Ok, so it’s been requested on here for months to finally reveal the ‘secrets’ of getting past the old ticket website queue and given there has now been a successful sale on the new site, now is probably the time to spill the beans on the method to the madness. I’m hoping this doesn’t come to bite me in the arse by switching back to the old system!
In short, there were several ‘times’ you could enter the pre-queue page and it would put you straight in when the ticket site/queue goes live at 8.15am.
I believe the algorithm for queue position was worked out based on the duration of the pre-queue being up, which for most games was 7.15am on the dot which allowed consistent entry. It was different for sales at 2pm where they may only have a 15 min pre-queue or on members bulk sales it was from 6.30am – I struggled with these ones due to the low frequency of them to do testing.
I work in IT and have access to a large quantity of devices. I use to just get as many in the queue as I could and hope for the best like most do, the reason these people are successful is because of the time it takes to open so many queue entries - they get lucky and catch one of the ‘times’, not due to sheer volume.
One morning I decided to open 1 unique queue entry every 60 seconds from the moment the pre-queue page went live. I had up-to 20 unique entries per device using different chrome ‘users’ I had setup on each PC (depending if it was my own device or a spare one ready to deploy to a user at work, one had 20 some had 4 etc), and what I found is that the first 6 were all over an hour in queue time, the 7th opened at 7.21am got in straight away. 7.22am had a 2-minute queue, 7.23am had around 10 minutes and the times slowly increased until it was back over an hour again. Personally I stuck at these times, but I also found there was a clear ‘opening’ at around the 7.38am mark too but due to having meetings 3 mornings a week between 7.30 and 8, I never explored this time more other than the occasion I mention below. These times stayed the same no matter on which device I was using, network connection or physical location (work or home if on holiday)
So 7.21am… to try and validate this I opened a tab every 30 seconds between 7.15 and 7.30, again the tab I opened around the 7.21 mark was first in, 7.21.30 was also straight in, and so was 7.22. 7.22.30 was a short wait, and then the wait time slowly went up again until over an hour. All entries before 7.21 were over an hour.
The sale after this was a local one and I didn’t require any tickets, so I did the same again but this time focused on finding the unique queue position in the HTML of the page and it confirmed that all entries before 7.21 were put right at the back, and after that they slowly increased again in queue position. I did this check twice myself during the season, and a close friend checked once and found the same results.
After this I wanted to do more digging on the 2nd ‘window’ which was around the 7.38 mark so the next sale when I didn’t have a meeting and didn’t require tickets I went back to the 60 second method. I found that 7.38 and 7.21 got in no queue, 7.39 and 7.22 had short queues of under 5 minutes, and both increased gradually minute by minute till over an hour was hit again. Looking at the HTML the queue positions for 7.22 and 7.39 were in the low hundreds, and as each minute increased (7.23, 7.24 – 7.40, 7.41 etc) the queue positions went up at a very similar rate, with never more than 500 positions separating them, even though they both entered precisely 17 minutes apart.
As the season went on and more and more entries were in the queue, the ‘window’ for getting in no queue shortened from being over a minute to more like 20-30 seconds. The window was slightly larger for the local sales with less people qualifying.
This proved the queue was not random and guaranteed I’d always get in in the additional sales (unless I was late for work
) I kept my usual amount of sessions and opened them all between 7.18 until I run out, in case the pre-queue time holding page ever altered slightly and it also allowed me to get up to 5 browsers into the site with no queue meaning I could get up to 4 tickets on 5 different logins for people without sitting refreshing.
There’s some people on here who’ve messaged over the last 12 months who guessed it spot on to be down to pre-queue entry times, hopefully this explanation helps you understand how you got lucky!