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PAX badge scalpers make me sick

by: Nathan -
More On: PAX East 2013

In case you didn't hear, PAX East 2014 tickets went on sale today and sold out in about 35 minutes. I believe that would be the fastest selling PAX ever, even more than PAX Prime. Getting tickets for PAX has always been a hard but this year proved harder than others. This year, the guys at PAX decided to announce when tickets would go on sale and implemented a new Queue system. This means that when you ordered tickets, you had to wait in line while other people bought theirs. Needless to say, most people couldn't even get on the site due to increased traffic.

Every year I go to PAX with my friend and my sister so I decided to order 3 badges. Seems easy enough right? Well that was of course until it kicked me back to the main site proclaiming tickets had all been claimed. Yes, 3 day badges were sold out. I was mad at first but I figured, "oh well, I can still buy single day passes." Well, I could if the site didn't crash every time I try to buy them.

Then, there is this a**hole and I am sure there are many others out there who are currently selling PAX East badges on Ebay for $499. This is absolutely disgusting and it baffles my mind that the guys from PAX don't do more to combat this every year. You have thousands of legit gamers that want to go to this event and can't get tickets due to idiots who try to scalp them every year. What's even more concerning is that he claims to have ten tickets for sale, which means he violated the rules for only being allowed to have five badges. This same thing happened last year and when I bought it to their attention on the official forums, my thread was immediately closed and I received a reprimand for it. 

PAX is an absolutely amazing event and everyone should try to go to at least one. They have something for everyone whether you are a fan of console games, PC games, table top games, retro games, and you can go there and be a true game fan. It's just a shame that nothing seems to be done year after year about the jerks who only buy passed just to sell them and make a quick buck. 

I don't know how but this needs to stop and it needed to stop years ago.