Out of curiosity, what was horrible and unfair about it? (Genuine question, I don’t know anything about how it was done.)
If you don't know anyone in the community, purchasing a ticket online is a crapshoot. IMO this is a feature not a bug.
Tickets are not that hard to get and you are not required to do anything once you have one.
I believe some core orga members (aka The people contracting the venue, getting permissions and renting equipment etc) are guaranteed a ticket but almost everybody else has to buy their own.
The fact that the "hacker space community" gets preferential treatment is very much intended.
You can absolutely get tickets on public sales by knowing when sales start, refreshing on the dot and doing the captcha as fast as you can. Reducing your latency (ethernet, fresh browser profile without extensions) helps. Add some friends into the mix and you'll get all the tickets you need.
But it's ok, I can watch it online. I don't like travelling during this busy period anyway.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...
Some things are pretty cheap compared to other countries, meat for instance
But I didn't mean to complain, just to say it's not only the ticket availability that's a factor.
And this is not something the organisation can help of course. It's a German event so of course it's in Germany. And the tickets themselves are well priced.
And like I said, I really appreciate them making everything available online.
I do tend to go to the Dutch hacker camps that are being held once every 4 years.
2) Hackerspaces get a number of tickets with priority, thru replicating tickets (you can only buy one per day). The amount of replicating tickets given depends on size of area (a hackerspace can be tasked with giving vouchers to relevant people in their city). There's a limited quantity of these tickets, separate from amount of vouchers.
The main point of the congress is primarily to bring the chaos crowd together, then the rest of interested parties. That model may not fit your vision, but chaos events year after year succeed at not leaving out the core crowd.
Also, this year I have bought 2 tickets on public sale for friends without issues (best way to get tickets is to group up with your friends).
It's always taken high effort to buy tickets for c3, needing to be exactly on time (not 30 seconds late) to each sale round.
37c3 was an exception due to low sales, caused by skepticism in the event returning after years of not happening. This year that trust was regained and buying tickets became hard again.
Now is the first year that seems to me where demand picked up it was not a given to get a ticket. This might have contributed to find the system unfair.
I did go to 36c3 (end of dec 2019, right before pandemic) and the difficulty of buying tickets was the same as this year.
- Congress on years where there's cccamp tends to be planned by people who are understandably more exhausted. 37c3 and cccamp23 were on same year and 37c3 slogan was appropriately "resource extension".
- The venue was back from Leipzig to Hamburg (CCH was doing renovations for a while, so it was moved to CCL for a few years).
- 4 years between events lead to both changes in the orga people, and general concern that the older set of people had been at this point less familiar with running an event of this scale ("can they still do it and make it feel the same?").
- Covid precautions were a divisive topic. Some didn't want precautions, some wanted more precautions. Ultimately some measures were taken, but none were mandatory. We have distributed free tests and masks last year, we'll do it again this year, though mainly aimed at volunteers, so you should bring your own mask and test if you can, see the info page^1 for full recommendations :)
All this lead to people being unsure if 37c3 would be good and not coming. But I think that trust has since been regained, seeing as this year sold out really fast (same as past years).
I think one other issue was that chaos community is getting older and many are having families, which makes going to congress between christmas and NYE difficult. We did, imo, really good outreach since then and now there's more young people joining chaos communities again. Still, coming to congress is costlier for younger people that earn less (175eur for ticket but cheaper options are available on request, plus 400-600eur in hotels, plus trains/flights/visas etc).
(I was/am part of the infection protection team at 37c3 and 38c3 but am speaking on personal capacity.)
refresh the browser a few milliseconds too late, and you will not be able to get a ticket.
The "slide the slider" captcha is an accessibility barrier.
> I’m blind/I have problems with my visions and I can’t navigate your captcha.
> Please contact us.