Good news: I secured tickets to Worlds, the League of Legends world championship, this year in Los Angeles
Bad news: They’re nosebleed seats, because I among hundreds and thousands of other aspiring ticket purchasers were unable to get luck of the draw through AXS’s convoluted “randomizing” ticket queue system
Naturally, thousands of people are livid at the system used by Riot Games to sell Worlds tickets this year. Personally, I’m not pleased with it either, considering the planning, preparation and execution of my own pursuit to get the best possible seats, and still barely eked through to get shitty nosebleeds. I mean, at least I managed to acquire tickets, but I’m not satisfied with the system in which they were acquired.
Basically, AXS is a company that somehow makes people wish Worlds tickets went on sale through Ticketmaster. This is the equivalent of preferring Playstation 4s being sold at Walmart on Black Friday as opposed to buying them from AXS. Never mind the bullshit fees that pretty much equate to a whole third ticket, because most people expect ticket sellers to rape people with their bullshit fees.
It’s the fact that AXS’s methodology of selling tickets is completely randomized. It doesn’t matter if you’re like me, who obsessive-compulsively reloads the page an hour before tickets go on sale, so that I can get into the virtual waiting room as early as humanly possible. For tickets that went on sale at 1:00 pm EST, a guy logging in at 1:02 pm has just as much of a chance to luck into the purchasing window as a guy like me who had been waiting since 12:29 pm.
This is where I’d rhetorically ask how in the world is that fair, but I know the world is not really a fair place, and that’s still bullshit.
When it comes to dealing with AXS, there’s zero merit to preparation and planning, and 100% entirely up to luck of the draw that your account is “randomly” selected and placed into the purchasing queue, where once inside, can leisurely peruse through available seats, while thousands of irate people await on the outside.
Needless to say, by the time I made it in, nearly 19 minutes past 1:00 pm, the Staples Center was pretty much sold out. Even then, it took like 100 refreshes and clicks to be able to finally get two shitty seats where it would’ve been impossible to differentiate Kobe Bryant from Luke Walton and one of them is a black guy and the other, white.
Ultimately, I’m glad to have managed to get tickets, but I’m extremely disappointed in the process that doesn’t incentivize preparation and planning and is completely dependent on luck of the draw. Not to mention the obvious reality that not even a full hour after all tickets were sold, probably a third of the Staples Center is up for sale on eBay, at naturally four times the face value of a single ticket.
This is where fuming fans voice their suggestions and opinions that if Rito wanted to please fans, if Rito wanted to make more money, etc, etc. But the reality of is that Rito is out to make money, and make is easily. Sure, Rito could probably make way more money if they sold the tickets themselves, but that would require work. Instead, they’ll make a little bit less money, but outsource the entire racket to a shit distributor like AXS.
Rito simply makes so much money, they give no flying fucks about the fans they make upset with their decisions. Fans of anything are always in some capacity in varying degrees of Stockholm Syndrome, and it doesn’t matter how shitty conglomerates like Rito can be to them, they still come back.
Personally, the difference with me now is, after having fallen prey to the same racket for the second straight year, making it a third doesn’t really seem like that appealing of an option. If Worlds isn’t in Korea next year, I probably won’t want to go and deal with this kind of bullshit all over again, and be reminded that Rito simply makes so much money, that they don’t have to give a shit about their fans.
