In case you missed it, Tuesday morning was the sale date for student section season tickets for Penn State men’s ice hockey games. The tickets were sold solely online at Ticketmaster.com, and the sale began at 7 a.m. While it may seem like purchasing tickets online would be a much easier process than purchasing at a venue in person, this was not the case. The virtual sale was met with many problems and program errors throughout the process.
Fortunately, I was able to be one of the lucky students who snagged season tickets. However, this was not the case for many fans. The Penn State men’s ice hockey team’s Instagram and Twitter accounts were flooded with negative feedback and criticism this morning regarding the sale. Many users reported receiving error messages or said that their payment was declined, despite having a valid credit card. One user even commented, “Can we switch to a platform that works?” My fellow football fans know from prior experience that Ticketmaster is definitely not the most user-friendly platform.
Although hockey is much less popular than Penn State football, its problems echo those of the football student section ticket sale to a T. Hundreds of students were not able to purchase tickets despite following all the steps and typing in all of their information correctly. Many once again received multiple, mysterious error messages, and when they tried to refresh the page to see if they could fix this mistake, Ticketmaster bumped them all the way to the back of the queue. At this point, there were now thousands of students in front of them. Despite being in line first and doing everything right, these students were no longer able to acquire tickets.
The hockey ticket sale was also at an extremely early time. The sale started exactly at 7:00, but they suggest being in the waiting room by at least 6:45 to secure a good position in the queue. I found this time to be a little unreasonable, considering the target audience is already exhausted college students. I personally had a very hard time waking up for the sale and felt super tired the rest of the day.
Despite all of these setbacks, the student section season tickets sold out in just under two hours. This was no surprise, considering the amount of thrilling overtime wins last season. The team recorded four overtime wins and nine total wins in the 2020-21 season. These included upsets over hockey powerhouses University of Michigan, Ohio State University, and University of Notre Dame. The season was also cut short, as many games were canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It is no surprise that people are itching to get back into the Pegula Ice Arena and see some Penn State hockey.
Unfortunately, many will not be able to experience this due to the difficult and ineffective Ticketmaster sale process. Hopefully the athletic department will hear the complaints of hundreds of students regarding the platform and will change the sale process by next season.
As someone who went through this process with football tickets, just reading this is giving me stress all over again. I totally agree that it seems crazy to sell something to college students at such an early hour, especially on a platform that is obviously having so many issues. I find it fascinating how doing things online is supposed to make life easier, yet oftentimes it feels like technology is doing quite the opposite. I was lucky enough to get football tickets, but couldn’t access them through student account manager. I stood in line at the BJC for 3 hours with tons of other kids having the same issue. I’m so glad you got your virtual tickets but make sure you can put them in your wallet!!
Two of my best friends are huge hockey fans, and they persuaded me to rise early on tuesday to try to obtain season tickets. Immediately I had issues, as I realize that my approved penn state athletics account is linked to my high school email, which of course no longer exists. The whole ordeal gave me flashbacks to football season tickets, which I did not secure. Luckily, I was able to somehow pull off some trickery and secure hockey season tickets. I am excited for the upcoming season!
I was woken up at 6 am to my roommate rushing around and stressing about getting these Hockey tickets and I also went through the ideal during the football ticket sale, so I relate to this struggle. Ticketmaster should be a simple site, but there are so many errors that can occur and little things that can make big things go wrong, including not getting tickets at all. This is awful because the only thing worse than waking up at 6 am to get tickets is waking up at 6 am and not getting the tickets. I completely agree that something should be changed.