, but the more that time passes I’m getting less angry. I just don’t understand how a company that usually has it’s shit together can screw up so badly. I’ll probably pay the $40 for the pay-per-view so at least my son can get the murloc bear mount…but I don’t think I’ll ever sing the praises for Blizzard quite like I used to.
3 tiffy // Aug 13, 2008 at 8:15 pm
someone needs to fucking bomb blizzard company and do it in action. id seriously just take pictures and laugh.
4 Darvisham // Aug 14, 2008 at 5:29 pm
UPDATE!
They’re doing what they should have done!
3,000 ticket raffle only to WoW players who had accounts prior to the sell-outs. No scalpers. Good luck to you all. Redemption? Possibly. But it definitely improves my opinion.
5 Steve // Aug 14, 2008 at 7:21 pm
you stole my next blog post!
j/k. I’m definitely going to try for the Blizzcon lottery. I hope everyone who wants tickets can get them.
6 Heather // Aug 20, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Poor nerds. Did you end up getting tickets or what???
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