This page is about the services we offer parties, so if you are not a party organizer this page might not be interesting at all.
Please contact sales if you are interested in using one or more of these features.
The services we offer all parties are:
- Concept
- Ticket sales
- User registration
- Ticket validation
- Seat reservations
- Compo handling
- Scala/Big screen control
- Time schedules
- Asset management
- Game and tournament support
- Single Sign On
- Customization of Look & Feel and translations
- Pricing
Concept
Our software is hosted on our global server that we maintain, this means that you will not need to buy or lease a server to take advantage of our software.We undertake all service and maintainance of the software that runs your ptn site, this means that we are quick to respond to complaints or feature requests and that you get the immediate advantage of improvements made to suit other customers.
If your physical location does not have an adequate Internet connection (100% reliable and fast enough) then we can supply a local server with a copy of the data you need to use the services you want.
If you have a dedicated Internet connection then all services can run off our main server, making your local setup much simpler and cheaper at the same time.
Between us we have provided some sort of service to many thousands of party guests from the begining of the 1990'ies up to now, we know what we are doing as we are all active party organizers ourselves.
Ticket sales
This is our main feature and we aim to make it work as well as possible so the users have the easy access to buying tickets online.The tickets we sell are mostly virtual, but we can support snailmailing proof of payment (like bracelets) if this is desirable.
If an item sells out the system will automatically start a waiting list of orders that wait for more items to become available and mail users when this happens, this system also ensures that you cannot over-sell an item.
User registration
When a user buys a ticket, he first registers for an account, this means that you have the data needed to contact the user in case of a problem and that you can generate statistics on the demographics of your customers, so you can better cater to your core audience.The user accounts are persistant, so that if a user goes to another party then he doesn't need to re-register for the next party, this makes it easier for the user, but also allows you to reward your most loyal customers.
The user accounts can be tied to a member card, this card (the PTN card, can be branded using your own graphics if this is interesting) if a user has a member card then he doesn't need to print paper tickets, but simply use the card to identify himself when he arrives, this not only speeds up handling at the entrance but also makes the whole process a little easier for the guest.
Ticket validation
When users arrive at a party with their self-printed tickets or member cards then you need to theck the validity of their tickets, because copying a ticket is a trivial task and copying a card isn't impossible either.To perform this task we have specialized hardware (small pc's running Linux of a CD) equipped with barcode readers and creditcard readers that is hooked up to either a reliable Internet connection (and thus our central server) or an on-site server.
This setup (with a central server for keeping track of tickets) means that there is no way a single ticket can be used twice, thus ensuring that it is a lot harder to falsify tickets and get away with it.
Seat reservations
We offer a simple, fast, and easy to use reservations system that is based entirely on w3c standards that doesn't involve any complex client-side scripting, this means that no-one should have any problems using it, no matter what browser they use.Compo handling
The handling of compos is the oldest parts of the system, it supports all compo-related tasks:- Set up compo times; for hand in, showing, voting
- Hand in and upload entries for guests
- Download & disqualify entries for juries
- Arrange play lists for showing
- Export SCALA playlists for the show
- Allow users to vote
- Counts votes
- Export voting results to SCALA and HTML
Scala/Big screen control
We have a system that allows you to control a normal Scala without interruption, this works with all versions of Scala from MM100 and up.The scala controlling subsystem can handle any number of "channels" so you can have one channel for the big screen and another one for the info desk screen.
The system includes a generic templating feature that allows you to cook up your own templates on the fly and fill them out via the system, filling out the template on the site is much easier than using SCALA and this means that every organizer can push information to the big screen, thus improving the quality of the information that is being shown.
Time schedules
The hand in and voting deadlines as well as the show times are being controlled via events in schedules, but you can make all the scheudules you want in the sytem, public or not.Once you have entered all the schedules into the system the users can put together their own schedule views according to their interests and you can set up scala exports of selected scehdules so you can have an updated and complete schedule on the big screen all the time.
You can also use non-public schedules for stuff like watch schedules and other behind the scenes stuff, you can even set the events them selves to non-public if you want to.
Asset management
We include an asset mangement system to help you keep track of your hardware the system supports printing tape labels with barcodes to mark the equipment as well as registering the movement of assets to new locations.Tournament and game support
The system has a number of game oriented features; Tournament handling, game server listing and player rating, .The subsystem for building tournaments gives tournament organizers a helping hand in planning, scheduling and executing almost any tournament imaginable, any game can be played, and the tournament is constructed from one or more stages of these types:
- All Play All: All players play against all other players, this is the most fair type, but also the one that demands the highest number of rounds and matches to be played, so it's usually used in a number of parallel pools from which the winners continue to a the final rounds.
