It’s been getting more and more difficult each year to get tickets (not to mention hotel rooms) for Comic-Con International, and each of the last few years I’ve been wondering if this one might be the year I’d be shut out. The current system is a lottery: Everyone who wants tickets signs into a “waiting room” website before the sale starts, and the system randomly selects batches of people to let into the ticketing system, slowly enough that it won’t crash under the load, until all the tickets are sold out.
It took about an hour to sell out on Saturday.
Despite teaming up — you can buy tickets for yourself and up to two other people, so you can make arrangements among a group of three that whoever gets in first will buy tickets for the others — we watched as first Preview Night, then Saturday, then Friday, then Thursday, and finally Sunday each sold out. The official SDCC Twitter account was more timely with that information than the waiting room, which refreshed its message every 2 minutes, but insisted that Thursday was “very low” for at least one refresh after they reported the sellout on Twitter.
It’s going to be the first year since 1990 that I haven’t been to San Diego for Comic-Con.
Oddly, I’m only mildly disappointed.
- I was half-expecting it.
- WonderCon and Long Beach Comic-Con are both great conventions in the area (WonderCon 2014 & LBCC 2014 writeups) that are a lot easier to get into (and less crazy to attend). The kiddo might enjoy Comikaze — he’ll be almost five by then. (Wow!)
- I’ve been lucky the last few years, so I guess now it’s someone else’s turn.
- If we really want that SDCC experience, there’s the possibility of taking the train down to San Diego on Saturday to look at the stuff outside that doesn’t require a ticket. The kiddo will like the train ride too, I suspect.
Then again, the last two times I’ve gone to San Diego, I’ve gotten a first-hand look at the inside of an emergency room. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t try for three in a row.
See Also: Convention Photos & Write-Ups
Thanks again for the team-up, Wayne. It was a valiant effort!
It’s sad when cons get so big you can’t have fun at them anymore. 🙁
Hi five back at ya! Great team up, just bad luck. Let’s see what comes.
I feel kind of the same way as you said in your blog post. There are indeed more alternatives nowadays that are more local.
So I can’t say it’s a total loss, just a shame. I may indeed go down one day of SDCC to see the sights outside. I will miss the panels and some booths, but I have also seen more and more companies have already seen the Comic Con warning lights so have arranged activities and demo areas outside of the convention center proper. So for the non-ticket-holders, there can still be stuff to do. Just less chance of seeing those stars in Hall H… wait… well… ;p
🙁 I was wondering if you’d had any luck.
That lottery system sounds annoying. But then the alternative isn’t necessarily better. PAX, which is our yearly con, tends to sell out in minutes, and it’s first come first serve… typically around 10am on a weekday. The aggravation of waiting to be sure you don’t miss the sale announcement, and then seeing badges disappear within moments of the announcement, sucks. This year we’re actually skipping PAX, not because of ticket availability, but because we chose to go to Star Wars Celebration instead.
I was going to say that SDCC used to be like that, but now that I think about it, it wasn’t. One year it sold out a few weeks before the con. The next year it sold out a few months before the con. And the next year the system crashed during presale and they had to retool everything. Each year it’s been tweaked a bit more to keep the servers from falling over. *Hotels,* on the other hand… Those have been a nightmare for quite a while!
On a related note, we were actually thinking about asking you & Sarah about PAX next weekend. We were thinking of branching out to either PAX or Emerald City as a replacement, and EC turns out to be the week before WonderCon.
Our typical PAX experience has been… book the hotel at the beginning of January, then wait for tix to go on sale in April/May (it’s always SOME time after PAX East). Then when it “feels” like sales are imminent (based on Forum/Twitter chatter), camp the website while at work every day until the sale.
Additional irony is that we had discussed with some friends skipping PAX in favor of SDCC one of these years. That sounds like it may not be a good plan.
That’s really too bad — something’s wrong when the set-up/system’s gotten to this point. I’m glad you’re not too disappointed, though, and that there are other good local cons to go to.
I think the biggest problem is that everyone knows tickets will sell out fast, so everyone tries to buy them right away, so they do. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. I don’t know which solution is better.
They keep talking about moving the con to a larger venue somewhere, but they also keep renegotiating with San Diego…and despite all the trouble, I think the con would lose a lot of its identity if it were to move somewhere else. WonderCon has definitely changed since moving from San Francisco to Anaheim. I think it’s weathered that change pretty well, but there’s no denying that it’s different.
Las Vegas would be drastically different, and I’m still not convinced the Los Angeles or Anaheim convention centers and surrounding areas are quite ready to cope with the scale. Though Anaheim’s convention center is expanding, and the SDCC team is gaining experience with WonderCon, so a few years down the road, who knows?