Niantic recently just hosted their Pokémon GO Tour: Hoenn event from February 18th through the 19th with a varying degree of success. The event itself was financially successful, selling out their tickets before the event was even out. According to Review Journal, this meant approximately 50,000 tickets were sold for the event hosted over President’s day weekend, which would be held at Sunset Park in Las Vegas, Nevada. However this was where the problem lay. Sunset Park was a public park, meaning that people were allowed to enter the park without needing to buy a ticket, causing thousands more people to show up than anticipated, causing network issues for the event.
According to IGN, over 17,000 people went to this event without paying for a ticket. This influx of players caused network servers to have issues with the event, resulting in people being disconnected from raids and, in some cases, being unable to log in entirely.
Pokémon GO is no stranger to this type of situation occurring. According toThe Guardian, back in 2017, the game had similar connectivity issues in their Pokémon GO Fest, a similar large-scale event for fans to meet up and play the game with unique circumstances, though they were for different reasons. Niantic had not prepared well enough for the large number of people who ended up going to Pokémon GO Fest, which caused severe issues in the networks hosting the game.
This year’s Pokémon GO Tour shares a similar problem to its 2017 counterpart. Pokémon GO Tour did not anticipate the thousands of extra players that came to play at the park, which caused problems with connectivity for those who paid and those who did not.
In response to this issue dampening the first day of the Pokémon GO Tour, the official Pokémon GO Twitter released a tweet asking those who did not buy a ticket to stay out of the park while the event was occurring on the 19th.
Many people in the Pokémon GO community were unhappy with this remark. Fans of the game found this statement upsetting due to the problem being Pokémon GO’s network. Most replies remarked how unfair it was that Niantic was trying to dictate that they should not go to a public park because the connectivity of their game was not strong enough. Unfortunately, it did not seem as though this plea helped the event on its second day, as it was reported that similar issues occurred on the 19th as well, which Niantic believes to be the fault of the abundance of players that had not bought tickets for the event.