W:O:A 2015 – without ticket personalization

Hello Metalheads,

for the last two editions of the W:O:A, tickets were personalized, as most of you surely know. We broke new ground with this in order to keep the black market in check. Our main concern has been to make sure that you could buy the tickets for the original fee, not some exorbitant prices organised black market traders are demanding. Also, the transaction still had to be easy and hassle-free.

We were fighting the good fight, so to speak, but this proved to be difficult for legal and logistical reasons. First of all, it‘s absolutely necessary for a ticket personalization like ours to work that none of the usual online platforms can sell the tickets. For this, the law has to recognise that personalized tickets are no commodity that can be bought and sold - which is actually obvious, because the tickets can‘t be transfered anyway without further action.

This leads to the main reason why the tickets for W:O:A 2015 won‘t be personalized.

1) We are currently in litigation with eBay regarding the question whether personalized tickets can be traded or not. The ruling hasn‘t taken place yet, but a huge German soccer team lost a trial with the exact same judge at the end of last year concerning the exact same question. It was ruled that platforms like eBay do not have to delete such offers on their sites. This makes it impossible to go after ticket traders that jack up the prices. This alone unfortunately makes a personalization obsolete.

2) Our ticket exchange system worked quite well in general. But in a lot of cases things went wrong when for instance buyers didn‘t pay or sellers didn‘t report received payments. Some transactions didn‘t work out, but what‘s even worse: Those who play by the rules had to , more often than not, pay the bill.

3) What‘s more, a name exchange had to be undertaken to exchange tickets. This proved to be some effort for a lot of you, an effort you didn‘t want to deal with.

So we decided after long consideration that tickets for W:O:A 2015 won‘t be personalized.

Your feedback was loud and clear, and we heard you. There‘s no use in making things too complicated for you, if the process doesn‘t have the desired effect. If in addition the courts rule against us, we have to admit that our intentions were good, but ticket personalization just wasn‘t workable for you and us.

In case you wondered why we released this decision just yet: By being late with this announcement, we are aiming to catch black markets traders off guard and to keeping them off your backs for W:O:A 2015.

We hope the ticket sale is now organized in a way that works for you. See you next year at the Holy Wacken Ground - rain or shine!

Your W:O:A crew