- Single elemination: This is the fastest, but least fair tournament type, where one loss means that a player leaves the tournament, this is often used as a finals stage after APA pools, this is implemented as a fixed template, fixed templates are game plans that do not change, using that gives the advantage of being able to draw the pretty picture as well as being able to "program" the stage very easily.
- Double elemination: This is like single elimination, except that a player will need to loose twice to leave the tournament, this is often used as a finals stage after APA pools, if there are ressources (time and computers) available for the extra matches.
- Carry over: This is like APA, but it follows two smaller APA pools and the matches that were played in the initial APA pools are not played again, this is also a very fair type of tournament, but using it along with initial APA pools means a somewhat faster tournament.
- Swiss style: This is a type of stage that can support up to 500 players and is nearly as fair as APA, players are repeatingly paired with other players with the same number of wins, so everyone plays every round in the tournament and people get paired with players of the same skill level, so more fun is had by all.
- McMahon style: This is a type of stage that is very much like Swiss, except it uses the players ratings before the tournament to pair players from the first round, this means that you can support more players in fewer rounds than with Swiss.
- Manual: Should none of these tournament styles satisfy you you can use the manual stage type where you can set up your own matches according to your own ideas.
You can combine the tournament stages in more ways than can be described here, but one popular confuguration is to start of with 4 pools each with 4 players and have them play APA, then take the two most winning players from each pool and have them play off in a single or double elemination tournament, this means you can be done in 3+3 rounds (3 for the APA pools, 3 for the single elimination) with the maximum number of matches played in a round begin 8 during the APA rounds.
The games defined for use in the tournaments can be marked as "public", by doing so you allow your guests to have their own game servers of that type listed on the system, the system will then ping the listed servers once a minute and only list those that are alive, the servers will also have some vital stats like their address and the number of players currently on it listed.
We currently support getting information from the following games: Quake, QuakeWorld, Hexen II, Quake II, HexenWorld, Unreal, Half-Life, Sin, Shogo, Tribes, Tribes 2, Quake III: Arena, BFRIS, Kingpin, Heretic II, Unreal Tournament, Soldier of Fortune, Rogue Spear, Redline, Turok II, Blood 2, Descent 3, Drakan, KISS, Nerf Arena Blast, Rally Master, Terminous, Wheel of Time, and Daikatana.
Other games can relatively easily be supported as the server interrogation is done by a plugin.
The matches that players (or teams if relavant) play all contribute to the players ratings, the ratings are calculated according to the same formula that is used in football and chess, namely ELO, this is a system that awards poorly rated players a lot for beating a strongly rated player, but not the other way around.
Unlike some rating systems ELO is based in sound math and we have kept our initial implementation very simple so it is easy for players to check their own ratings.
Single Sign On
A party usually has many different systems, the PTN SSO service works by allowing the user to log in on PTN once and re-use this session on all the partys different systems.The SSO service also means that each system doesn't need its own user database and authentication, it can simply re-direct all users that are not logged in to partyticket.net, when the user is logged in he will be sent back and the system can check his identity, assigned tickets and other rights via the ptn servers sso interface.
The SSO service is easy to implement for web-application writers and using it means that users only need to log in once to have access to all web-applications the party runs and that you have just one global user-database to manage.
Contact sales for a protocol speccification, a demo and sample code.
Customization of Look & Feel and translations
The system offers administrators access to modifying the Stylesheet that controls look and feel for their own part of the site, this means that you can customize the colors, layout and fonts to make your ticket sales site look like your own main website.We also allow texts to be translated and to be customized on a pr-party basis, so if you do not like our english texts you can translate them to your local language or change the meaning of the text entirely, translators simply get a link at the bottom of every translatable page that will allow modification of the page.
Aside from supporting translations we also supply all dates/times in the relavant notation and in the relavant timezone.
Pricing
For a typical solution (ticket sales and all other software services) we charge no startup fee, only a ticket fee of 4% of the ticket price + 5 NOK pr. user of the system, this typically translates to a small fee that is paid by the customer when ordering tickets.However, that price can be lower or higher depending on what special needs your event has, but we aim to be competitive with the national ticket sales agencies or whatever solution you have been using before.
If you want us to implement a function that is hard to make work and is not usable by anyone else then this will be more expensive than if you want something that is easy to do and is easy for us to make and is generally useful.
We normally charge a small rental fee for on-site service and hardware (servers, pos terminals, barcode readers etc.), but depending on your needs and your size we may provide both hardware and people, but this is decided on a case by case basis.