After an array of student complaints were received Thursday morning, the N.C. State Athletic Department has determined that there was a malfunction with the online student ticketing software. This malfunction means students who have received a ticket to the men’s basketball game against Duke on Jan. 19 and have already claimed it, will have to reclaim their ticket before the claim period ends Sunday at noon.

“Tonight we will be rerunning the lottery and we are going to extend the claim period until Sunday at noon,” Associate Athletic Director Dick Christy said. “If a student has won a ticket for the Duke game, they need to go online and check their account by Sunday at noon and reclaim their ticket.”

The malfunction stemmed from the software wrongly distributing seats according to loyalty points. Students who had fewer loyalty points were rewarded seats that were better than students who had earned more points.

“The seat assignment is going to be different because it is going to rank and put students in the correct priority order,” Christy said. “So we will have some students who thought they had a good seat but probably knew that they were not deserving of that seat, while some students who deserved better seats will have their seat section improved. “

Christy stressed the fact that students who received a ticket during the initial claim period are guaranteed to receive a ticket again once the lottery is re-run, only they will need to claim their new ticket.

“The same students that won tickets originally will win tickets again,” Christy said. “But if you don’t do anything to your account by Sunday when the second claim period will start, you will lose your ticket.”

Christy believed that the extra student seats the athletic department added for the Duke and North Carolina home games caused the malfunction.

“We added additional student seats for the Duke and Carolina games this year,” Christy said. “When demand was so high for football, we went ahead and added a few more seats for the basketball games, and the software didn’t prioritize the seats correctly.”

Even with the trouble the malfunction has caused, Christy and the athletic department are just happy they discovered the problem with enough time to still be able to fix it.

“I am glad we caught it now because we have a chance to fix it later on. It is an inconvenience to the students and we are not too happy about that,” Christy said. “But we are glad that we can set it right for those students who have spent all season accumulating points and doing what the system was set up to do, which is reward them for this game.”