If there’s one criticism that has been lobbied at WWE in recent years that all fans can agree on, it’s that ticket prices have reached an obscenely high level. It has reached the point where WrestleMania 42 is just a few weeks away, and despite taking place in the same city and venue as last year, ticket sales for WWE’s biggest show of the year have been 18% lower than WrestleMania 41. The company did hold a brief discount sale in February, but there was little to no movement as far as tickets were concerned. This all led to a much bigger discount sale on March 16, with Dave Meltzer breaking down all the numbers in this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

The sale that took place on March 16 wasn’t just for WrestleMania 42 tickets, it was for all events through to June 9 including non-televised house shows. All tickets were discounted by 31.6% to commemorate the date, which many wrestling fans jokingly refer to as “Stone Cold Steve Austin Day” given his “Austin 3:16” promo and best selling t-shirt, which itself is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

The real question was very simple, did the sale actually work? The answer, is yes. Meltzer noted that a large number of house shows shifted over 1,000 tickets for each show, and as far as WrestleMania 42 is concerned, around 2,000 tickets were sold for each individual night. At the time of writing, that puts night one of WrestleMania to 39,425 tickets sold, while night two finally passed the 40,000 mark as 40,687 tickets are currently out. This year’s “Showcase of the Immortals” is still behind the pace of WrestleMania 41, but instead of consistently being around 18% behind, WrestleMania 42 is now around 11.2% behind the pace of last year.

For the fans who don’t to outright buy the tickets from WWE and would rather pick them up on the secondary market, they might be in luck. Meltzer reported that the secondary market is much lower than this time last year, 33.8% to be exact. The current lowest price to get a seat for night one on the secondary market is $237 and $221 for night two, which Meltzer did say is still very expensive, but compared to WrestleMania 41, it’s significantly down.