Pokemon Center has been making Pokemon drops pretty regularly these last few weeks - usually spanning once or twice a week. Although, that doesn't come without challenges. Bots continue to overrun the queue and get through without many issues, as a lot of these bot providers continue to try their best with engineering any prevention updates Pokemon Center throws their way. However, this past Friday, something rather interesting happened... Pokemon Center queue had gone up a few times during the day, causing many people to rush to the site in the hopes of securing whatever drop was happening. As the minutes past, it became obvious nothing was dropping and rather a false alarm? I mean, it can happen! A lot of these monitor bots these Pokemon restock servers implement tend to look out for backend changes that happen to the site, alerting people of the queue going up.
The track record for that has been pretty impressive, but this past Friday, nothing came of it. What was interesting, however, was the extra captchas and Imperva security measures being implemented, which was not seen before. It appears the Pokemon Center website was actively trying these measures out live to see how bots may interact with it. At the same time, numerous Pokemon fans were lining up in this virtual line in the hopes of scoring whatever drop would happen but they were faced with a litany of network errors when trying to solve these captchas. Some were even met with error 15 and 17 messages which are notorious for blocking individuals from accessing the site from their IP address.
It didn't take long for Pokemon Center to revert back to their old system. It became rather apparent during this event that they were implementing new security measures to fight against the waves of bots that are so prevalent within the Pokemon TCG scene. What I am personally afraid of is that it won't take long for these bot providers to find a way to bypass these new security measures (if they do go live).
As someone who has no knowledge of cybersecurity or bot preventions on websites, I am curious to see how the Pokemon Center website and all these other retail websites continue to fight against bots. When the big Destined Rivals drop happened on Walmart a couple weeks ago, many people were able to cop because the bot providers (like Stellar and Prizm) were not anticipating this new queue system. Similarly, many people were able to purchase the Black Bolt and White Flare ETBs when they were live on Pokemon Center. The stock lasted approximately 5 hours.
Now I'm no expert, but I do wonder whether Pokemon Center will tackle this bot issue by restricting a certain quantity to each address. I mean, they are already doing this where if you try to purchase more than the limit, then you're simply met with a red banner, preventing you from moving forward with the purchase. Considering bots don't have to wait in the queue, restricting to address makes the most logical sense to fight against them. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if these bot providers have a workaround ready for that. But what do I know? I'm simply the Webmaster of Pokevew! :P
Either way, curious to see what happens for this next Pokemon Center drop which I anticipate will happen this upcoming week. Guess we'll see...
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