Maybe I'm thinking too simplistically, but we're coming to the end of 2019 and yet we're still using paper tickets for game access. As a tech school I'm surprised that the CS department hasn't been tasked with building an app that VT can use to disseminate information, score updates, and most importantly...tickets vs. spending the money on paper tickets (it would also have the added benefit of eliminating the paper airplane problem). But seriously:
- Tailgate info
- Warnings in case of inclement weather
- Pre-kickoff alarms, i.e. 1 hour prior, 2 hour prior, etc.
- Buying/selling/transferring tickets (because f*#@ stubhub and all those other places)
- Rewards for season ticket holders who actually attend games
If people want paper tickets, they can pay the extra money for them.
We can also join Nick Saban and track the students who leave early (you know, before halftime) and give them *ahem* a lower priority when it comes to student ticket lottery. /s (but not really)
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Apps cost $$
And printing those season ticket books doesn't? The university can't ask one of their academic departments to find some kids to do it as a grad project?
Look at the demographics. Millennials and Genz are spending way less time at actual games. This is a sport wide problem.
Who are at the games? What's that demographic? Boomers and Genx who are not as technologically savvy. Don't get me wrong some are, but they are more concerned about other things.
If you build an app would that bring the younger demo back? What kind of things would you add to increase engagement to get them back in the stands?
5G, AR stats, basically what NFL stadiums are working on that we don't have near the amount of funding to support.
If only there were certain beverages they could sell at the concession stands to boost revenue and allow for things like online tickets.
I'm picking up what you're putting down. Milkshakes would bring all the boys to the yard?
Yep. And their lives would most likely be better than any of ours.
But it also provides the ability to capture a lot of data that can be used to build better relationship with fans.
My guess is that an app isn't a priority right now, but it should be in the athletic departments backlog somewhere.
If they simply somehow tied it to the Hokie Club so you could donate off of the app, surely some drunk students would accidentally donate once in a while.
Could just be a mobile solution doesn't have to be an app. Mobile responsive websites are becoming more and more like apps everyday.
I bought the Flex-10 plan and my tickets were sent to my Apple Wallet. We are already moving in the right direction. The change for season ticket holders will happen eventually.
This is another thing. You just don't want to make an app to have an app. If you build an app you want it to be an extension of a real experience.
The Jags went full e ticket only and had massive issues for the first preseason games. This is the kind of thing that needs the slow rollout. Which it seems with the above comment they are doing.
Panthers did the same thing and experienced similar issues. Hornets moving to all E-tickets as well. This will be the norm before too long.
Carolina Hurricanes as well
They've done digital ticketing for a while, but this year they went fully digital where you can only get in through your phone. They're still scanning QR Codes this year, but apparently next they're going to NFC scanning at entry. But this was a 5 year rollout to make sure everyone got used to it, but this is also a relatively young area with a fanbase that is primarily millennials and tech savvy boomers. And even then, they're still providing physical tickets to anyone who needs them at the box office.
True, but we've already had major issues with regular tickets. I can't remember which games in particular, but there have been 2-3 in the past 2-3 years where the scanner system wasn't working and the backlog to get in got ridiculous. I understand that these kind of improvements need to be "focus tested" and I was unaware that the Flex-10 ticket owners might be the guinea pigs.
You'd have to have a reliable cell signal to make this work...
just saying.
edit: this isn't limited to gameday/game time in Blacksburg. Verizon's coverage is abysmal from Lane stadium to the Kroger/south main development. I've seen other services work better in the south main area, but still not blazing fast.
Seriously, E-Tickets would be such a clusterfuck if they were mandatory and there wasn't a serious cell-service upgrade. I know a lot of the people who post here are probably smart enough to load the tickets beforehand but imagine 66,000 drunk people trying to get through the gates and how many of them would freak out at the front of the line when they can't load it.
Lane would wind up half-empty if this were attempted right now.
I loaded tickets to the FSU game from stubhub on my phone last year.
