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How Penny Arcade manages PAX tickets
- nihilist_t21 6y agoReminds me of the "fun" year after year of getting into Blizzcon. Friends and I managed to snag tickets for 2011, (there wasn't a 2012 Blizzcon), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 before finally calling it off. I believe Blizzard switched the vendor they sold tickets through three times during that span.
- Zealotux 6y agoI was afraid they were going to bring up NFTs at some point in the article.
- qsort 6y agoThe solution, assuming they actually want one, is really simple: setup a Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction. Frankly, I doubt the premise, though. Conventions are basically advertisement, and I suspect the chaos regarding prices is actually part of the plan all along.
- ivanbakel 6y agoCould you clarify this a bit? It sounds like an auction would just be a more complicated way of raising prices, since the tickets would still go to those customers who are able to bid the most.
- qsort 6y agoYou can run auctions in a bunch of different ways; in particular Vickrey–Clarke–Groves has rules such that the optimal strategy is for each participant to bid their true evaluation. Of course the prices are going to increase. If the supply is the same and the demand increases, the price increases. There is nothing anybody can do about that.
- AndrewDucker 6y agoFTA: "Yes, we’d get to line our pockets with money for days, but we like to think of PAX as the show for the every-gamer, and if we didn’t keep badges affordable, it’s not fair to those that can only afford our current price."
- qsort 6y agoScalpers are already effectively increasing the price. If the price of the event is $100 and I value it at $300, I'm going to buy from a scalper at $200. It would be more fair to "distribute" the price increase among all participants by using an auction method that incentivizes people to bid their true evaluations. I don't want to be unfair to the guy, he seems to be understanding the problem and it's not an easy decision, but that sentence is a bit of a platitude.
- AndrewDucker 6y agoAs they say, it's only affecting about 1% of their tickets. So 99% of people aren't having their prices inflated.
- qsort 6y agoIf that is the case, then it follows that the expected price increase would be approximately the same in a Vickrey auction (barring extreme cases where the bids have sharp discontinuities).
- ivanbakel 6y agoHow does that follow? The PAX organisers are "artificially" keeping down the price of tickets by controlling supply and fighting scalpers. If instead the auction allowed potential attendees to pay more for their tickets, then those tickets would end up going to attendees that pay far above the original price - as is already true for scalped tickets. The percentage of tickets which are scalped is not a direct function of the demand on tickets.
- paulcole 6y agoI thought a Vicrey-Clarke-Groves auction could be undermined by bidder collusion and in particular in some circumstances by a single bidder making multiple bids under different names. Isn’t that exactly what scalping groups would do?
- qsort 6y agoIt can be undermined by collusion, but not if a sufficiently large portion of the bidders is actually honest like, presumably, is the case here. I'm not sure how a single bidder making multiple bids under different names would impact the math, but intuitively I'd say under the same assumption as above the system should hold: if I make N bets out of M with N << M, the effect should be small enough that the guarantees still (broadly) apply. I could be wrong here, feel free to correct me if you know better.
- paulcole 6y ago> if a sufficiently large portion of the bidders is actually honest like, presumably, is the case here. I’m not sure why you think this is the case here? If you create a system that can be gamed by a large portion of the bidders being dishonest, a large portion of the bidders will become dishonest.
- qsort 6y agoI suppose, but how realistic that really is on a scale this large? Wouldn't it be just a giant prisoner's dilemma? Unless almost all parties collude, it's still optimal to bid truthfully.
- paulcole 6y agoIf a system for selling tickets has a weak point, it will be found and exploited by scalpers. That's kind of the whole point of the original article. Every "solution" thrown out by well-meaning third parties is either exploitable by scalpers, makes the experience significantly worse for legitimate buyers, or just shifts which legitimate buyers are able to make a purchase (i.e. I didn't get to buy a ticket but you did. This solution would let me buy a ticket but wouldn't let you buy one).
- ulucs 6y ago> Khoo: We’ve run the numbers behind this, and even with a hundred pickup stations, it would take between 2-3 hours on Friday morning to pick up a badge [for Photo ID verification] I think they're missing out on the fact that the alternative is having to check PAX ticket availability for all eternity. Scalping is apparently a huge enough problem that they're subjecting people to this instead of announcing ticket sale times or doing a lottery (which are kind of mechanically the same) but hey, other people's time is free. Also funny: "PAX Prime prices hit a record high as organizers eliminate all-weekend passes" which means they have raised prices while also trying to disguise it.
