Update []: Well folks, after a couple of days of drama surrounding the launch of the latest Pokémon Trading Card Game set, Destined Rivals, The Pokémon Company has released a statement on the whole affair — and yes, it's expectedly vague.
Released to VGC, the statement claims that TPC is "committed to providing a smooth purchasing experience" to all those using The Pokémon Center online store. Hmm. Meanwhile, the queuing system employed for the Destined Rivals launch — the one that many reported being stuck in for multiple hours — was simply to "help provide a more seamless purchasing process during periods of increased site traffic," the statement continued. Hmmmm.
Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube840k
According to the statement, TPC will "continue to explore measures" to improve the overall shopping experience, though it gave no indication of what those improvements may be.
You can find The Pokémon Company's statement in full below (via VGC):
We are committed to providing a smooth purchasing experience at Pokémon Center and employ technology that helps get products into the hands of fans first and foremost. Currently, Pokémon Center implements a virtual queue for certain products to help provide a more seamless purchasing process during periods of increased site traffic. We will continue to explore measures that help create the best possible experience for Pokémon Center customers.
The launch of the new Destined Rivals set was marred by massive wait time for fans eager to get their hands on the highly sought-after Elite Trainer Box, while scalped items immediately began to pop up online with massively inflated price tags. All that was capped off by the news yesterday that some fans lucky enough to push a pre-order through were having their purchases quietly cancelled.
You can read into the full debacle by checking out our original coverage below.
Original Story: Yesterday, the Pokémon Company launched its latest Trading Card Game expansion, Destined Rivals, via its online store. As was predicted, the set proved to be massively popular, and many of those hoping to pick up one of the sought-after Elite Trainer Boxes were hit with site crashes and multiple hour-long wait times.
If that wasn't rough enough, we've today learnt that even those who managed to place an order may not actually be able to get their hands on the elusive ETB, as The Pokémon Company appears to be retroactively cancelling orders (thanks for the heads up, VGC).
As flagged across social media, customers who are still waiting on a confirmation email after what appeared to be a successful pre-order are discovering that their purchase has been quietly cancelled. This hasn't come in an apology from TPC, but rather by heading to the Pokémon Center website and entering their order number. In short, if you think your Destined Rivals order is in the post, you might want to double-check.
What's more, it doesn't seem like this is an isolated incident, as a quick glance at social media told us:
As many fans left yesterday's queues empty-handed, Destined Rivals Elite Trainer Boxes quickly began to crop up on eBay with massively inflated asking prices — a sign of another TCG launch marred by bots and scalpers.
The Pokémon Company has started to take some action against such profit-based practices, such as removing plastic wrapping on select orders in the Philippines, but until the demand dies down, we've no doubt that the madness will continue.