"Unpopular Opinion: Niantic did a great job of ticketing for GoFest this year."

#PokemonGO: Disclaimer: I was not drawn for tickets but am going because a friend of mine did.I honestly liked the way Niantic rolled out tickets this year. Yes, it gave multi-accounted an unfair advantage through “extra entries,” and yes, scalpers were still able to exploit tickets using a children’s account loophole to allow ticket sharing, and yes, there were a lot of legit players from around the world who didn’t get tickets. But here’s why I think Niantic handled it so much better than last year.Last year whether or not you got to go was predetermined by the quality of your internet connection. Luckily I was buying from work at a university with great internet and got tickets, but I know of a lot of well-deserving players who had crappy internet connections at missed out. This year your internet access didn’t determine whether you got to go to GoFest - everyone had an equal shot.Last year within seconds of tickets going on sale we had resale tickets on eBay for as high as $1,000. Yes, this year there were a few scalpers but the number of hoops a buyer would have to go through is insane - I’m actually curious if anyone followed through with it. Not only would you have to buy the account - you’d have to go through the process of creating a child’s account so you could share tickets with a friend and trade every single Pokémon you caught over to your main account - a process that would take hours and possibly days assuming you hit out the 100 trade per day maximum. Again, I’d be interested to see if anyone actually purchased tickets this way off of eBay.At the end of the day, Niantic found a way to implement an in-app method where every player had a fair chance to enter a drawing to win tickets. It didn’t depend on your internet connection, or patience dealing with website crashes, or the size of your wallet to buy exploited tickets off a 3rd party site. Yes, multi-accounters got to have multiple entries, and people with larger networks of friends in bigger communities had an advantage (which is how I got my ticket), but seeing how the last two years of GoFest ticketing has gone, I think Niantic did an amazing job this year.For those of you critical of how Niantic handled it this year: what improvements would you make? via /r/pokemongo http://bit.ly/2GXQ5qk