After a horribly failed attempt at getting Colorado Rockies tickets that I previously mentioned, we are now hoping based on a Rockies press release that the ticket sales will resume tomorrow at noon.
After all the day’s mess sorted out, and I was able to do some reading on the very active post at denverpost.com it has come down to the following facts of today’s ticket sales blunder by Rockies management, ownership, and the company contracted with the MLB for ticket sales, Paciolan (link intentionally omitted).
First, this has been blamed as a malicious attack by hackers, however, the facts state that approximately 8.5 million visitors were active on the ColoradoRockies.com at the time tickets were initially to be sold. I find that this really seems to fall more on poor IT Department talent at the ticket venue, Paciolan who I found out later were even running Windows 2000 servers for fluff’s sake. But despite all the visits to the MLB page for the Colorado Rockies, which I did not once today notice even the slightest slow down in connecting to, was able to stay up all day with all those 8.5 million visitors landing on the site. Yet somhow, the Paciolan systems seemed to take a crap and die before even 500 tickets could be sold. The simple fact would have to be that Paciolan had no idea how big this would be considering that they were not restricting sales to outside states as many teams seem to have used in the past as informed by message board posts at the denverpost. The fact that even prior to Sunday, when season ticket holders were able to buy tickets, I saw many listed on StubHub from tons of season ticket holders looking to charge 700 or even 1000$ for ROCKPILE tickets!!!!!
If I were living in some country where the all mighty american buck is so valuable that 1000$ could support a family for months, why wouldn’t I try to buy tickets, and turn a quick profit on the hundreds of online venues where such items can be sold for auction or set prices. Ticket scalpers across the country are able to use their tools of trade to get tickets, and then charge the real fans, us, triple, quadruple, even ten times face value because that’s how they make a living. By buying something cheap, and selling it to us for more than the manufacturer originally intended. Supply and Demand at its simplest. But we are Americans after all, so why not blow hard earned cash, and give in to the pressure. If only fans gathered together once, and left 20,000 plus seats unsold at a World Series game, or even the Super Bowl, and left the scalpers holding , it would be a hard lesson learned for them, out tons of cash with a handful of tickets. But we give in each time, and submit to the mercy of merciless ticket scalpers.
I hope for my own sanity that tomorrow does go smooth, since they did mention that they have backup plans in place for tomorrow should anything goes wrong again, which I’m sure will happen since they are just turning back on the same system, hoping for the best.
Good luck to the rest of you Rockies fans out there… Be vigilant so the damn scalpers and sox fans don’t get them.
