2019 Ticket info.

ItWasAllGiallo
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by ItWasAllGiallo »

In terms of online ticket purchase experiences for FF, our crew may have had better but certainly have had worse (Vue circle of death anyone?) Got there after about an hour after multiple kick outs, payment failures etc.

One real issue I have now is that I have 2 festival passes I didn’t think I’d managed to buy as the page crashed on payment section and then timed out every time I tried to go to the “my account” page.

Another member of the crew bought a pair of tickets for me as she was having more luck. So
we now have 6 rather than the 4 needed....
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The Soapmaker
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by The Soapmaker »

I thought after all these years it was finally going to be the one where I couldn't get tickets.

I guess that'll be next year.

At least when we physically had to queue they didn't say "yes, I know it looks like till number 2 is free, but we're only prepared to serve you at till number 3, so you'll just have to go to the back of the queue and hope you're lucky next time you get to the front."

And now I'm just waiting for those people to turn up and say "oh, it was great, we got eight seats right in the middle of row J, just like we wanted. All done by five past twelve."
HeadOnAStick
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by HeadOnAStick »

I think last year was smooth for me. Still, it turns out that there's no horror film that can make my heart race the way buying a festival pass can.
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JimmyTheZeke
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by JimmyTheZeke »

cineBAKA wrote: Sat Jul 06, 2019 1:18 pm Finally managed to get my ticket. :lol: I was aiming for middle of E (and got there twice to payments timing out), but ended up with middle of F after an hour. I'm happy despite the experience. Literally everything is paid for and booked, hotel and travel too. I just gotta turn up and survive. :twisted:

Just a suggestion, but after experiencing the payments timing out, the pages in a constant state of rebooting you to a specific screen, and seats being help up in people's carts, wouldn't it be an idea to allow us to see what is in our carts and allow us to pick up the purchase from where it went wrong? I feel like this should be technically possible, whether feasible with your set up, budget and infrastructure I don't know. Something to consider, if it hasn't been already.
I got middle E! Don't throw popcorn at me neighbour! :eek:
cineBAKA
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by cineBAKA »

JimmyTheZeke wrote: Sat Jul 06, 2019 2:08 pm I got middle E! Don't throw popcorn at me neighbour! :eek:
I will be sitting in judgement of the back of the person's head who is in my originally selected seat! I hope they can live with my judgement. I'm too polite to throw anything but a mean look, unfortunately.
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The Soapmaker
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by The Soapmaker »

All settled down now. There are still about 30 weekend passes left, but all right at the front or at the extreme ends of rows.
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JimmyTheZeke
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by JimmyTheZeke »

cineBAKA wrote: Sat Jul 06, 2019 2:29 pm
JimmyTheZeke wrote: Sat Jul 06, 2019 2:08 pm I got middle E! Don't throw popcorn at me neighbour! :eek:
I will be sitting in judgement of the back of the person's head who is in my originally selected seat! I hope they can live with my judgement. I'm too polite to throw anything but a mean look, unfortunately.
I can indeed live with that... :lol:
ChrisReynolds
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by ChrisReynolds »

I got my tickets reasonably easily this year, only having my payment rejected twice before it went through. For the thousands of quid in ticketing fees that nutickets are making, it’s disgraceful that Frightfest customers are having these experiences. My guess is that they cut corners and allocated less bandwidth this year.
jonbly
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by jonbly »

At least when we physically had to queue, it didn't mean spending more than the ticket price on travel and accomodation, followed by three hours of queueing in either pounding rain or burning sun, for the chance of a not particularly good seat.

Oh... wait... that is what it meant.
The Aylmer
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by The Aylmer »

I wasn't even planning on getting the tickets for our group this year (my mum passed away ten days ago so I've been busy sorting out all the funeral arrangements, closing accounts and shit). In fact I'd completely forgotten they went on sale today until I got an email reminding me one of our lot was on there trying to get us five seats together at that very moment while having very little luck. So I casually wandered onto the site to see how the sales were going and ended up getting the tickets myself (and yes, that white screen with no confirmation of purchase was very disconcerting until the email arrived saying I had them). Still, given the inevitable and by now traditional problems with trying to get passes online I have to say this still seemed easier and less stressful than usual. Well, less stressful than organising a funeral anyhow. I think my mum was probably up there somewhere breezing me through some of those frozen screens!
benj
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by benj »

I won’t reiterate what everyone else has said. Frankly, I wouldn’t blame Ian if he steered clear of this thread due to the sheer ire the booking process has drawn this year.

Last year was fine for me (ticket booked by 12:03), the year before that scarily fast (seeing those dots go red in real-time) but also fine (ticket booked by 12:02). This year it took me an hour.

Now, either there’s been an unprecedented leap in demand for tickets this year or nutickets was bs’ing about being prepared. As someone else said, either they cheaped out on the bandwidth or didn’t spin up enough load balancing servers and, given their hefty cut, this is a shocking lack of technical proficiency, likely for the sake of saving a few quid on their hosting costs.

I really hope Ian tears them a new one as this cannot go on. Frightfest deserves so much better than this. We’ve seen from previous years that this system is capable of dealing with demand. There’s no reason they couldn’t have increased resources in those agonising 90 minutes it took for the site to become usable but they simply didn’t.

One final comment. I don’t know if anyone recalls those colour blindness tests from school where there’s all the coloured dots spelling something out? Well, the seating plan has almost exactly the same colours. For God’s sake, can whoever decided those colours to denote available/ unavailable spare a thought for those of us with colour blindness! (And go on a ‘designing for accessibility’ course) It was near impossible for me to tell the difference🙁
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The Soapmaker
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by The Soapmaker »

I can only compare with the booking process for the London Film Festival.

The first couple of years they went online, their system was utterly shambolic. I booked my tickets at work one year and got so sweary, furious and destructive that I had to promise my colleagues that I'd do all future bookings at home, forevermore.

Nowadays, booking for the LFF is - touch wood and cross fingers - almost entirely smooth and painless. It's a little slow for the first 20 or 30 minutes, a bit nerve-wracking (because I always expect the worst), but - touch wood again - the system doesn't crash and tickets don't vanish from your basket.

They got it sorted. I can't understand why FrightFest and nutickets, or whatever they're called, can't achieve the same thing.
DavieT
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by DavieT »

Congrats to all those who secured their tickets for this years 20th Anniversary festival - hope you all have a fantastic time as I’ve done in the past 14 years I’ve attended. 👍 Having a break from it all this year and having my own private Genre Fest at home with a few mates! :D Booze, Food, wall to wall Blu-rays and no queues for the bogs :lol:
SarahSmiley
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by SarahSmiley »

I got my ticket, after a lot of difficulty, but ended up with a seat in D55, not exactly great.
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Whiptail
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Re: 2019 Ticket info.

Post by Whiptail »

I had to take an extended break at work to try and get seats. After an hour, I finally managed to get to the payment page and see the hypnotising magenta flower spinning around. It kept timing out but I checked my phone and saw that it had gone through! Didn't get my preferred seat, but after frantically clicking all the left over green dots in panic, I managed to get J-34. Hope my neighbours don't mind me spilling all my nachos again.
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