FFXIV FanFest Tickets Are A Disaster This Year

[Ramiren]

Polls on twitter and reddit (while not exactly the most scientific) seem to have about 12-15% of people selected for US tickets, and 7-8% of people selected for EU tickets.

This is a joke, and it makes SE look absolutely incompetent, like the entire shadowbringers era player increase just flew over their heads. The Excel Centre can hold 60,000+ people if they booked up the entire thing, and while I don't expect that kind of capacity to be needed, or conducive to what is essentially, a keynote speech, a performance and some merch stands, the scope was there for greatly increased capacity on the EU side with some schedule adjustments. It seems like they probably booked an auditorium when they should have booked an event hall or two. In an era when the rest of SE is reeling from bad management and poor choices, we really don't need anything FFXIV related to be poorly managed with bad choices like this has been, that just makes it look like the rot is spreading.

Nobody wins here.

SE has lost out on revenue.
Players can't attend the event.
Those who can, will probably be attending without most of their friend group.

[Vahlnir]

Polls on twitter and reddit (while not exactly the most scientific) seem to have about 12-15% of people selected for US tickets, and 7-8% of people selected for EU tickets.

This is a joke, and it makes SE look absolutely incompetent, like the entire shadowbringers era player increase just flew over their heads. The Excel Centre can hold 60,000+ people if they booked up the entire thing, and while I don't expect that kind of capacity to be needed, or conducive to what is essentially, a keynote speech, a performance and some merch stands, the scope was there for greatly increased capacity on the EU side with some schedule adjustments. It seems like they probably booked an auditorium when they should have booked an event hall or two. In an era when the rest of SE is reeling from bad management and poor choices, we really don't need anything FFXIV related to be poorly managed with bad choices like this has been, that just makes it look like the rot is spreading.

Nobody wins here.

SE has lost out on revenue.
Players can't attend the event.
Those who can, will probably be attending without most of their friend group.

SE has been slow to catch up and KEEP up for some time now, so unfortunately none of this surprises me. They have also been very clearly investing the bare minimum in FF XIV in general, from the game itself to...well, events like this. Their golden goose can't keep them afloat forever if they don't give it a hand every now and then. The player base increased significantly, meaning the interest in this event also increased. There was no good reason that they couldn't have booked a bigger venue, which they clearly did not. As per usual, they have shot themselves in the foot and are probably wondering where all the money went because they just don't get it yet.

[Troxbark]

The funniest part of this is that instead of just doing a second raffle with the left over tickets for account holders, they just FFA the tickets so now those people had to deal with more rng but now with scalpers and bots.

[Ramiren]

There was no good reason that they couldn't have booked a bigger venue.

The irony is, they booked the biggest event venue in the UK, but only a small part of it.

[Vahlnir]

The irony is, they booked the biggest venue in the UK, but only a small part of it.

That's...even more confusing.

[rainichan]

The irony is, they booked the biggest event venue in the UK, but only a small part of it.

They did the same here for NA, but they're also sharing the space that weekend. Are there any other events going on there the same weekend? Because that would limit how much room they have available to them.

As for why they did this lotto style: here's the 2018 ticket issue that they actually apologized for, in English, on a Japanese-only Live Letter. It was bad that year. tl;dr for those that don't want to read through that thread (and I don't blame you): ShowClix messed up after ticket sales opened and had no line system like they were supposed to, nor did it have the hard stop of 4 tickets per sale when they decided to fix it while ticket sales were live instead of... pausing, throwing everyone back in line, and making it fair for everyone. If you refreshed the site you could just skip the line and buy as many tickets as you wanted, and within 10-15 minutes of the sales opening, they were gone. A lot of people were incredibly angry for people gaming the system so badly, on the next JP-only LL between the ticket sales and NA FanFest, they apologized in English to their NA playerbase.

Contrast to 2016 sales (which I went to), tickets didn't sell out until about 8 hours after they went on sale - they went on sale at 1pm, and the notice that they sold out hit at about 9pm that night.

It seems there were issues for the ~2000 tickets that 2014 Fanfest had, with the site having errors and similar to 2018 things happening. The only difference was they pulled the site down to fix it and had tickets left. They didn't bother to do that for 2018. Out of all of the years I've tried now (2016, 2018, and now this year) the 2018 one was truly the worst.

But for as much as things change, all things stay the same, because there was heavy complaints on all years over this same thing lol.

[Yeol]

NA/EU ticket situation looks very bad. Seems like JP won’t be any different. I really want to attend the JP one.

[Konstanza]

Is this thread still open. I just want to know if you can change the name on ticket for your extra person. My person flaked and Im forced to try and bring someone else or can I just bring someone else will they ID the person you bring? I don't wanna go alone I have bad anxiety

[CidHeiral]

That brings up a good question. If someone ends up not being able to go, does the ticket just go to waste since there's no reseller option like some other sites?

[rainichan]

Is this thread still open. I just want to know if you can change the name on ticket for your extra person. My person flaked and Im forced to try and bring someone else or can I just bring someone else will they ID the person you bring? I don't wanna go alone I have bad anxiety

No. There was a period where you could, but that passed back in the middle of April. All names are now locked in and you cannot change them. I got this email from the vendor in April, you likely did too.



God the preview is such potato quality, right click -> open in a new tab because the thumbnail is bad, sorry.