When people went on to the New York Comic Con website yesterday morning, they expected there to be a mad dash to claim 3-Day Passes – especially after the 4 Day Passes Sold out in record time.

What people didn’t expect was the total disappointment of technical difficulties and miscommunications that left so many without tickets and probably the most pissed off I’ve seen anyone all year. Seriously the Facebook comments were monstrous. 

So what exactly happened?

The moment the clock struck 11:59 the site went down and all users could see was a blank page with the small words up top “Not Found (Error to Origin). Despite constant refreshing and reloading, nothing could fix this. A few minutes later, New York Comic Con’s Facebook page posted that there was technical difficulties and that they would be fixed as soon as possible.

Eagerly awaiting this to blow over, fans sat at their computers ready to click “buy”. Finally the FB page posted a link that would take you to a Ticket Queue where you’d wait for your turn to get tickets. Sadly, the webpage didn’t post this link for quite some time so anyone not watching the FB page was already at a disadvantage. Once on the Queue page, everyone read what the page said and it explicitly stated that the page would automatically direct you to the purchasing page. Manually refreshing the page wouldn’t help you move faster; however, it also wouldn’t make you lose your place in line. It wasn’t until over 10 minutes later that their Facebook page urged users to NOT hit refresh as this would return them to the back of the line.

After 20 minutes of this ridiculousness Comic Con reportedly had already sold out of 3-day tickets. It wasn’t until about 45 minutes later that the Facebook page finally reported that this was also incorrect and that we should ‘refresh’ the ticket page to see that there are tickets. You see the problem here.

Finally you might have actually gotten through only to click “buy tickets” and then being told that you were unable to do so because all the tickets were in fact, sold out.  And if you refreshed the page again, it would give you the same error message.  If you managed to get past ALL THIS you would confirm your phrase only to have the whole thing freeze on you.

We don’t know if NYCC was trying to thwart all our efforts to purchase passes or if all of this is just for the extra press but the whole thing needs to change. What once was easy and simple became a battlefield. Everyone was screaming and crying. People that had wanted to purchase tickets for presents were sorely disappointed and taking it out in kind to NYCC’s Facebook page.

Hopefully NYCC can remain the fun event most of us look forward to all year but the ordeal, for many, started off on the wrong foot to begin with.  Nothing says “screw you” to the fans more than not giving everyone an equal chance to purchase tickets properly and because the demand is so high, even if it happens again next year they will still turn a profit off each and every one of us.

Bad form, NYCC. Bad form.