[davewasthere]

Having built a few highly trafficked sites (in Airline, Education and Events Ticketing) I think that ticketing is actually pretty easy. Making something that is usable & simple is still hard work. But the actual processes behind tickets is fairly straightforward.

I've built a system for the planning and seating of VIP hospitality packages that has been used for Beijing & London as well as the last Rugby World cup. Admittedly my ticket app is only for a select group of clients & users, so I haven't needed to scale anywhere near to the same degree as LOCOG, but I have done so with other sites in the past and the scaling techniques are the same.

That said, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the ideal way to have done ticket resale, would have been for people to register interest in events, possibly taking payment information in advance. Any inventory released back to LOCOG could have then been randomly offered to people who'd registered interest. There would be some element of first-in first served, but you're always going to get that with oversubscribed events.