Blizzard Apoligizes For Blizzcon Ticket Chaos
After the server-crashing and fail errors that plagued the selling of Blizzcon tickets this year, (compared to last year when tickets were available for a week), Blizzard fans were justifiably upset. It seems it didn't occur to Blizzard how great the demand would be from not just WOW players, but Starcraft and Diablo fans as well. Now Blizzard President Mike Morhaime has issued this apology.
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
Hopefully this new system ends up being a bit more fair than the old one, (sidenote, scalpers are already trying to charge quite a large sum for passes), and time will tell if fans accept the apology.
Statement from Mike Morhaime [WorldofWarcraft.com]
Sgt. Sausagepants
Posted to MMOs, Video Games on 14 August 2008
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: Blizzcon, WOW
This whole ticket fiasco has really changed my view about Blizzard. You could of almost called me a fan boy a couple of weeks ago, but after this whole mess I can no longer say I'm a big fan of them. This whole 3k extra tickets just seems like a way for them to make an extra $300,000. If they really cared about what happened they could show it by giving those tickets away for free via the lottery system, in the end they are "extra" tickets that they didn't count on selling in the first place.
I guess I'm just really bitter about the whole thing. I never went to the previous Blizzcon's and was looking forward to checking it out this year.
I think it's commendable that they're trying to make up for it. And for the record, it's could'VE.