ASU shifted to online ticketing for student events this semester, and some students have experienced difficulties with the transition.
Ticketmaster, the platform that ASU uses to sell its tickets, experienced an outage during the New Mexico State University football opener, according to Ticketmaster. The issue caused problems for students who were looking to grab tickets, and later impacted students who were unable to pull their tickets up at the gate.
The football game was the first time online ticketing was introduced to students for ASU events. This idea was created to improve the former ticketing process, where students had to physically pick up tickets at various locations on their campuses.
Jackson Dangremond, president of Undergraduate Student Government Downtown, said the new online ticketing process is the result of hard work between USG and Sun Devil Athletics. He said they are working to fix any issues with the system before the next game.
“The sheer amount of data involved in this process is massive, 70,000 students can reserve their tickets if they choose to do so,” Dangremond said. “There were issues with the system that we are hoping to address this week in preparation for the game against SDSU.”
Dangremond said Ticketmaster may have been the root of all the issues when it came to student tickets.
“When we launched our system, Ticketmaster was experiencing a nationwide outage,” Dangremond said. “It was unfortunate that is was happening right at the very start of our football season and right when we are rolling out this platform.”
Dangremond said he still considers Thursday night’s game a success even with the ticketing issues, because the student sections did sell out.
William Weinstein, a journalism and mass communication sophomore, said he was not able to get tickets for the ASU v.s. NMSU game.
“I looked online about a week before the game and found that every link directed me towards tickets outside the student section that I would have to pay for it," Weinstein said. “I asked around and found that some students had emails sent to them with links to getting the student tickets.”
Weinstein did not receive an email about tickets and said that he did not find out until later that arriving with a student ID could have gotten him into the student section of the stadium.
“The execution was sloppy and led to much confusion,” Weinstein said. “I am upset that the confusion caused me and my friends to miss the game.”
Although some students faced issues with the ticketing system, others did not; for some, the process was a very easy one.
Tyler Tobyne, an interdisciplinary studies junior, said he did not face any troubles at all when working with the online ticketing system.
“I got my tickets last Monday when the email went out to me,” Tobyne said. “I just logged in and got everything taken care of.”
Tobyne said the process he went through was simple and that it only involved following instructions that were sent in an email.
“When I went to the stadium I showed them my ticket and it was a super easy process for me,” Tobyne said.
Reach the reporter at Victor.ren@asu.edu and follow @MrVictorRen on Twitter.
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