"My thoughts on the Viva Calle San Jose Event"

#PokemonGO: I went to the Viva Calle San Jose event, and to sum it up, it was a mix of joy and frustration.The good:The spawns were great, lots of Lapras, Larvitar, and Starters, especially in the 4 advertised locations which had a lot of extra Pokestops fully lured, although these rare spawns were available along the 7-mile route (a very narrow spawn corridor as well, if you ventured more than 2 blocks from the route you'd never know there was an event). There wasn't any special spawn (such as Unown), though none was ever advertised.Cellular networks stayed up the whole time, and there were no PTC login issues!!!The St. James Park in particular had 3 simultaneous Lapras spawns, and there were hundreds of Trainers able to catch them thanks to good network/server reliability! It was also extremely easy to find raid groups!The bad:The "Golden Raid Pass" was simply the entry form for the sweepstakes, that's it. No exclusive raid, or in-app code, or any other perk you can make up, but nobody could have known because the whole thing was a mystery.This Golden Pass was exchangeable at one of the 4 locations (I never saw a Niantic presence at the St. James location), though the rewards varied slightly by location. At Lake Cunningham, you could only get either a poster OR wristband of your team's color, while at the Mexican Heritage Plaza you got both. Lake Cunningham had wristbands available until about 11:20am, and ran out of Mystic bands first (no surprise there), though they never ran out of posters...most likely because of their "one but not both items" restriction. Mexican Heritage Plaza was the last to run out of goodies, I think somewhere around 1-2pm, while Japantown was over before it started (the ambassadors went in and out of hiding during the event, eventually running out around 12-1pm).The Sprint gym battle event seemed pointless, I went to the Tully location at 12pm hoping to see something interesting, and nothing happened initially. As has often been the case for previous Sprint promotions, the employees at the store had no clue about the event. (It was brought up in another thread that the winners of the Amazon GC would randomly selected from the pool of users who signed up for the event on mytrainnerrewards AND belong to the team holding the gym at 5pm.) Both Sprint locations did end up spawning at least one Raikou during the 12pm-5pm window, and I battled and caught one at the McKee location.The ugly:At around 10:15am at the Japantown location, two female Niantic ambassadors were handing out wristbands in the crowd, and were completely swarmed by Trainers. People were trying to grab from behind which likely freaked the ambassadors out, and I think they went into hiding in Japantown after that happened. Even John Hanke didn't get this kind of treatment at Go Fest. In contrast, the Mexican Heritage and Lake Cunningham locations both had booths to hand out the items and it was very orderly at those two locations.Other Notes:The event spawns ended exactly at 3pm local time, surprisingly on schedule! Having a bike was the way to go here, as I quickly gave up on getting any swag in Japantown, but was able to ride to Lake Cunningham to get a wristband! I wasn't able to get a poster though because of the restriction at that location. I enjoyed the event, but there was a lot of room for improvement.If you've made it this far, congratulations! You've just read more than an entire year's worth of PoGO communication from Niantic! (OK not really, but I hope that made you smile) via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2x83Oru