- rriepe 6y agoYou want something that's fair and also selects for good con-goers. It "costs" more to line up hours in advance for a midnight movie showing too, but that's the kind of person you want at your con. The system they're using now gives a leg up to obsessive groups of friends who all really want to go together. Switch to something "fair" and next year it'll be all the boring 9-5 people with no friends.
- michaelt 6y agoTo an extent - but random releases of tickets tend to benefit people with desk jobs and soft-touch supervision. My boss doesn't mind if I'm keeping an eye on a festival website when my code's compiling, and I take 15 minutes to book a ticket when they go on sale. But a call centre worker or a doctor or a teacher or a production line worker isn't in the same position.
- lmm 6y agoSounds like that's selecting for "good con-goers" as well. You want enthusiasm, but you also want people who can afford to buy things that are being sold there and drink in the hotel bar.
- gambiting 6y agoA doctor can absolutely afford to do those things, but they probably can't buy the tickets due to the nature of their work.
- aestetix 6y agoThis is a major problem many events are facing right now. See: Burning Man, DefCon, Chaos Communication Congress (CCC), HOPE, etc. There really isn't any good way to "solve" it.
- ginko 6y agoAt least CCC partially solves this by distributing part of the available spots as voucher codes through the local clubs. You get a new code to pass on after you've redeemed yours so many people get there by knowing someone who knows someone.
- aestetix 6y agoYes, the voucher code is the best solution I have seen to this problem. It still has all kinds of problems, but it's the least bad fix I know of.
- ulucs 6y agoThere are really good ways to solve it. Tie the tickets to names to disallow resale (have you heard of plane tickets being scalped?), or sell at the market clearing price so there are no profits for the scalpers. The main problem is that the events don't really want to solve this problem. Ticketmaster takes a cut of the scalped tickets, scarcity generates insane amounts of buzz. They should just try being honest instead.
- aestetix 6y agoThat doesn't work. If you make the tickets non-transferrable, then it prevents last minute ticket swaps, and will piss off people and cause a PR nightmare. Plus you have to deal with fake IDs, expired IDs, name changes, etc. And many events cater to people who'd rather not have their legal names associated with an event for a wide variety of reasons. If you want them to be transferrable, then you have to set up an exchange like Burning Man did to manage them, and it requires a ton of staff overhead that takes away from dealing with the event itself. And creates the risk that a database full of your attendees personal information could get hacked. I can't speak for Ticketmaster, as I have not used it very much, and none of the events I listed use it either.
- follower 6y agoNote this article appears to be from 2015.
- yellowapple 6y agoOne idea unaddressed here is simply having more PAXen. If 90% of attendees are on the West Coast, then the distribution of PAX events should probably reflect that; instead of putting all of PAX West's eggs in the Seattle basket, maybe consider diversifying to, say, Portland or San Francisco or Los Angeles or Vegas or San Diego?
- prepend 6y agoOn using a lottery or requiring a profile... > Scalpers could, over time, flood the submission box, profile creation, or whatever means we’d use to collect entries, and ultimately, you’d have a higher percentage of scalpers purchasing badges than before. It seems pretty simple to require profiles and then do basic analysis to identify fake profiles. It’s not like they have billions like Twitter, they’d only have like what 50-150k? I think it’s possible without requiring a link to a social media profile.
- prepend 6y agoI went to a con that created all the badges beforehand and each badge had our photo and name and such. So pickup was really fast. That worked out pretty well. I suspect that just mailing the badge beforehand would have worked well instead of requiring pickup.
- mimikatz 6y agoThere is a solution, they even know it is the solution, they just choose not to implement it for other reasons. "Increase Price. And this is what you’re touching on here. I get this “solution” suggested to me quite a bit, and yes, there is validity to it. If scalpers didn’t see the profits they do, they wouldn’t be incentivized to participate in the first place. But it brings up the pickle we are often in, which is that pesky tradeoff again. Yes, we’d get to line our pockets with money for days, but we like to think of PAX as the show for the every-gamer, and if we didn’t keep badges affordable, it’s not fair to those that can only afford our current price." You either charge what the thing is worth or you will have people arbitraging your system. That's the world, no getting around it without adding tons of extra costs. I am constantly surprised how A. Unpopular the idea of charging what people will pay is B. how rarely it is done.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago> I am constantly surprised how A. Unpopular the idea of charging what people will pay is B. how rarely it is done. It's unpopular because it alienates the fans that don't have a lot of money.
- bb611 6y agoSince this article, PA has adopted a way to pay more money to jump the line - join their patreon (Club PA). For $5/month you will get a couple days early access to buy up to 4 sets of tickets. Also, Robert Khoo left PA the year after this article was published.