Bodies On The Road To San Diego: SDCC 2013 Tickets Sell Out In About 90 Minutes

sdcc_logoSo, you thinking about going to San Diego Comic-Con this year? Yeah, well, you can stop. Because it’s sold out.

Tickets went on sale via a specific Comic-Con Web site that they only publicized to those with Comic-Con member IDs who were eligible to take part in the general sales – those who got tickets via the early sale open to those who attended SDCC 2012, for example, were unable to get in on this to maybe get tickets for friends, loved ones, or anyone they’d like to drive into a forced geek march for four to five days.

Now, as we tried to establish in our report on how we proceeded in the early sale back in August, it is best to approach any Web-based sales event related to Comic-Con as if you are attempting to use the Internet to complete a transaction required to ransom your child, and that you are doing it from a location prone to network outages, power failures, and pre-nuclear electromagnetic pulse attacks. Comic-Con makes it a point to learn lessons from where their online sales and registration procedures fall down each year and plug those holes… only to find brand new holes that need plugging the next year.

Long story short: not everyone can get tickets, and sometimes the system to sell the tickets that are available falls down.

The sales Web site opened at noon. And we soon started seeing Tweets expressing… shall we say, displeasure. Apparently the waiting room went into overflow within a minute or so, and, unlike prior years when people complained that the URL to the sales site was bad and the server threw rampant 500 errors, this time around, it was complaints that the waiting room didn’t refresh,

I’ve seen reports from the well-prepared that the waiting room “line” hit over 6,000 people within three minutes. As for the less prepared and / or lucky?

Well…

At 12:53:

At 1:24 p.m.

And then later…

But ultimately, what matters is this: at 12:50 p.m.:

At 12:53 p.m.:

At 1:01 p.m.:

At 1:12 p.m.:

At 1:35 p.m.:

And finally, at 3:23 p.m.:

All of which led to this typical reaction:

If you didn’t manage to snag any passes, all is not lost. Comic-Con will be offering a sale of cancelled passes at some point in the future, so if you’re out in the cold, I recommend subscribing to Comic-Con’s Twitter account and their RSS feed to see when that happens.

And hell; if everything fails, subscribe to our RSS feed. We’ll be at SDCC, and we’ll be reporting from there pretty extensively. You know, provided we can get through the next online SDCC adventure and score a hotel room.