To The Metal

So I tried this past Saturday to land 2 tickets for myself and my girlfriend to see Daughtry perform in Troy, NY. At 10:00am the tickets went on sale. Before 10:01am they were gone. None available at Ticketmaster online or over the phone. Needless to say I was, and am, PISSED OFF.

I don’t go to many concerts, the ones I do attend I buy my tickets honestly from Ticketmaster (oxymoron there, as I firmly believe Ticketmaster is a fucking farce in itself) for the fair selling price. I decided to check 2 popular ticket sites on the net which resell tickets… StubHub and TicketsNow.

Now mind you, these tickets cost $20 a pop at Ticketmaster. If I was at the box office for the venue and bought these tickets, they’d cost me $20. StubHub had prices ranging from $123 to $165 for a SINGLE TICKET and TicketsNow had them for $105 a pop. How the fuck this isn’t opportunistic scalping I do not know, and I refuse to accept the ‘Secondary Ticketing’ line.

I guess you could call this business the dirty taint of the Capitalist machine.

Now as a fan of Daughtry, someone who has followed his career from Absent Element, through Idol, and now into his solo career, I want to see the guy perform live – as does my gf. Sure, I can drop $210 plus whatever other fees and taxes apply to buy tickets to the Troy show, a 2 hour drive from my home. I can also try to land tickets to the show in Philadelphia. It’s the principle of the thing though. These scumbags are denying actual fans the opportunity to see their favorite artists at a fair price for no purpose greater than the almighty dollar.

They don’t give a shit about the music, or the artist, and that’s fucking wrong. These people are the enemy of the music industry, but they’re too busy infusing their ill-gotten gains back into the industry for the big-wigs to realize they’re selling themselves – and the fans – up shit creek without a boombox.

It’s nice to know that if I’m standing outside a venue, trying to offload extra tickets for the same amount I paid – I can get arrested for scalping. However, if I’m a big business funneling millions of dollars back into the coffers of the greedy music industry scumbags, I can scalp $20 tickets at nearly $200 a piece without breaking a sweat.

The entire music industry needs a fucking enema with sulphuric acid, from the music distributors to the tour promoters. I LIKE the CD. I LIKE live concerts. Due to corruption, loopholes, and greed, I am forced to change my habits as a consumer to avoid getting screwed by the industry who blames their faults on my peers instead of their own crooked practices.

Fuck the stupid fuckers in their fucking stupid asses.

Used to be you played a game to a certain point (era before the veritable savegame) and you’d get a special ‘code’ to continue from that point on – if you got one. That was pretty much the start of being able to stop one of the long new games and continue later on IMHO. Course there was Zelda with the battery powered cartridge as well, a real savegame there. Time progressed, consoles got memory cards, new ways to save your progress and catch up whenever you wanted. Then consoles got hard drives, and the trend continued.

Now it seems that more producers are getting into making the savegame part of the gameplay. No longer can you save on the fly – you’ve got to save at specific portals in the game (its well done in games like Grand Theft Auto or poorly done in games like Dead Rising). Other games offer an auto-save feature (it’s well done when you can disable it, poorly done in games like Need For Speed: Carbon or Test Drive: Unlimited where the choice to buy / sell a car can pretty much wreck the game and leave you broke with a slow car and no money left to customize it).

If you’re going to use the save portal method, make it so that there are enough of them to allow a save without getting taken out in the process and eliminating the usefulness. If you’re going to use autosave, leave the capability to disable the feature so that if say… I want to sell all my custom cars and buy a Lamborghini, I can without being stuck with it at the end-boss and not enough money to mod the car so I can win… I could just run through a couple dozen races at 500 a pop until I get enough money to mod the car, or I can start over.

Keeps the game in my system longer, but I’m not the kind of guy whose life is irrepairably harmed by not being able to beat a game I like – it’s a game. I’m just as likely to toss the thing – I’m renting, not like I invested a full $60 into it.

Ok so a while back I went off on how cheat codes take away from a game, the ability to exploit a design flaw – takes away from a game. Now something I’ve managed to do in the time I’ve owned an Xbox 360 is not cheat on a single game. While MOST of the games I’ve played on it haven’t required cheating, the last 2 I’ve played could have benefitted from a little God Mode action – which apparently no longer exists.

I’m sure developers came to the same realization I did, and so be it. I didn’t cheat on Super Mario Brothers and after 18 years I successfully beat it for the first time. Still, I looked, and for most of these games when I look at the supposed “Cheat” or “Code” list, I find nothing but information on what can be unlocked at various points in the game.

Cheats aren’t earned, they offer unfair advantages. Unlockables are achievements, the player did SOMETHING and as a reward, something got unlocked. They should just say that there are NO cheat codes for a given game instead of even populating the frikkin list.

God Code, I miss you.

So tickets went on sale today for Daughtry up in Troy, NY. At exactly 10am when the on-line menu switched to ‘find tickets’ I hopped in and tried to grab 2. None available. WHAT THE FUCK!? I smell Bullshit.

Insult to injury, the idiotic CAPTCHA image that Ticketmaster uses to guard against automated ticket scripts is so illegible half the time that even me with my superior 20/20 vision couldn’t make it out.

So I’ll have to wait out for tickets to come available or hope the guy expands his tour. This SUCKS.