Margen
If you get into the Ticketmaster waiting room at 9:59 for a 10:00 sale, you're not behind the person who's been there since 9:30. The company says so itself in its queue guide: the time you enter the room doesn't decide your place, as long as it's before the sale starts. What does send you to the back of the queue is not being inside when it kicks off.
I started looking into it because of a complaint. On 23 January, in the BTS presale, a girl who'd paid for a fan club membership to buy early got in on time, waited in the queue and watched the tickets sell out in minutes. She wrote about it on the OCU's complaints website. Ticketmaster replied that tickets are sold “first come, first served”.
A customer service reply doesn't tell me much, so I looked up what else Ticketmaster says about its own queue. There are three versions.
The guide's, which I've already told you about.
The complaint reply's: first come, first served.
And the one from the company's global president, Saumil Mehta, who wrote on X in May that he didn't know where the idea that queue places are random had come from, and that they can't be, because the anti-bot filters work in real time.
So: not first come, first served, not a lottery, and they won't tell us how it works. Outside Ticketmaster, nobody knows how you get your number. What is in writing in their guide isn't much, but it helps.
What I'd do on sale day:
1. Get in before the start time. According to the guide, the room usually opens about 30 minutes early. You don't need to be sitting in front of the screen at 9:30: being in before 10:00 is enough.
2. Be logged in with your card saved before you go in. When it's your turn, you get a window to buy, and digging through your wallet for your card at 10:14 is how you lose it.
3. Once you're in the queue, don't refresh or close the page. The guide says it updates on its own once you're in the queue, and specifically asks you not to refresh it.
4. Screenshot your number as soon as it shows up, with the time visible.
If you get place 48,000 and you got in before 10:00, you haven't done anything wrong: nobody's going to explain why you got that one. And if you'd paid for a presale or a membership to buy early and you miss out, do what she did and complain in writing. And you'll have the screenshot of your number too.