False Accusations? Bobzilla questions Burners.Me, “where’s the evidence?”

Bobzilla, who speaks with the authority of BMOrg, has raised some objections to our claims in the comments on this post.

What you are failing to understand is that *all* the statements made by BLM, etc are in the context of “over five years”. Nowhere does anyone say, we can do 70K right now. Its right in front of you and several people have pointed it out.

Any response to your baseless accusation that the senior decision makers in the BMOrg are making money on the side via the secondary market?” How do you back that up? Any evidence? Hmmmmm?

We refer readers to our earlier 4-part series discussing the ticket situation, where we outline potential scenarios in some detail. In particular part II – money is a powerful motivator, and there is a lot of money involved here.

http://burners.me/2012/02/10/exploring-the-other/

Something is not quite right about this whole situation – and it is not just me with this feeling, 75% of voters also think something is up. Do I have evidence? No, I’m not the cops, and this is not a court of law. What powers do I have to gather evidence? Should I subpoena people? It’s just a party!

There is only circumstantial evidence – the bizarre lack of tickets among the Burner community, with only 40% of newbies and 30% of Burners getting tickets; and as of today, around 40% of Burners not knowing ANYONE who got tickets in the lottery; and the series of decisions where BMOrg ignored the community’s wishes and instead did the perfect thing for scalpers every chance they had.

This could be sheer incompetence, and I explore that and other possibilities too. But in that case, the incompetence is truly outstanding, given the consultation with game theorists and others. If incompetence is the answer, then BMOrg should own up to it : “we fucked up, we don’t know what we’re doing, we didn’t mean to decimate the Burner community, please help”. The Burner community is kind of useful, for example they invented Google.

Instead, in each case, BMOrg’s excuse is “it’s all too hard”. For example: “It’s too hard to grow to 70,000, even though the EA describes exactly how, that’s supposed to be in 5 years, it’s too hard to see what BLM would think if we ask to accelerate it”. “It’s too hard to associate ID’s with tickets, even though much bigger festivals do it all the time”. Etc.

It may not be high level insiders, gaming the system. BMOrg might have been hacked, and not even know it. Without any evidence-gathering capability, all we can do is raise some scenarios and discuss them. We have tried to be even-handed in exploring all possibilities, but unfortunately BMOrg keeps favoring scalpers over the community. Despite their pleas, actions speak louder than words.

We suggest BMOrg  have a detailed look through the survey and ticket lottery results, and find out exactly how scalpers did or didn’t get tickets, and how veteran Burners got turned away ; if that’s too much work, Burners.Me would be happy to arrange an analyst to take a look through the data, and review the database cleansing and ticket lottery allocation algorithms.