If you were one of the folks who tried to purchase tickets to this year’s New York Comic Con, you probably experienced a long wait, and technical issues. That coupled with quick sell-outs created a miserable experience for numerous individuals.

ReedPop, who runs New York Comic Con, has posted a very genuine response about the issues along with some very solid advice. Read below for the details and response.

On Wednesday at noon Eastern Time we put tickets for the 10th edition of New York Comic Con on sale and after months of preparation and close working sessions with our ticketing vendor we almost immediately saw something was not right. I know you saw it too. This letter is an attempt to help you understand what happened, and while that still might not get you the ticket to NYCC that you wanted, we hope it will at least provide you with some portion of the explanation you deserve.

Some facts we have been able to ascertain by looking at the data:

• The demand for tickets at noon was roughly quadruple what we experienced in 2014.
• Those who were attempting to buy tickets in the queue know that it took several hours to move through the queue and received error messages along the way. This was a direct effect of an unexpected and unforeseen slowdown of the system.
• What is important to note is that regardless of the slowdown and error activity, when the queue opened at noon, there were already more individuals “in line” than there were VIP, 3-Day, 4-Day and Saturday tickets combined. This means that beginning at 12:01 demand had already outstripped the supply of tickets. Thus even without the challenges we experienced unexpectedly, there was not a guarantee that people “in line” at 12:01 would receive the exact ticket types they so craved.
• The queue slow down lasted until about 3pm. At that time most fans that remained in the queue or refreshed after getting an error message were able to buy whatever inventory of tickets remained. Admittedly, many ticket types were sold out due to the sheer demand for tickets.
• Now let’s talk about those ticket resellers – we don’t like them either! We know you see tickets available on reseller sites and we know how frustrating that is (especially if you did not get the tickets you wanted) and please know that we continue to be aggressive about doing all we can to deal with those resellers. We further limited quantities this year. We will comb through those sites and attempt to get tickets removed. We review the data of ticket purchasers and cross check names, addresses, email, credit cards and then remove and ban where we find people trying to buy tickets over the maximum allowed. In short, we are as frustrated by people selling tickets at an inflated price as you are.
• What can you do about those reselling tickets at inflated prices? DON’T BUY THEM! First of all, it creates a market for people to price gouge, but just as important, we will be cancelling as many of those people we can identify as ticket resellers (meaning those trying to cheat the system and buy large quantities) so you may be buying a worthless piece of paper.
• A limited supply of New York Comic Con Tickets will be available for purchase at Special Edition: NYC 2015 on June 6-7. All details can be found here.
• An event at Midtown Comics later this summer. Midtown Comics DOES NOT have tickets yet. All of the info for this event will be announced at a later date. Note that Midtown Comics is the ONLY Retail partner selling NYCC 2015 Tickets.

We are truly sorry that the ticket buying process did not go as well as we wanted and certainly not as well as you deserve. The reasons don’t matter though; we let you down and as a team, we are really, really sorry for that.  We know many of you won’t get the tickets you wanted for NYCC and for some it is because of sheer demand for limited quantities, for some it is aggressive ticket brokers and for some it is the challenges our system had thrown at it yesterday. No matter the reason for it we want you to know that we wish we could get tickets into the hands of everyone that wants them and we are doing all we can to assure that and that we value you as fans more than you can possibly imagine and what feels the worst is that many of you don’t feel that way today.