For some reason, when I got to the gate, the tickets had disappeared and I didn't have wifi. Sucked for about 10 minutes until I managed to get service and get the tickets loaded, as I panicked that I wasn't going to get in before kickoff.
I learned from stubhub that you need to download the PDF onto your phone. And make sure your phone is charged.
Shit, didn't even think about that. I can't get my simple sports app to refresh CFB scores at this point.
A well-written app would save the tickets locally on your phone to avoid those kinds of problems.
So went looking through my apps on the iPhone. There is a Hokies Gameday app. Never used it anyone know what it has?
...because we still need materials to make paper airplanes obviously 🙄
There are a lot of older alumni who would riot if we forced all ticketing to app and smartphone based.
And, our wireless reception around Lane needs to be significantly upgraded before we can do that. Not everyone knows to send tickets to Google Pay or Apple Wallet before heading to the stadium.
Not to mention if I want to sell or buy a ticket just before going in there is no signal to make sure it goes through.
Which also brings up another thing. Now that the Hurricanes went fully digital here, its pretty much forcing everyone to use Ticketmaster for the secondary market. The person who is buying needs to have a ticketmaster account, and your sale never goes through until the person accepts the tickets into their ticketmaster account.
And of course, through this, you are completely at the mercy of ticketmaster fees when doing one of these transactions.
Really? That's shitty.
Hence why I was thinking that the app could enable people to "trade" their tickets and use an external means to transfer money (Venmo, Paypal, etc.). The problem with this is that it doesn't guarantee the sale and would result in scams. Then again, that's no different than last week when I bought a pair of tickets off another TKP'er and I paypal'd the money to them.
So a bunch of random thoughts on this:
To your first bullet point....
Given the current arrangement between VT and Amazon over the DC campus, I highly doubt that'll be a problem going forward. If anything, we might become the leading AWS training bed in the very near future.
Yep, quite possible, but I do expect that transformation to take time. That's at least 3 years out, probably closer to 5.
Anyways, the point I was trying to make was that it's not as simple as "oh, our CS students can just build an app;" No one expects our Mechanical Engineering students to just build the next car for Toyota; I'm not sure why they expect our CS students to just build apps. Additionally, if our athletic department rolled out a shitty app built by CS students with no work experience, there would be a thread on here talking about how poor the app is, and how it looks shitty that our athletic department would pay for an experienced development team.
I know nothing of our CS dept. (construction guy here) but I would HOPE that some of the professors/TAs teaching the students would have a modicum of experience when it comes to app development. I would also never expect the kids to punch this thing out in a day without any bugs whatsoever and would hope that it would be developed properly with internal testing leading to beta testing leading to an eventual rollout.
Again, not a CS major, but I think you'd be disappointed. I bet that our professors/TAs are geniuses, but there are plenty of people who reach the peak of academia without ever working in a professional environment. Working as a developer and interacting with designers, product people, UX researchers, etc is different skill set than studying the theory behind how computers work.
Going back to my previous analogy, How would you feel if our athletic department decided to design and build a new building use student civil engineers and architects under the advice of professors and TA's instead of hiring an actual professional? That would be ridiculous right?
Based upon the stupidity of some of the architects & engineers I've had the pleasure of working with I'd say that it couldn't be worse...
But I completely understand where you're coming from.
We have the same views on the other side.
I don't doubt it. We're just one big happy and disfunctional family.
Absolutely, we do...
I agree, I work as a developer, I didn't do CS @ VT, I did ME. I work at a fairly well known media company, and most of our developers don't have CS degrees. I think most are self taught. I think CS degrees have value, but web/app development is way different than what you learn in school. The core concepts apply, but they're usually abstracted away by libraries, frameworks, etc. Knowing what tool to use and how to figure stuff out (google, stack overflow is like what I do 90 % of the time I feel like). So the ramp up for a new grad can be significant. I worked with a lot of Berkeley grads, and it seemed like their curriculum atleast has a lot of practical classes. Even the interns we got from Berkeley were pumping out code on day one. It also probably helps that Berkeley's right next to San Francisco which is the main hub of the tech industry.
