Anyone with experience in this world, how does a big company miss the boat so hard?
This is topped off with a technical staff that doesn't really have any greybeards to hit people with a cluebat when necessary.
Finally, Niantic is privately held, so it's executive staff are not subject to being fired after having repeatedly screwed up (Pokemon Go basically suffered from all the same problems that Ingress suffered from only even moreso).
Put all that together and you have a perfect storm to create multiple, high-visibility fuckups.
For a long time with Pokemon Go, I assumed that the problem was that Nintendo put so many shackles on Niantic that Niantic really couldn't do anything. The more I hear about Niantic, the less I believe that to be true, and the more I believe that Niantic management are just idiots.
Poor event planning, I can believe. Marketing promotions getting ahead of infrastructure, I've been there.
But I know that a great gaming experience is very, very important to this team...
I wish I could write this without sounding like astro-turfing. The Fest was a horrible failure, burned the goodwill of exactly the fans that Niantic treasured most.
Developers, marketing, executive staff should all be required to use the shitty bandwidth that everyone else has to live with.
Here in germany for big festivals every carrier places a truck with mounted wireless antenas nearby the event location to ensure a good wireless coverage. I dont know how it is in chicago, but for such an event the planners should have asked the big providers if they can do something to not have wireless outages. But maybe this would have costed them some money they wanted to spare.
Also the HDDs that a large segment still uses.
These days I notice some stuff taking forever on HDD machines that I suppose just flies on the devs/testers SSDs ...