by Spudulika »
23 Feb 2007 02:16
mattyougg RobRoyale The system would be much better if you could just put in the required tickets and then be told where you can get them together.
Having to search block by block for your required amount of tickets only to find out, (on an extremely slow site when busy), that there aren't eenough seats is very annoying!
Exactly, how hard coluld it be to put a number of tickets available in each block at least.
Huntley & Palmer Utterly impossible I would say as you have so many users ordering at the same time, all the system does is reserve that seat when someone confirms payment. The computing required to then update what is left available visibly would change too much to make it worthwhile
It may not be possible to always display an accurate figure for the number of tickets remaining but the system could be a lot better than it is. Even with lots of orders going through at the same time, you only have 25,000 seats and each seat can either be 1) Available 2) Reserved or 3) Sold. It is pretty trivial to write a program to do what is needed, and a bit more difficult to do it so it doesn't run too slowly when lots of people are using the service. A massive improvement would be if the system displayed a message along the lines of "cannot find 2 seats together in block Y18 - would you like to a) buy 2 seats in Y19 (or Y17 or whatever) b) buy 2 separate seats in Y18, c) start again?". At the moment it seems to allocate 1 seat in the chosen block and not give you any reason why it has done this - totally confusing!
At very busy times when there aren't many seats available, there is the issue of seats being sold immediately before you try to reserve them but this wouldn't be an issue if they displayed meaningful messages as part of the process. And if there was more thought put into the usability of the system, people would not need to spend so much time using an already busy system trying to get the tickets they want - I reckon it must have been a 20-30 step process for me to get just 2 tickets tonight!!!
Incidentally, it annoys me that when you get the stadium layout screen you have to select a block and only then are you told whether any tickets are available - if you look at the web page HTML you can see which blocks have seats available without clicking on each block one after another so there's no reason not to display this information in the first place.
Why do they have to turn it into some kind of treasure hunt!?