BlizzCon 2008 Sold Out

A few years ago, when the first BlizzCon was hosted at Anaheim Convention Center, it took a few days to sell out; At $100 per ticket, people were rather unsure whether the convention would be worth that kind of money. Last year, at the second BlizzCon, I think people decided that it was worth the trip to Anaheim, if only for the cool factor of the Murloc Suit in the goody bag; this year, the goody bag includes a polar bear mount with a flag waving murloc, and apparently that's a good enough goody that some ticket scalpers are already selling their extra BlizzCon tickets for $400.

Consider for a moment that people were going nuts for the Murloc suit, an inventory item that gave no stat enhancements, but did change your avatar into a flag-waving Murloc. Murlocs are the love-hate villain of World of Warcraft -- you fight them as a newbie, all the way up to the high level undead murlocs -- I often joked that WoW really should have been WoM - World of Murlocs, just because of the sheer number of the amphibious reptile men that need to be slaughtered in the name of the Horde (or the Alliance). Mounts, even after all this time are still one of the most desired items in WoW -- they look cool, and are sure attention grabbers (especially if you have one of the ones that you can ride at any level, but may not necessarily give a speed boost).

With BlizzCon 2008, the convention sold out in less than a day; while we aren't talking Comic-Con crowds of 130,000+, we are talking about 10,000+ tickets sold in a matter of minutes.

Yesterday at around noon, BlizzCon sales went live; it became quickly clear that their servers could not handle the amount of users hitting their site, buying up tickets, and they promptly took it down. They brought it back up, and the server died again, going down for an hour or more. They did this a few more times up until 6pm when they brought down the server until the next day at noon. Today at noon, there were close to 10,000 tickets available, in a matter of minutes, those tickets were sold, the server died a few times, and the server was closed for ticket sales until 8PM tonight. At 8PM, the server promptly died, and came back 10 minutes later, and sold out the remaining tickets in the next five minutes. This process was a major fiasco; instead of a escrow system to buy the tickets, the tickets required several steps before you were given the option to confirm your purchase, and at each step required the server to send a message back to the potential purchaser; however, when the server can't handle all the requests, it sends back errors, and one is forced to hit reload over and over again; at the same time the potential purchaser has no idea what's going wrong, or if their order is going through. I tried to purchase tickets 4 or 5 different times; in all cases, the batch of tickets sold out as I was putting in my credit card information. How did I know they sold out? The shopping cart kindly told me so AFTER booting me back to the front page of the store.

Here's the thing -- I can almost guarantee you that almost 50 - 75% of those tickets sold may not actually be used for admission, but rather for the purchase of the goody bag for resale, so Blizzard is fully capable of overselling the convention, because even with the crowds of people at BlizzCon 2007, I'd say there were no more than 3,000 to 5,000 people in attendance; the convention floor never got so full of people that one felt crowded. However, this year's BlizzCon should be a good one: Diablo III, Starcraft II and Wrath of the Lich King all make their appearance this year, which are all upcoming products with a massive fan-following.