A new weekly (or biweekly) feature on Garde My Biere!
In case you missed it (I know you didn't...), Dark Lord Day tickets went on sale on Monday. I tried to get tickets, but I didn't.
[INSERT RANT HERE!]
After the dust settled and I was left ticketless, the world didn't end. It continued to chug along. The sun still set and it still rose the next day. My glass was still half full even though I finished half of it.
But for some people, the apocalypse came in the early afternoon on Monday, March 17th. But why? It is JUST BEER! There is plenty more of it in the fermenter, on the store shelves, in the keg and in my fridge. Wonderful, excellent beer that we could drink instead of complaining.
Which brings us to my favorite part about Dark Lord Day: the reading material. Every single year I visit Twitter or Facebook after the tickets sell out to read the absolutely amazing rants people leave. It's the highlight of my day.
This year it was a little different. Let's first acknowledge the elephant in the room: the queue for the tickets started before noon (my friend texted me at 11:45a telling me to get on the site immediately). A lot of the Facebook and Twitter rants were about this. I will admit that this SEEMED to be unfair, but I don't know what really happened to allow that and I probably never will.
But what I do know is that there still were a lot of comments laced with beer snobbery. My favorite was this one:
"Another year, another botched ticket sale event. Why do I even try anymore? DLD is just a shitty money grab revolved around an artificially scarce, over-hyped beer. Sadly, it will never improve as long as they keep selling out and 3F makes money hand over fist.
Every year the event gets more popular. Every year more people come in from out of town. Every year, the locals and regulars that support 3Floyds year round get screwed out of attending. They don't care that their botched system screwed you out of a ticket. They don't care who does or doesn't get tickets as long as that person brings them money. They just care about making as much money as possible on DLD."
3Floyds does care, my friend. If you haven't noticed, in the past few years Dark Lord Day has gotten better. A LOT BETTER! Even the ticket buying process has gotten a lot better. If you take away the unfortunate early queue, this year was the best year for buying tickets online. If the early queue gets fixed, we may have a winner.
3Floyds has also gone to great lengths in recent years to ensure that the DLD experience improves. Last year they greatly expanded on the festival grounds, the amount of Porta Potties, the guest draft list, the actual 3Floyds draft list, and the amount of seating available. 2013 was the best DLD day that I have been too. (In case you are wondering, I have gone the past three years.)
They even print your name on the ticket now to help prevent ticket scalping!!
Yet, we still complain. Would you still be complaining if you were one of the people that hit "refresh" and ended up in the queue?
Probably not.
Stop blaming 3Floyds and start blaming yourself.
We created this monster.
They did not.
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