Pokemon Go Fest "A Wild Farce Appeared"

[Badnik Mechanic]

So remember Pokemon Go? Well it's 1 year old this week, and to celebrate, there was a huge outdoor event called 'Pokemon Go Fest', imagine a giant gathering of Pokemon Go fans who were promised the following.

* A unique legendary battle against a legendary pokemon.

* An increase rare pokemon spawn rate for the area.

* Player challenges which if completed by the masses would unlock more rewards. 

 

Well... 20,000 people paid for a ticket and turned up to the event.... and it's been one of the biggest disasters in gaming memory. 

To start, people with early access wristbands were waiting in the boiling hot sun for 3 hours just to get in!

Then when the event 'started' users were kicked out of the game and couldn't log in due to the mobile service provider crashing due to the increased demand.

Then when those who could get online found that no pokemon would spawn because the release build they were all using had 2 game breaking bugs which Niantic admitted to the crowd was their fault (HUGE MISTAKE!).

Then the challenges randomly started to complete despite nobody being able to play... and someone was very quick to snap this.

Someone behind the scenes manually altering the challenge progress. The fans were having NO influence on the days main attraction at all.

Fans in their thousands then started to chant 'We can't play' as stage events took place... and Niantic continued to provide commentary for the 'battles'.

It became such a farce that people started to throw garbage at the presenters.

The CEO took to the stage and the crowd started to boo and chant 'Fix our Game' and 'Fix your shit' as he started his welcome speech.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/161129805?t=8m27s

The event has been such a disaster that Niantic has said it will completely refund everyone who bought a ticket and credit everyone who attended with $100 worth of in game currency.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40695589

 

 

Edit: Oh wow it gets better. It turns out there was an official livestream for the event, every time the cameras cut to people playing the game, it quite often showed 'connection error' messages or the game completely crashing!

 

Periodically the live stream is interrupted as a USB plug in sound effect plays and several mic 'check check check' voice overs.

[KHCast]

Holy shit. Like just...holy shit. The game already had its issues regarding connections am match starting. It amazes me simply how fucking bad this was

[Meta77]

Lol well only event was refunded not plane tickets

[Pawn]

How can they still be having so many problems a year later? I can't believe that they don't have the available funds to hire more people or execute their plans more efficiently. Either way, if events like this are stretching their capabilities for whatever reason... why create them in the first place?

[NegaMix]

Wow... and I thought the Sonic 25th Anniversary livestream had issues. But this... this is on a whole new level.

[Badnik Mechanic]

Oh my god...

 

[Vec]

Instead of making this fest as an excuse to release Lugia and Articuno raids,  they could have just released them and save themselves all the mess the event was.

[Big Panda]

Considering how much the server kept breaking last year during the release cycle, and this was to celebrate the one year anniversary of said time...a fitting celebration really.