As your apology letters pour out regularly, I'm at once relieved & surprised that the hubris which created this mess has been acknowledged at all, yet not one bit convinced that such hubris will not prevail again - for all the claims that you are now "listening." Not listening is a harder habit to break than you know.
Then there's still the faulty logical thinking and looking ahead that led to this fiasco... Can I assume the same minds are STILL in charge of the "final fix" decision being hatched now?
So, I can go on STEP and get or give up a ticket...so what? Individual ticket transfers won't do enough for theme camps until, in many ways, it's too late. Camps need assurances of large blocks of tickets, and soon, if they are going to start planning. Without it, they either won't be going or will be bringing a much smaller game. Boy, all those newbies are gonna have SO MUCH FUN this year with nothing to see, do, climb on or dance to!
Oooh! Wait, are you thinking ultra-meta? Interesting...sacrifice all the fun this year...get a bunch of would-be burners to bugger off after attending the horrible, boring, dusty burn with NO theme camps this year...scare the crap out of any future ticket speculators (scalpers)...and then get the event back on track to a manageable number next year. That would be kind of awesome, actually (sad as it would make me since this will be my last year for a while) if only I believed it was brilliant premeditation rather than accidental fiasco. Hey - maybe you can "spin" it that way anyway when it all goes down the toilet.
What you need here, though I'd be shocked if you could pull it off in time to make a difference, is a Kickstarter model on your STEP site - and if you've thought ahead and already built this, I take it all back.
The Kickstarter ticket-distribution model is just this:
Let's say you have an extra ticket or two to pass on (and by some miracle don't know some friend who needs one). You go on Kickstarter-STEP and in addition to being able to sell to an individual buyer, you can browse about the different theme camps which are in need of blocks of tickets. You pick the one you most want to see there, and PLEDGE them your ticket. If they get enough pledges to fill their stated quota, they get/buy them all. If they don't within a stated amount of time, they get none and YOU still have your ticket to sell to someone else if you like, just like on Kickstarter.
There are many complications to this. How do you validate a ticket-pledger has a real ticket or will hold to the pledge? I wouldn't trust you to build it and it's revoltingly complex compared to the first-come-first-served sales. But then, you honestly wouldn't expect there to be a simple solution to the mess you made, would you?
Margeaux
