"How Niantic has Learned from 3 years of Go Fest"

#PokemonGO: Hello all,​Edit: Forgot to mention ticketing. 2017 and 2018 sucked for tickets due to scalpers. This year was way better granted there was no transparency on when waves would go out and took this community as a whole to help others know when the waves went out.​I have been thankful to have the ability to go to all 3 years of Go Fest. Here is my POV of all 3 years. I would first like to praise Niantic for an amazing GO Fest 2019. Niantic has learned a lot from the past 2 years. Lets start with Go Fest 2017 and we will end with 2019.​Go Fest 2017This was a disaster from the start. First issue was how the players were to enter the park. The small area sectioned off for go fest was gated. So players who had early access didn't get in until 11 AM. Early access was at 9 AM. I had normal time and didn't get in until about 11:30 AM or 12 PM. At this point they just starting letting players in without really checking their bags. Next issue was having so many players in a small section of grant park with no WiFi or portable cell phone towers. This caused so many players to have issues getting in to the game. On top of this they had raids at the event as well which caused more issues on the Pokemon Go side. The last major issue was that they had no contingency plan at all. It took them several hours to realize they do not have the resources to fix the issues within the park and had to open the event up to the surrounding area. I would give it negative a million stars out of 5​Go Fest 2018I would like to start off by saying there was no major issues at this event that I can remember. I want to start by saying they fixed the gated park issue, You just walked up to a poke stop and spun it, then scanned your wrist band. More or less I just had a few small gripes about this go fest. First gripe is no raids. They were not able to test a lot of raids in a small area in the year they had since the last go fest even though they had multiple chances. On top of this they shut down raids in the surrounding area of Lincoln park for just in case purposes. I personally was unable to connect to the WiFi and I thought it was useless. It may have helped some players (Just my opinion). The play area was to long. To get from one end to the other took forever and it sucked when it came to the special research task. Obviously they had to try something new and they didn't want a disaster like 2017. I get it and I totally understand the reasoning behind it. Food was a disaster that year. Lines were super long and took about an hour to get food if not more. Overall still an okay year. I would give it 3 out 5 stars.​Go Fest 2019I cannot express how amazing this year was. I would give it 10 out of 5 stars. Niantic has come a long way since 2017. It has definitely been a learning experience for them. Niantic has learned a lot from the last 2 years and it really showed this year. First off the portable cell towers extremely helped compared to the WiFi. The area was perfect granted it still took some time to get from one end to the other. The food was everywhere and allowed quick and easy access to it damn near where ever you were. The lines were not bad at all. Access to the event was based on geofencing and you did not actually have to go to your specified gate. The other huge thing was the fact that they had a contingency plan if something went wrong. We seen this on Saturday when the city of Chicago kicked all the players out of the park due to weather conditions. It took a little bit (30 mins or less) for them to be transparent about what was going on and why we had to get out of the park. At that point the tweeted out and sent an in game notification to them. Kudos to them. Once we were allowed back in to the park at 3:30 PM they told us what would happen for those players effected on 6/22. Everything went great this year and they finally started testing raids for major events. All in all I think Niantic deserves some major praise for this event.​TLDR: Niantic did an amazing job at Go Fest 2019 compared to other years. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://bit.ly/31P4gYf