I think this problem extends to all engineering departments really. Atleast at VT, most ME classes were purely theoretical, in order to get hands on experience you needed to join one of the clubs or take the few electives that offered a more hands on approach (think there was an engines class, a CAD class, etc.). We had the ME labs, but they were a bunch of BS imo. Our senior design project was pretty hands on building stuff, but I will say I struggled to apply the stuff I learned from my classes to our project. More practical classes would have been nicer, but I don't really know what the solution is. Maybe more engagement with industry can help our engineering department figure out how to provide students more relevant skills that they'll use on the job.
Sounds like a similar thing in the Building Construction department. It may have changed in the last 9 years, but I wish there had been more of an emphasis on some hands on construction vs. the book learning that we did. The one outstanding class we had every year was the integrated lab which helped with learning how to read plans, do take-offs, etc. That said, I really wish that there'd been more of a focus on construction methodology and the ME & EE side of things.
Isn't that a lot of degrees? I know I did more hands on during my associates degree at a technical college than I have done getting my bachelors.
I could not agree more. Perhaps that has been the plan all along. A girl I dated 30 plus years ago was doing a two-year community college program in business. I was sort of incredulous at the time, but she insisted she would have enough of the practical skills necessary to start up her own business when finished and not have wasted her time with all the extraneous garbage. While not sure, I would wager it turned out well for her. It's taken me 40 years to realize my 16 years of schooling would have at least been spent as well for a "buck-fifty in late fees" at the library.
Steve Rushin, who is a great sportswriter, had an excellent article in the recent SI about the unfortunate demise of paper tickets. I have ticket stubs going back to 1972...
Side note; if anyone on here knows anything about app writing ability I've actually thought a ton about the weather aspect of this and driving. I have a wonderful idea if someone would like to exchange contact info?
The app scans are usually just slower. It would slow down everyone getting into the stadium significantly. Everyone has to zoom in on the barcode, mess with their brightness settings, and it still sometimes takes a few attempts.
They'll usually let you scan your ticket this way but it's definitely slower.
This is assuming you remember to screenshot your ticket as cell service around the stadium would make it impossible to download it on the fly as you're walking up.
This is just bad design in the app/electronic document.
Most PDFs are designed with an 8.5x11 page in mind and so everything is scaled to print out that way. The e-ticket should either be responsive and scale to fit the browser it is being displayed in or if it is static, assume a smart-phone screen instead of paper. The smart-phone sized print will still work on letter-sized paper.
edit: this size discrepancy is mostly due to inertia. "We've always designed on letter, why would we change?". Source: work in documentation.
Just a thought, but whenever I use my Qdoba app to get my rewards, it automatically adjusts the brightness and has the barcode at the appropriate size for a quick scan and then goes back to my regular settings once I'm out of the app. If we're going to move to in-app tickets, just make it to the app has access to those settings.
When I use my phone for boarding passes, the app automatically adjusts the size and position of the barcode and maxes out the brightness. No reason this hypothetical app wouldn't do the same.
A group sitting in front of me at the Furman game indicated that the company they work for is currently working on e-tickets for VT (this came up from watching the paper airplanes and the associated, seemingly random, cheers from the student section).
As far as a roll-out, I think Free e-tickets to free sporting events on campus with the benefit of reserved seating sections would be a cost effective means of a trial run.
The Caps/Nats/DC United are mobile entry only and it works great. I think we underestimate older fans' ability to figure out things like mobile tickets sometimes. It's all pretty straightforward these days.
I hope Tech is going in this direction. I have season tix and couldn't transfer tickets online to a family member. The ticket office said they couldn't (or wouldn't) convert the tickets to PDFs even though that's what happens on StubHub. Very frustrating to not have a basic electronic transfer option with season tickets
All i can think about is the hurricane game against A&M and i really don't want to take me phone out in that weather. The gates aren't exactly covered.