Spoke to my rep and he confirmed that he has been told they are going to tiered pricing. Of course, he did not have any information about how the games will be tiered, how many many tiers they will use, or any actual numbers. Said they probably won't have that information until the schedule comes out.
He kept touting that my average price will be $89/ticket and my total will not change. Also kept saying that pre-season games and early season weeknight games will be a little less than the $89, but a weekend game against the Caps will be a little more. I explained that "a little more" and "a little less" are relative terms and I want to see actual numbers.
Will a Tuesday night in November against Arizona be $80 or will they drop it to $50? If it is $80 for Arizona and then $97 for a Saturday night against the Caps or Pens, that is one thing. If it is $50 for Arizona and then $128 against the Caps or Pens, that is a completely different thing. Especially for someone like me, who now keeps the weekend games for myself. My wife never knows what time she will be able to leave work until the afternoon of that day and with a 3-year-old, not always easy to get a babysitter during the week. Aside from that, if I decide, I do want to pay $128/ticket for that saturday night game, my regular buyers might not be interested in paying that price.
The guys I sell to are either friends, relatives, or relatives of friends. I do not just want to say they are $96 each and then have to mix up games so they get close to that price point.
It would be one thing if they made the pre-season one price and the regular season another, like the Giants do. My Giants tickets are $55 for pre-season, $110 for regular season. Reasonable. I even did the math for him, took me about 45 seconds to figure it out. Make my pre-seasons $21 each and the regular season $94 each. $94*41+3*21=$3,917. A dollar more than they are charging me for the package.
The real frustrating thing is not that they are doing this, but they have NO INFORMATION to give out. So basically, the schedule is going to come out and they are going to play with the numbers until they get to a total of $3,916 for my price point and the numbers they need for every other price point.