Quick one for you, Crew, because this needs to be said while it's fresh .. and because it happened twice in two days.
Wednesday, Pokémon Center (11am–3pm EST): The first wave of chaos. Pokémon Center's queue system went into "maintenance mode" repeatedly during this window - people got within a minute of the front of the line only to get bounced back to the start, over and over. Others made it all the way to checkout with items in their cart, only to have the site crash on them. Reports pointed to a new anti-bot measure throwing a brand-new error at phone users specifically ... an error longtime PC shoppers say they'd never seen before.
Late Thursday night into Friday (after 4am EST), Target: Just a few hours later, Target opened its own Pitch Black preorders .. and ran into the same wall. Their anti-bot measure ended up blocking real shoppers trying to check out, while doing little to actually stop bots from getting through.
So two different retailers, two different systems, same result: the people these measures are supposedly built to protect got locked out, and the actual target (pun intended) .. bots and scalpers ... slipped through largely unaffected. We've seen this exact pattern before with Prismatic Evolutions, and here we are again with Pitch Black before it's even hit shelves.
For reference, the Pokémon Center products in play were:
ETB — $59.99 (limit 2)
Booster Bundle — $26.94 (limit 2)
Booster Display Box — $161.64 (limit 1)
If you struck out on either drop, you're not alone ... and you're not out of options. Local game stores will have Pitch Black product for the July 17 release, with prerelease events running July 4th–12th, so there's still a clean path to get this set without fighting bots and broken queues.
Did either drop treat you any better? Let us know in the comments .. curious if anyone actually got through clean on either site.
~ DJrythaman
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