Listening Without Hearing or Counting

In light of yesterday’s post about the new ticket price tears tiers , we thought it would be interesting to compare BMOrg’s new policies with the result of our own poll.

We asked Burners “how should Burning Man Sell Tickets?”

The results (as I write this) were:

1. Link Tickets to IDs – 49%
2. Sell paper tickets: Web and Gate (2011 system) – 16%
3. Sell paper tickets: Web, Gate, Retail Outlets (2009 and prior system) – 16%
4. Memberships: pay annual subscription, guarantees a ticket – 11%
5. Try something new – 4%
6. Other –  4%
7. Keep the lottery system of 2012 – 1%

So did they really listen? Well, for sure we can rule out 1-4 entirely – that’s 92%. “Try something new” is highly arguable, since although there are changes to the pricing tiers, they seem to have kept a lot of the cumbersome crap from the 2012 system. The new system seems very similar to the 2012 system, with pre-registrations required and BMOrg trying to get handling fees from the secondary market via STEP. There are no longer gate sales, or outlet sales.

What about the “Other” ideas?

People leaving BRC the previous year can buy one ticket. Then 2009 system. 

I liked 2011. Please keep it simple. 

trade for sex 

Allow more people

Tickets refundable only to the Org with a service fee, with a Step program allow 

I like the single price idea 

Priority by seniority 

have a pre-mail-order like grateful dead and phish do 

Target more tickets to groups who contribute to meeting the 10 principals.

One of them was close – tickets are refundable to the Org with a service fee via STEP. But, some of the tickets are scalper-friendly too. Which leaves us with “keep the 2012 system”, at just under 1% of all votes.

It’s hard for us to tell exactly how many of the community BMOrg consulted in coming up with this system. We know there were game theorists and artists involved. From our poll results, it doesn’t seem like they listened to the community at all. The pre-registration system is a nightmare for overseas Burners, who face significant logistical challenges from the start in planning to attend Burning Man. The reason we are given for this system is to prevent scalpers (by Burning Man curating the pre-registered database and arbitrarily weeding out anyone they deem undesirable), but the Burning Man owners insist that scalping is completely insignificant, less than 1% of tickets. Their Christmas Special tickets, where you pay a premium to get something you can scalp to anyone without STEP, represent 5% of the overall tickets. So, much as we’d love to say “Burning Man has figured out their ticketing issues”, we are still left with a bizarre system based on flawed logic and fuzzy mathematics. If you pin a tail on the donkey, it’s still a donkey.