As many as 20,000 attendees at a Pokemon Go festival in Chicago are being offered refunds after technical glitches meant fans were mostly unable to catch anything – let alone \u201cthem all\u201d.<\/p>\n
Disappointed fans will also be offered $100 in the form of the app\u2019s in-game currency, Pokecoins.<\/p>\n
The event on Saturday had been touted as a chance for fans to come together and catch some of the rarest monsters on the hugely successful app.<\/p>\n
But fans booed and chanted \u201cfix our game!\u201d and \u201cwe can\u2019t play!” as executives from Niantic, the game\u2019s creator, attempted to explain the problems.<\/p>\n
At one point a bottle was thrown at a presenter on stage – it missed.<\/p>\n
Pokemon Go was launched last summer and has since been downloaded over 750 million times, reportedly making more than $1bn in revenue. The game required players to walk around the real world in order to find monsters in different locations.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, in Chicago\u2019s Grant Park, fans had hoped to find some species of Pokemon that were otherwise not available or extremely rare.<\/p>\n
Tickets to the event sold out within around 10 minutes of going on sale, leading to many tickets being resold at almost 10 times their face value.<\/p>\n
‘Worst time’<\/strong><\/p>\n But the festival succumbed to a combination of overwhelmed mobile networks, and several bugs that Niantic admitted were \u201con our side\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that this is not the day that we had all envisioned,\u201d Mike Quigley, the firm\u2019s chief marketing officer, told angry attendees.<\/p>\n \u201cBut we appreciate your patience.\u201d<\/p>\n As well as the technical problems, long lines prevented many ticket holders from getting into the event for more than three hours.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the worst time I have ever had doing anything,\u201d\u00a0tweeted one fan, who later left.<\/p>\n In an attempt to fix the issues, the company increased the radius of the event by a further two miles, meaning players could leave Grant Park in order to try and connect to the game and get access to the rare creatures.<\/p>\n And just before 6pm local time, attendees were told they would all get a Lugia – a Pokemon that had not been available on the game before, an announcement that drew big cheers from an otherwise dejected crowd.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As many as 20,000 attendees at a Pokemon Go festival in Chicago are being offered refunds after technical glitches meant fans were mostly unable to catch anything – let alone \u201cthem all\u201d. Disappointed fans will also be offered $100 in the form of the app\u2019s in-game currency, Pokecoins. The event on Saturday had been touted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[106],"tags":[6998,9568],"yoast_head":"\n