This is being re-sent from last year as a reminder of how this works.  Here is how we plan to randomly distribute ticket-buying privileges so that everyone has the same chance of being able to buy a ticket, whether they're signing up by themselves or in a group:

*Random Drawing/Lottery Method*
All of the unique people who are registered by March 22nd will be divided into equal-sized "buckets" (or call them blocks, chunks, or bins). Last year they were all buckets of 10 and that will probably be true this year too.  Then ticket-buying opportunities will be randomly distributed to as many of those buckets as we have room for this year.

The group option is for people who know that they want to all put themselves in the same bucket, and thereby tie their chances together, but it doesn't increase or decrease the chance that that group or an individual person in that group will get to buy a ticket. Similarly, people who just register by themselves have the same chance of being in one of the buckets that gets to buy tickets as someone in a group.

Our intention is for there really to be no advantage or disadvantage to group registration, except in the ability of groups of people who are close or depend on each other to plan what they're doing this year.  We've thought about this pretty hard, and we don't think there's really any way to game this system one way or another, but if you think of one, we'd like to hear about it sooner rather than later.

*Odds of being able to buy a ticket*
As for the actual chances, we unfortunately won't know what those are any more than you will until we see how many people register. Last year, everybody who registered in the initial registration period eventually got the chance to buy a ticket even if they had to wait on the wait list a little while. The Firefly event this year will have slightly more people than last year. If we don't have a lot more than 600 people registering this year, then odds of getting to buy a ticket will be quite good. If we do have a lot more than 600 people, odds will be worse, unfortunately, but there's no perfect solution to our limited capacity.  We're all waiting to see how many people register this year.

*Thanks for your patience!*
If we have any excuses for not explaining this in the previous message, the best ones are that we didn't want to bulk up that long and detailed message any more than it was already, and it took us long enough to draft that message anyway to get all the details right. We hope this clears things up a bit and means that you can all keep talking about it, just with less speculation about what we're up to!

*Reminder*

Ticket details and registration are at http://fireflyartscollective.org/firefly/tickets/ .

~ Firefly ~