This post was updated Sept. 17 at 5:02 p.m.
Tickets for Bruin Bash 2018 sold out within an hour and a half despite setbacks at the Central Ticket Office.
At 18 minutes into ticket availability, the Campus Events Commission tweeted the CTO had reported problems with its site. This year, instead of the lottery system, Bruin Bash floor tickets were released on the website and Facebook event page in a manner that allowed those who first accessed the page to get tickets first, putting those after them in a queue. Though the loading screens took many students more than 30 minutes to break through, Alley Madison, the Campus Events commissioner, said the site did not crash this year.
“It was an issue of heavy traffic and routing to on-sales of the ticketing,” the rising fourth-year English student said. “We had sold 1,600 tickets by 11 a.m.”
The multiple links led to different tickets, said Isaiah Rutledge, a rising third-year political science student. The link posted on the Facebook event page initially loaded sold-out tickets to events from 2017-2018 like those for Spring Sing and JazzReggae Fest. Madison said the heavy traffic to the tickets page prevented the link from uploading the Bruin Bash tickets until about 50 minutes into the sale. The links to the CTO sale were correct, but the site had not updated yet, she said.
Students like rising third-year psychobiology student Arissa Santos said while they understood the traffic caused slow connection to the servers, there were multiple links to the tickets, which confused them. Santos said she appreciated that CEC and the Cultural Affairs Commission acted as a bridge between students and the CTO, but two links made her question which one was actually correct, when both functioned to bring people to the correct queue.
While the loading screen informed students they were in line for tickets, Sarah Ahmed, a rising second-year psychobiology student, said some people seemed to bypass the queue. She said some people would wait on the page, which instructed them not to back out because they were in line, while others would click one of the working links later and be redirected to the purchasing page quicker than those in line.
CTO Director Paul Abramson said the possible queue-skipping glitch had not come to their attention until the Bruin Bash floor ticketing process had ended, but they will be contacting Ticketmaster to look into it.
Santos said the people in her apartment logged in through the same device to obtain their tickets because two of their computers brought them to the purchasing page while three sent them to a queue. She managed to help two of her friends get tickets through her device instead of waiting on the processing screen.
“A lot of people got tickets for their friends if only one device was working and everyone was logging in and out of their accounts, going to the same link,” Santos said. “I closed out my six tabs of processing and logged in for everybody else on CTO … and got my friends tickets.”
Madison said CEC and CAC worked to make sure the ticketing process went smoothly, communicating with students through Twitter and Facebook as problems – like slow traffic – became clear. She also said the tickets were on a first-come, first-served basis, and are now sold out for floor seating. Though she said the confirmation emails she saw screenshotted seemed to mention mentioned a lottery, anyone who received them is guaranteed their tickets because there is no lottery system.
CEC posted a press release to their Facebook event page about the issues they encountered with the first round of tickets, but Madison said they will be clarifying issues with routing links for the tickets available Wednesday and Thursday.
“For the 100- and 200-level ticketing, we are talking to CTO to try to make that as streamlined as possible. The traffic may cause some waiting issues, but we will make sure students are prepared for that,” Madison said. “Insofar as routing issues through our website and social media, we will make sure everything is cohesive with CTO.”