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I appreciate all that Tony, John, and John's people do to take care of us fans, but I have grown SO tired of ticketmaster's games when I try to land seats close to the stage. I made sure to be on high speed internet today for the presale, and was logged in with the password ready. My wife was waiting the same way on a friend's computer too. I ordered 1 show and she ordered another show exactly when they went on sale. We ended up with 14th row and 11th row. Not bad seats but not what I was hoping for since I won't see anything as soon as everyone stands up because of my short height. My problem with ticketmaster is that an hour later after spending a LOT of money on these two shows, I checked the tickets again for both shows only to find that I could be sitting 5 rows closer each night than what I had already bought. When I wait so long for the chance to see John and the band in concert, this kind of stuff takes away my excitement and leaves me feeling only disappointed.
So the issue you described above is not a Ticketmaster issue, it's the issue with all online ticket sellers.
Here is what happens.
Lets say we have a show with 3000 tickets and at the moment of on sale there are 500 people/computers/browsers/shopping carts requesting tickets
If all of those request 4 tickets that means you have requested 2000 of the 3000 available tickets (remember not all tickets are available, some are held for the public onsale, other presales, for the band/promotion etc).
That means SOME of those tickets requested, even in the first seconds are not that great.
People then have a few minutes to decide if they want to buy them or not. So often most of the requested tickets sit in online shopping carts while people decide, try to check out etc.
What inevitably happens is a surprising percentage of those tickets requested are NOT purchased and then return to the system.
Remember lots of buyers have multiple windows/browsers/computers pulling up tickets, so one person who wants 4 tickets could be requesting 4 multiple times at the start of the presale to get the ones they want.
This means slowly but surely quality tickets go unpurchased and return to the purchase system between 5 to 20 minutes after the on sale starts.
It stinks and is super frustrating to the customer but you can't make people buy the tickets they request if you want to give them the option of seeing/approving their seat locations.
The way around is this how some ticket sites and artists presales sites work (Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam) simply sell the tickets in order of request and assign them by that (or some other way like seniority) HOWEVER people don't find out their seat locations until they are mailed to them.
