Disastrous 'Pokemon Go' Event Leads To Mass Refunds (techcrunch.com)

thegarbz writes: A Pokemon Go Fest hosted in Chicago and attended by between 15-20,000 people has ended in disaster. The event was plagued by logistical issues resulting in 3+ hour long delays getting into Chicago's Grant Park... Those people who were lucky enough to get into the paid event were greeted with a completely overloaded cell network unable to cope with the number of people trying to get online at the same time. The occasional person who was able to connect experienced a never ending string of game-breaking bugs when attempting to catch the rare Pokemon created specifically for this event.
Gaming company Niantic finally just gave a rare Pokemon Go character to everyone who attended -- though one attendee still called it a "horrible, terrible day." The Kansas City Star reported some people had paid as much as $400 for their tickets -- which had sold out within minutes -- and that some attendees had even started lining up for the event at 6 a.m.

Comments

Capacity planning

[djinn6]

You'd think after running into trouble with unexpectedly high volumes when they launched the game, they'd learn a thing or two about capacity planning. And in this case, they knew exactly how many people were coming and what they'll be doing once here.

I wouldn't ever go to a Pokemon Go event, but if I did, I'd be pissed too.

Re:Capacity planning

[Dan East]

Yes, but they are a software company, not an ISP / cell carrier. They obviously did not consider the fact that the existing cellular networks could not handle that many customers in one small area accessing high bandwidth resources at the same time. Had they alerted the carriers, the carriers could have set up temporary mobile cells for the event, and / or Niantic could have set up their own free Wifi hotspots for the attendees.

Either way, this was a very, very expensive way for them to learn about these kinds of connectivity logistics.

Re:Capacity planning

[adolf]

Are software companies somehow immune from hiring competent event planners?

Re: Capacity planning

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares what the cell companies do?

Niantic should have set up a bunch of professional grade wifi networks, all tied to a fast fuckjng backbone. This was their event, and their event required a shit ton of network connections. Fix it with temporary wifi. It costs a shit lot less than like a hundred bucks a head to set that up.

Re:Capacity planning

[ShanghaiBill]

An experienced event planner would likely have made the situation worse. At a typical event, maybe 10-20% are on their cell at any time, mostly using low bandwidth voice and text. At this event, maybe 80-90% were trying to use the network, and at much higher bandwidths. The normal heuristics would not have worked.

Re:Capacity planning

[r1348]

An experienced event planner would have known that.

Re:Capacity planning

[thegarbz]

Are software companies somehow immune from hiring competent event planners?

Competent in what? Precisely what kind of event has taken place before where 20000 people simultaneously need to use data from the same area. It's easy from the IT sidelines to see the obvious, but given an event with these requirements hasn't happened before, just how were a bunch of "competent event planners" (I hear that's a uni degree now) supposed to know the what they don't know without precedence?

Re: Capacity planning

[cfalcon]

No to both. A LAN party may have a bunch of gamers who have cell phones, but the focus is on the LAN. If the LAN is only part of the action- if teams are playing online- then you can be sure the planner will at least have a high speed connection available. Even a hackathon will focus more on local data transfer.

This was truly unprecedented.

And also completely, 100% percent, predictable.

Again, in Pokemon Go, literally all you do is play on their server, through a cell network or a wifi.

You can supply a fucking wifi. You can supply enough wifi. If this is your goal, you NEED to.

Re:Capacity planning

[adolf]

Competent in...planning events?

Events need to have things. Bathrooms, for instance: Someone needs to figure out how many porta johns to rent. Figuring out the quantity of things like is the job of an event planner.

This event needed bandwidth and none was provided. That's a pretty gnarly failure, and being a "software company" instead of some other type of company does not excuse this guffaw.

tl;dr, this is like organizing an Oktoberfest event and forgetting to bring beer.

Re:Capacity planning

[Gussington]

An experienced event planner would likely have made the situation worse. At a typical event, maybe 10-20% are on their cell at any time, mostly using low bandwidth voice and text.

What is this 2008? Anyone involved with any sort of event in the last 5 years knows that 99% of the crowd will be on Snapchat, FB, Twitter, Whatsapp, WeChat, Telegram, Viber, Maps, Uber etc It's all data these days, has been for years.

Re:Capacity planning

[Gussington]

Competent in what? Precisely what kind of event has taken place before where 20000 people simultaneously need to use data from the same area. It's easy from the IT sidelines to see the obvious, but given an event with these requirements hasn't happened before

Ok just stop. Have you heard of the Olympics, or any of the thousands of sporting or music events that happen every week somewhere in the world that have more than 20000 people all snapchatting, facebooking, twittering etc? I was doing this in 2010 and 3G (at the time) was on the same list as power, water, toilets and transport. This is a massive fail for a company that's primary product relies on a cellular network to function.

Wow

[skam240]

Wow, I cant believe people still play Pokemon Go.

Re:Wow

[skam240]

Because it was the ultimate fad game. When it first came out I'd see countless people walking around outside waving their phones around. A dozen or so restuarants in my area (and i live in the burbs) even gave discounts to various factions as a means of bringing in business. Fast forward to today and my teenage neice and nephew dont have a single friend who still plays and literally every person who i knew who played no longer does.

Meaning of "disaster"

[PopeRatzo]

I'm very disappointed in this story. A flaming airship crashing into a crowd of 10,000 people is a disaster, not the failure to catch a rare pokemon.

To be honest, I was hoping for the former.

Re:Sigh.

[Scutter]

Must be pretty easy to see them all from your high horse.

How is this event any different from, say, Comic-Con or any other fan fest? Just because it's a video game you don't happen to like? Newsflash: People like enjoying their hobbies and sometimes that involves paying money to do things related to it.

Re:Sigh.

[0100010001010011]

Comic-Con or any other fan fest

Or professional sporting event, theater, concert, etc.