High-tech scalpers hit World Series

There is less joy in "Mile-highville" after a mighty 740,000 Colorado Rockies fans struck out on Tuesday, trying to score some World Seriestickets. But at least they had a chance to step up to the plate.

Not so the day before, when the team's designated online ticketing system shut down, swamped by nearly 10 million requests. The culprits were not desperate fans, the ticket company says, but automated software robots – known as bots – deployed by scalpers to cut in front of human buyers online.

Bots are a growing problem for sports fans and concertgoers everywhere, although it's not clear how great a challenge they pose. The flap over Rockies' tickets illustrates the larger conundrum over online ticket sales. While the Internet has democratized the process of getting tickets to high-profile events – more people can go online than stand in lines overnight – it has also simplified and expanded high-tech scalping. Industry executives are wringing their hands over how to devise a fairer system.

"We love the Internet, but when you are a ticket-buyer and are forced to compete against thousands – if not millions – of people, what are your chances of getting a ticket?" asks Sean Pate, spokesperson for StubHub.com, a website for ticket reselling based in San Francisco. "I think we are at a situation where, to make it completely fair, we almost have to go back to the old way of ticket distribution, which is people lined outside of a box office spending the night."

In the case of the Colorado Rockies, the majority of the team's 52,000 World Series tickets went to local fans, says Shaw Taylor, a spokesman with Paciolan, the company handling the online sales. Four in 5 registered buyers lived in Colorado and the average order was roughly three tickets, he adds.

Bots still posed a problem on Tuesday, crowding online waiting rooms and "forcing a lot of valid buyers out," says Mr. Taylor. But it wasn't enough to force a repeat of the previous day's shutdown when, according to Taylor, the system was swarmed not only by ticket-seeking bots but also bots designed to crash the server.

Other industry executives suspect that Paciolan simply wasn't prepared to handle the legitimate traffic spike. Taylor declined, for reasons of security, to get into specifics of the attacks.

In any case, the use of automated bots is on the rise, Ticketmaster says. It estimates that on some days they account for 80 percent of all ticket requests on its website. The company won a first-ever court injunction this month against one automation service.

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