FFXIV FanFest Tickets Are A Disaster This Year

[HyperiusUltima]

It’s like they didn’t learn from 2018. First the lottery, which makes 0 sense because Scalpers are all over the place - then the general sale, which once again goes to guess who! - SCALPERS.

There are some people who got the tickets legitimately, but this scalping problem is a big issue. On top of that, they literally had 15,000 tickets - several thousand selling out in 10 minutes - FAR LESS TIME THAN 2018!

What Square needs to do is reward its veterans that actually care about game and look at sub time - as well as play time. Most of these scalpers I bet are bots on XIV that literally have next to no playtime because they get banned in waves. Rewarding players for being loyal to a game through FanFest would make things better.

The other thing they need to do is RENT OUT A VERY LARGE VENUE. This means larger capacity to help match more demand, because the demand was extremely high as always to go. They’re sharing a venue with another convention, so if they don’t have the room, then oh well.

[PaulH]

Yeah the EU is as frustrating, if I don't get tickets that is fine its a lottery and I was lucky to go to Fanfest in Paris. What does bother me, we get no announcement on social media that EU period lottery application period is over unlike the USA.

Winners are to be told by the 15th of March, but lucky winners get told at 5:18pm GMT on March 15th and then another twitter that we now have to wait till the 16th in sort of second waive. I get the USA is first, we wait behind the general sales, but give EU the same blooming respect as other territories.

Congratulations to winners of the first waive.

[PredatoryCatgirl]

Wait, didn't they say that the winners' real names are kept on record, and you need to present ID with the ticket this time? How does that work for scalping?

[DPZ2]

Limiting ticket purchases to two and requiring the original credit card (or was it ID?) to be presented to attend were the two anti-scalping methodologies I believe they adopted for this year.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Limiting ticket purchases to two and requiring the original credit card (or was it ID?) to be presented to attend were the two anti-scalping methodologies I believe they adopted for this year.

It's already been shown you can change the name on the tickets through showclix. And names weren't prefilled I believe. You just... Put in w/e name you wanted for the tickets.



That's how people who got lotto tickets were trading them around. All winning the lotto got you was a code. No info needed to match SE account or anything.

[Malykris]

I'm gonna speak for myself mostly, but I do wanna note that there are some of us veteran players who feel the same as I do in the regard of attempting to go to Fanfest this year.

The preface is that I am a player who was in the PS3 Beta of ARR, I've been playing for 10 years and have given so much time and faith into this game. For the first time in these 10 years of playing the game, I am both hurt and disappointed. I've been wanting to go to FanFest ever since the first one. I've never been able to go because up to this point in my life, I didn't have the means to go and I've had to work hard in my life to get to where I am now. And now that I finally have the means to go, it just so happens to be the FanFest where people who want to go will be subjected to the will of luck.

The initial setting of it being a lottery was already not optimistic. Learning that there would 15,000 tickets feels like it's not enough when the player base for North America, let alone the rest of the world, has grown exponentially large over the last few years. Out of the active players of North America, with each person who got an email getting two tickets, that means only 7,500 people got that email. There are a lot of theories/ways people could still scalp these tickets, but the main fact of the matter is also that all the tickets could be potentially sold out - there's no separate pool for general sales.

Entering General Sales felt less optimistic in terms of logistics. Despite there being "several thousand" tickets left, which one could surmise is either three to five thousand tickets left, that's at the most a third of the tickets to now the rest of the world. And yet, even though it was told that this would be a first come, first serve attempt, it isn't. You had to wait in line where your place is completely randomized - a second lotto for a larger pool of people. To add insult to injury, there were ways you could game the system - you could have multiple browsers open and that would be a position in line, on multiple devices that can include your phone as well.

Do I deserve to go because I'm a long time player since the rebirth of the game? No. How much time or how much love I have for this game doesn't make it obligatory for Square-Enix or Yoshi-P to give me a ticket to FanFest. But I, along with everyone who feel the same as I do about FFXIV, deserve a better chance than leaving it all up to luck. I can't say that I have a better solution to how to go about selling the tickets, but I know sure as hell it wasn't this.

[Brynne]

While I'm extremely disappointed about not getting fanfest tickets, I don't think that SE should necessarily prioritize players based on how long they've been subbed. That's not fair to players who haven't been playing as long but are just as excited about the game and fanfest as any of us.

How much of a problem were the scalpers, exactly? Does anyone have numbers on how many of them got tickets compared to legit players? I'd imagine some "fanfest ticket sales" outside of the main channel are scams, frankly.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

While I'm extremely disappointed about not getting fanfest tickets, I don't think that SE should necessarily prioritize players based on how long they've been subbed. That's not fair to players who haven't been playing as long but are just as excited about the game and fanfest as any of us.

How much of a problem were the scalpers, exactly? Does anyone have numbers on how many of them got tickets compared to legit players? I'd imagine some "fanfest ticket sales" outside of the main channel are scams, frankly.

It's not really scalpers as much as people gaming the system. There were people buying up a bunch of start editions to have a higher chance of getting codes.



We were told codes were locked to the account and things would be checked but that wasn't true.

[Brynne]

It's not really scalpers as much as people gaming the system. There were people buying up a bunch of start editions to have a higher chance of getting codes.



We were told codes were locked to the account and things would be checked but that wasn't true.

I'm confused. Each account could only enter the draw once, so were these people making multiple accounts to enter more than once? If so, I'm not sure how SE could guard against it. There are already people who play the game on multiple accounts and unfortunately they'd have higher chances because of it.

[Seraphor]

You needed an active sub for 90 days in order to enter the lottery for 2 tickets. I'm not sure scalping from the lottery is going to be that prevalent. Once the tickets go up for live sale though sure.

In general though, do you have a better suggestion for selling tickets for an event with far more demand than availability?