"Go Fest Tickets: A Civil Discussion of Solutions for the Future"

#PokemonGO: Right now, there's a lot of people really angry with how tickets for Go Fest 2018 went down. I don't blame them and I'm right there with them. There's going to be hundreds of angry threads, news articles, thousands and thousands of tweets eviscerating Niantic over it. Probably should be. That said, what could Niantic have done differently?Different partner site for ticket sales. Clearly tickets.com did not have the capacity or the capability of crowd controlling a mass rush for an event like this. Most people I've talked to had problems even getting the site to load in the first place due to the high traffic volume. This could be an area that Niantic spends some time on in order to make sure they are having the right tools in place.Multiple cities. The fact that even though they have a massive player base in the US and the country is geographically very large, they still opted for only one location. This is probably their biggest mistake, and one they should have learned from after last year's debacle. Multiple cities across the country would reduce demand for any one specific location. It would also reduce both traffic and cellular network congestion, both of which plagued the event last year (and seem very unlikely to be much different this year). If Niantic truly wants to turn Go Fest into a positive experience, Go Fest 2019 needs to be a multi-location event.More dialogue with the community in the lead-up to the event. Right now, there's still a lot of unknowns as far as what the event will truly entail, and that's a double-edged sword. While it builds excitement on one hand, it also does nothing to quell community anger if things go wrong. Niantic's developed a reputation going back to Ingress of not listening to the community that actually plays their games. While they've been better about it recently, it hasn't been dramatic enough to shake off that negativity, so when you have something like this where a large amount of the community feels cheated, that's going to boil over.In my local community, we've already seen talk about people quitting the game, boycotts of ingame purchases, and things of that sort. With issues like that, plus with Niantic having a very expensive lesson to learn after the tire fire of Go Fest 2017, additional cost created by addressing some of the core issues (such as the number of locations, which would likely drive the largest expense), sound business logic would be to be far more proactive about avoiding issues than what Niantic seems to be.So now to turn it over to the minds of SR. This community tends to be very active and have a much better feel for details than the general populace of the game. What, if anything, do you feel could have been done to make this morning less negative than it boiled down to? via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2jU1ZGJ