last week I got an email. Not just any email, but one that promised to bring happiness, joy, and ANGUS YOUNG…. I got a newsletter from the St. Pete Times Forum informing me that AC/DC tix were going on sale Saturday morning at 10am. I was ready and waiting to get my two tix, hopefully somewhere not on the otherside of the building from the stage. 10am hits and I search for tix. It was a 10 minute wait on Ticketmaster, and all they could give me were upper deck tix ON THE OTHERSIDE OF THE BUILDING FROM THE STAGE. I tried for 30 minutes to get something not in the 300’s and not on the side of/behind the stage. I gave up, taking it as a sign that it wasn’t meant to be. I know StubHub has the tix, but it isn’t worth it to me.

I signed in at exactly 9 am and go nothing. It would seem it sold out in a matter of 3 minutes….because that is about how long my wait was before it told me there were no tickets availble. That seems strange to me…..but I guess it is what it is.

The same thing that happened to others happened to me as well. It just doesn’t make any sense when I go on the moment the clock turns from 8:59 to 9:00 and there aren’t 2 tickets together for the games. The Rays obviously withhold lots of tickets to force people into buying season tickets for next year. They tell you this is the only way that guarantees you playoff tickets, talk about holding the fans hostage. Then when not enough people sign up for 2009, they release the remaining tickets they were holding, as evidenced by what they did for the earlier games. I understand they want to make as much money as possible, but this policy is complete bullshit. They’re alienating and pissing off a lot of true fans like myself who have been going to many games for years. Instead of sending out false hope to everyone, they should figure out exactly how many tickets they want to make available (which should be ALL of their unsold seats), and divide that number by 4 since everyone always buys the maximum. That way everyone who receives the e-mail is ACTUALLY guaranteed a seat and isn’t let down by the whole process. Sorry for the long post, it’s my first one, but this whole situation has really pissed me off!!

If they are trying to win over fans, this isn’t how you do it. Especially the loyal ones. They need to come out and explain how the process works and how many tickets are available and quit trying to blame MLB for the headaches. Why send 10,000 e-mails out for 4,000 tickets, it completely baffles me.

ALCS 1: over 2100 tix listed…mostly auctions…and way over face value
ALCS 2: over 2200 tix listed…mostly auctions…and way over face value

The AC/DC tix I mentioned in the first post…I found tons on StubHub within 30 minutes after they supposedly went on sale to the public. You just don’t know how many people are out there just to make a buck or who actually want to go to the games.

Hey guys we all the big kick in the ass this morning. Got the password on Saturday afternoon and freaking excited and waited all weekend to be able to purchase tickets online. So while I was waiting around for my class to start I though of an idea of trying to use as many computers and try to get lucky on the theory of probability. Well that sh#t did not work either. My buddy and I both won the drawing this round, so on four computers this morning at exactly 9:00am I type in two different passwords for game 1 and game 2. What happen next was gay ticket master tell me I was 6 minutes behind, then 3 minutes, then back to 13 minutes (which was damm confusing) and still got zero tickets after trying a billion different combinations. So after some research this is my conclusion of how we all got f’d in the ass.

First, even know they look like different codes they are really all the same code to ticketmaster as stated before. So I could give my code to 10 other people and they could go on and purchase tickets and ticketmaster would have no idea. Because of this people took advantage of the system and were selling their code on ebay for $25 and $15 dollars as many times they wanted to.

Second, ticket hores (a.k.a scalpers, tickets brokers and all other ticket people) signed up all of their employees, family, friends, and hell even fake people for the drawing. So when tickets opened at 9am they had coded on their computer to purchase tickets. If you look at eBay and stubhub a lot of the tickets are together or all in the same row but different auctions for two tickets.

Another thing I found out from ticketmaster was that the faster your internet connection the quicker you could get in to purchase tickets. So all these ticketing website that sell upper deck outfield seat for 6 times the normal price could get tickets before other people, if they had a faster online connection. So the reason it would go from 3 to 14 to 6 to 10 minutes was because people had faster internet connections. There was really no such thing as “waiting place in line”

So after finding all this out IT JUST SUCKS!!! plain and simple a lot of true fans are either going to purchase tickets now for double or triple the price or have to watch the game at home because of the way things were done. I do not blame the Rays for this yet because MLB runs the show in the postseason, but there has to be a better way so when you get a important email about being able to purchase tickets for a playoff, that email has to hold its value. Because If I get selected for the World Series I probably wont even have a chance because of the way it is run by MLB, Ticketmaster, or possibly the Rays.

Sorry for the venting, but just a die heart fan that has not yet to see his team in the postseason because of stupid ticketing purposes.

I always bought tickets a month or two in advance, but back in May, the box office wouldn’t sell me the seats I wanted anymore. When I would go to the games later, I would see the seats I wanted to buy, and they were empty, or worse, someone that got online an hour before the game was able to buy them. So I went to the Ticket Sales office at the Trop to complain. I learned that the seats I wanted were blocked out for the 6-game plans. I was then introduced to the half season ticket plan. I bought a prorated weekend plan back in July that had about 15 games left on the schedule, which was just a little more than I had planned to attend for the rest of the season. I didn’t want to go to all of the games I had tickets for. I was able to trade in unused tickets from missed/past games for other games, and I was able to trade in tickets for future games for different games. I also sold some tickets to a friend. The only reason I bought this plan versus the 6-game plan was that it guaranteed me posteseason seats. Although this does nobody any good this year, some of you may consider doing like I did and maybe once the Rays look postseason bound next year, you can get in on a prorated half-season ticket plan with some friends and have rights to postseason tickets without going though all of the obstacles.