That's an interesting thought, but one I have difficulty with. CCI *overselling* badges? They have plenty of experience with this and know exactly how many badges should be sold. If this is actually what happened, there was a major screwup of some kind, perhaps with the software programmers?
i don't think we'll ever know but it explains the symptoms. The term 'over sell' is prob an over statement by me but by trying to sell as many badges as possible i can *assume* cci left no margin for error. Couple that with a lack of returns & bingo, no returned sale.
"Oversell" is a very good term, Alyssa. It's like airlines "overbooking" because they know a big fraction of reservations will be cancelled, but of course they'd approach it more conservatively because there is no "later flight" people could get bumped to.
I expect that SDCC looked at all of the past years and figured out the *minimum* number of refunds/returns, then dropped back a bit from that percentage. If the smallest percentage of refunds was returns in the past was (say) 20%, maybe they aimed to sell 112% or 115% of the total in the lotteries.
It costs money and lots of volunteer hours to run every sale, and they would want to avoid a third one if it could be managed. Even if there aren't any server glitches. This is what I imagine they were thinking. I wonder what the minimum "leftovers" would be needed to trigger a resale - 1000 left over wouldn't be enough to bother with, but then what happens with the 1000? The only slight improvement I can think of, and there might be complications, is to have a Waiting List of names who just missed out in the General Sale.
If instead, they got fewer returns than they expected, I wonder what that means. The increased media buzz means that there were people trying to register who had never registered before. (Start posting the headlines that it's getting much more difficult to get badges, and people start saying "I'd better start trying or I'll never get fulfill my bucket list to go once in my lifetime.") Did some of the newbies think that they *might* attend, but if not, they could still find a way to sell their badge privileges? We all know that lots of people with UserIDs still haven't read the instructions and haven't spent much time reading these forums, and the number is higher among people where it's their first time in the lottery. Newbies may also be the same people who didn't pay attention to the refund deadline.
We all seem to believe that the number of people entering the first two lotteries has grown constantly over the last few years. So if they unexpectedly got significantly fewer returns than expected, I wonder if the number of no-shows will increase.
Mass psychology is a difficult subject to understand.
edited for a confusing quote issue
