Weeks of waiting, months of anticipation, and all over in a few minutes. Now TI11 tickets are appearing on resale sites with a 600% mark-up.
On August 13th at 10:00am Singapore Time, tickets for The International 2022, TI11, went on sale. According to some reports and first hand accounts, less than an hour later all tickets had sold out. Now a vicious resale market with markups over 10x more expensive that the original price are flooding websites.
Carousell Singapore is a local reselling site. Within minutes of the tickets going on sale, the site was flooded with listings of tickets being resold. These range in price from similar to their original listing to close to S$1,498 ($1,100 USD). Many listings are deceptively labelled, or given with no price as to initiate a negotiation. And prices on the site have been spotted at over S$3000 ($2,200 USD).
There’s a term people from Singapore use when people list products for ridiculous prices or act unreasonably: They call it Carouhell. And now, thousands of eager Dota fans will find themselves in their own version of Carouhell.
“The Great TI11 Ticket Debacle”
Fans in Europe stayed up as late as 3-4am depending on their timezone for a chance to get TI11 tickets. Meanwhile, fans attending live in Arlington had to compete with the already difficult task of ordering tickets on their phones while watching the Major.
What all hopeful TI ticket buyers found was a system that randomly entered you into a queue at any position. There are horror stories of people clicking on the Ticketmaster site just as it launched, only to be put into position 18000+ in the queue. In this situation, with the Suntec Arena’s listed capacity of 6000, there was no chance they would receive a ticket for the group stage, and little chance of a Finals spot either.
While the majority of fans looked to get tickets for the full length of the event, it seems few were able to get tickets for more than a handful of days. Now many are stuck with the issue of having tickets booked for Singapore but no way to watch TI11 in-person.
This is further compounded by just how expensive the tickets were. We’ve previously talked about the intense reaction to TI11’s highly increased ticket prices. And while Valve made no response, they now find themselves with another controversy linked to TI11.
Dota fans aren’t notoriously well known for their patience and tolerance with Valve shenanigans. Meaning there’s now a growing community of fans who are unhappy with ticket prices, the way ticket sales were handled, a lack of a Battle Pass, a lack of True Sight, and generally what they feel is the mismanagement of The International.
All of this means that TI11 is going to have a hell of a hurdle to clear this year. Valve needs to put on an incredible event. Or they risk having this edition of The International be better remembered for this misery leading up to it, than the competition during it.