I waited for over an hour at the waiting room message. Finally I gave up and started over and no problems. Who knows if I missed out on better seats waiting instead of immediately starting over again.

Rail against Ticketmaster all you want (and I have), but they're the only ones able to handle the load. Tickets.com is notorious for this, a good reason to be a Wolf Trap member and get advance tix so I'm not subject to this.

I was put in the "waiting room" when I logged on at 9 AM sharp. After a few minutes I was excited to be directed to the ticket selection page. I selected the number of tickets, my preferred secation, then (credit card in hand) was directed to a screen that asked me to type in a computer generated password. Ready to type in my Discover card number, I received a message that the website was too busy. I repeated this for the next 45 or so minutes until I received the "sold out" message. It seems that once you access the seat/section page, you should be at the front of the line. Even when I clicked on the "best available" seats selection, I received the too busy message. In real life, it was like reaching the front of the line, being shown the tickets, then having the cashier leave the counter to sell them to someone in a different line (which you had to move to). Suggestion: take your buyers in the order they logged on - just like at the box office.

I had the same experience as Mark - I thought I was there, but then I got an error message and after two more tries at clicking "continue" on the screen with the error message, I got booted back to the Waiting Room. I never got in at all!

I am a season ticket holder, and we had the opportunity to buy on line last week. I was able to get to the website, but it refused to find any 2 seats together, at any price. I finally had to call the ticket office and they sold two $10 seats together to me over the phone.

I tried clicking "Best Available" only to be told that I had not selected a price level. Why the %#$& do you have a "best available" option if your system doesn't recognize it?

I wound up going to StubHub.

Tickets.com is a complete joke. I agree that Ticketmaster is the devil but at least they are able to handle the volume. The virtual waiting room is horrible - I sat in one for 8 hours last year trying to get tickets for Cubs-Nats at Wrigley.

As a DC-resident Boston Red Sox fan, I am pretty well accustomed to the vagaries of the virtual waiting room and MLB ticket releases. This was nothing new folks! The Sox even hold raffles for the privilege of entering the virtual waiting room for high-demand games. Just keep clicking and hoping for the best.

I got a string of error and "sold out" messages from 9:30-10am or so, and all but gave up. On a whim I tried again at 10:30am or so, and it seemed as if more tickets had been released so I got in! I'm thrilled to be there for the inauguration of the new ballpark, and glad that DC-ers of all sorts can root for the home team.

By 1:30 this afternoon, the traffic jam was over and it was relatively easy to obtain tickets for several games throughout the season - though the best seats still available are boxes rather far past the baselines.

But this is nothing compared to the traffic jams when 45,000 people all try to park and/or head home on Metro at the same time.

Checked in on the Nationals website around 8:50 and got the Virtual Waiting Room using Firefox. Using the same laptop I decided to open another window using IE and got the same message. Around 9:05, the one on IE broke free and I was good to go. Chose the Best Available option for 4 seats and ended up with tickets in Sect 141. The whole registering aspect of MLB.com had me nervous because I type slow as hell, but I made it through with the time limits provided and made the purchase.

I was at the Nats first game at RFK on April 14, 2005. Best believe that I'll be in the house come March 30, 2008 at 8:05.

I'd rather watch games on TV and try for tickets next year than suffer through that Dantean ordeal. Back in the 1990s when I lived in Bawlmer, I set my computer modem init string to dial the O's box office over and over with the speaker on so I could pick up the first time I DIDN'T get a busy signal. At least then I felt like I was doing something constructive, finding a way to automatically redial until I got through, and once I got through, I was actually able to ORDER TICKETS! Miracle of miracles!

Mostly received the error message that I was in the waiting room... but also had the problem that I was given tickets to choose, and then the error that the server was too busy and would have to start over.

Here Philadelphia beats the Nationals again. I tried to get tickets to the home opener there. The procedure was to enter a lottery. The rules states the date you had to enter by, the date where they will pick the winners, and the date that you will be notified. I didn't get any tickets there, but I wasn't as stressed and disappointed, nor did I waste an hour.

i had no interest at all in opening day tix given the humongous transportation cluster$%&* I expect ... but I did give in and go for 3 Sat. evening games in April, June & Sept., when it might be a little more sane getting to & from...

If the transportation is a mess, I won't be back, though, I fear they're really playing a wild card/dodging a bullet between the lack of parking and limited Metro capacity at Navy Yard.

I don't know about others, but I'm not going to wait 45 mins.+ for a train after the game and want to come back.

I discovered that tinkering with the website address allowed me to bypass the waiting line. Unfortunately I did not discover this until 9:30 when it was sold out.

But in an interesting twist of fate, I logged back on to the website at about 10:30 and found one ticket that came up as being available and snatched it up.

Ordinarily I would never have an interest in going to a baseball game alone, but I do want to be a part of this historic night. What are you thoughts on going to a Nats game alone?

Didn't you also help some of the website congestion by having three computers trying to get tickets for the same group? How many other people opened multiple windows (tabs) in their browsers and did the same thing? Somebody mentioned Stubhub. Same idea, they have thousands of people who purchase tickets on-line for them to sell in the gray market. The recent Hannah Montana concerts had the same problem, with entire venues/dates sold out within minutes of the tickets becoming available.

How to avoid the problem? I have no idea. Get rid of on-line sales? Go back to standing in a line for a maximum of 4 tickets? With the last suggestion, you then have a bunch of college students waiting in line to sell tickets by hand outside the park/concert arena. Real scalpers.

A more general comment about online sales: those of us who are savvy don't realize how challenging it is for the unsavvy. My wife just went online to get me surprise tix for a summer concert at a Wolftrap type center here in NJ. She linked through the artist's site to livenation.com for the tix but didn't see (I checked and it was easy to miss) the link for the NJ date. So she started again and googled the name of the venue; got a fake site bec. the venue had NOT registered the site as a webname (to prevent this...) and she ended up, unwittingly, buying from a scalper/ticket service for TWICE the face value when tix were STILL available from livenation.com! At first I was distressed that she could be fooled--BUT the point is, that venues and vendors should use common sense for newbies, make the links clearer and for God's sake, spend $10 and register the obvious link someone might use to get tix, to prevent this sort of problem!

Does anyone know how to force the misleading vendor to refund the money? I've checked the laws in his state (CT) and NJ, and scalping seems to be legal!!!!
What is up with THAT?

Oh, and Red Sox fan is right; the Mets and Phillies also use lotteries--my buddy got us Red Sox tix in Philly in June using one.

Good luck.