London 2012 Ticket Ballots - how many tickets to apply for?

If I had the inclination, and the funds, to buy tickets to the London 2012 Olympics, I would be a very angry person.

The ticket allocation process has been lazily designed to leave the applicant having to make difficult decisions without any information. If I wanted to spend £200 on tickets, how many would I be best advised to apply for?

The most logical approach might be to gamble that I get half of what I asked for, and apply for twice as many events as I really wanted to attend.

But I have to be prepared for the possibility that demand isn't as high as has been expected, in which case I might be allocated all the tickets that I ask for.

If I were rich, that would be a risk that I could afford. But if money is tight, I cannot afford that same gamble, so I would have to apply only for what I could afford, and possibly end up with nothing. (Well done London 2012 - another barrier for the cash-strapped.)

And what if I were thinking of travelling quite a way and only thought it worth the effort if I could get tickets to at least two rounds of the event that really interested me? Again, hard luck: no way to specify this.

Well done to the organisers for avoiding the crudest first-come-first-served bunfight. But what we have is only a little better.

One of the justifications for Britain spending money it can't afford to mount London 2012 is that we can show the world what a brilliant country we are. The ticketing system certainly isn't doing much to boost our reputation.

Where is the imagination and innovation that could create a really intelligent ticket allocation system?

Why can't purchasers list the events they want in order, but specify a maximum spend?

Why can't purchasers specify "I only want to buy one of the following group" so that they can apply for tickets to any of the first-round heats in an event, without the risk that they get more than one?

What about offering a multi-stage allocation process, where you are offered tickets in Round One, and can then accept or reject tickets for each event? Then the rejected tickets are re-allocated and offered to those who didn't get them in round One?

I'm sure there are lots of other innovations that could be added. It would have made for more complicated programming, but I thought that Britain fancied itself as a knowledge economy. And if the website had been well designed, it could actually have made life easier for the user.

Shame on London 2012 for their laziness.