BADGES SELL OUT FASTER THAN EXPECTED LEAVING THOUSANDS OF FANS IN THE LURCH

MORGAN HALL
LAYOUT ASSISTANT

San Diego’s 41-annual Comic-Con takes place the weekend of July 21 – 24, but those who have not purchased tickets yet are out of luck.

In a matter of seven hours, individual day and four-day badges to the 2011 Comic-Con convention completely sold out. This year’s convention sellout is an impressive milestone compared to the 2009 convention, which sold out of badges in roughly six months and last year’s convention, which sold out in just two months.

Since Nov. 2, 2010, Comic Con attempted to sell badges online to fans twice, but both times, two different sites experienced high amounts of traffic at selling time and crashed before fans purchased any passes. Three months later, relieved fans heard a new site called TicketLeap felt confident their site could sell the badges without overcapacity. TicketLeap guaranteed their site to handle a simultaneous amount of thousand people on the site without crashing. Fans relief turned into pure frustration at 9:05 a.m., when the TicketLeap site sent out error messages saying, “We’ll be right back. TicketLeap is currently down for maintenance,” and, “We are currently over capacity, and the site will be back momentarily.” Fans felt defeated by the new site, especially after TicketLeap’s twitter page read, “If you see an over capacity message, hit refresh. We are under heavy load right now and it should smooth out.” After continuously hitting refresh buttons in different stages, some buyers slowly made their way through the pass purchasing process. TicketLeap averaged that fans requested the site 400,000 times per minute.

Comic-Con will not disappoint the fans who defeated the ticket purchasing process. This year’s convention features a large amount of comic book and sci-fi/fantasy blockbusters slated for release through 2011 and 2012. The movies “Thor,” “Captain America” and “Transformers,” premiere later this year, so directors will speak on their films at the convention. Comic-Con may highlight films slated to premiere in 2012, such as “The Avengers” and the much-anticipated “The Dark Knight Rises.”