[iamkroot]

I've always figured you could just do an auction.

Say you have 500 tickets. You give everyone who wants to go 48 hours to submit how much they're willing to pay for a ticket. At the end of the time period the 500 people whose bids were the highest all get the tickets.

You could publish the current price of the tickets during the bidding time frame and allow people to modify their bids at any point.

The final price would be whatever the 500th lowest bid was. In the event of a tie, choose randomly among the people tied for 500th.

I imagine this would be greeted with complaints about how it gives the rich an advantage, but I can't think of a fairer way to distribute tickets that also avoids the scalper problem.