If, at any point, you find yourself running a multi-billion dollar company which throws up a self-promotional annual event, sells attendance tickets at $125 a pop… and they sell out in 15 seconds, you’ve probably done something extremely right.

While these might not be Michael Morhaime’s exact thoughts, Blizzard deserves credit for having BlizzCon tickets sold out within seconds of becoming available. Although it was not “officially” confirmed, an experiment run by IncGamers provides some justification for the strange ticket queue system that Blizzard had used.

A staff member of IncGamers tried the new system and refreshed the site every second before sales opening. Four seconds after the sales had started, the queue was over 2.500 buyers long, and 10 seconds later the queue was full. The actual queue time to pay the tickets took about 30 minutes. Every fan in the queue could buy up to five tickets.

The event is planned to take place in a convention centre fit to accomodate nearly 30,000 people, and the rest of the tickets (A guesstimate total of 10,000-14,000) will be realeased in a second batch ten days from now, on May 30th. Keep your wallets close by – you’ll only have a few seconds to get in on the ground floor.

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3 Comments to “BlizzCon Tickets Sold Out Ridiculously Fast; Brace for Batch #2”

1. 4poolfastexpand — May 20, 2009 @ 8:44 am
   

   Wtf? 10 seconds?
   Had i been going this year i would have been heartbroken. There’s no way Australian internet can refresh that fast in a pool of more than 30,000 other users!

2. BlizzconTicketHolder — May 21, 2009 @ 10:51 am
   

   I keep hearing this 5-15 second business…it is just hype to get people pissed or for people to justify their slowness…

   I was not one of the people spam refreshing, I was on vent when someone else told me tickets were up for sale, I immediately switched to the page, hit refresh, selected my 4 tickets…by now at least 10 seconds had passed since I was told tickets were up. And I was 1,200 in queue. My friend who forgot his blizzard store password took over a MINUTE to get logged in and enter the queue, and he got in at 10,350 … which of course is too far away to get tickets but it still didn’t give him a “queue is full” message or whatever crap people claim happened after 10 seconds.

   Once my transaction was complete, I jumped back in queue to see what position it was at and I was around 22,000 something…and I never saw a queue is full message. I think people are just trying to stir up negativity and justify their slowness. There are people on the blizzcon forums who were 3,500 in queue and got their tickets, they too didn’t spam refresh and were probably a good 20 seconds late…so this 4 seconds crap is just ridiculous.

3. Not Hype — May 30, 2009 @ 10:06 am
   

   I waited 2 seconds because my browser fucked up and now I’m 10800th in line. Now at 10,000 and only 40% stock left :’(