Pokémon Go is holding a makeup event to let in players without tickets, to let in players without tickets

It is now officially a trademark movement for developer Niantic. Last month Pokémon Go players were accidentally admitted to the Kanto Tour event for free with a ticket. Make it right, Niantic announced there would be a special bonus event for those who paid. That started today, and guess what: they let in people who hadn’t paid.

During the celebration of Pokémonthe 25th anniversary, Pokémon Go featured a pretty pricey special event. Cethey lebrate the monsters’ original homeland, the Kanto region charged a hefty $ 12 to play. So when people found they could participate without buying a ticket, others became dissatisfied.

Niantic quickly responded with apologies and announced that there would be a special bonus search sequence to make it right. That started yesterday in Australia and New Zealand, and with just perfect script writing –like Eurogamer reports-it was available for a short time to people who had not paid.

You have to consider that whoever was responsible for turning on the event was sitting in front of a computer with 80 different sticky notes pasted all over their monitor and desk saying, ‘DON’T OPEN IT TO ANYONE’ while several colleagues and bosses are walking their around the door and say, “Remember, don’t open it to everyone!” When it got to the point, they just broke down.

This is not exactly unprecedented. Only last year Niantic performed a similar farcical series of pratfalls after that year’s GO Fest, in case of technical problems meant that the rotating cast of spawning Pokémon was not working properly. To apologize, they held a catch-up event where … technical issues meant that many players were unable to participate properly. Incredibly, they held a makeup event for that catch-up event, albeit limited to players in the Asia-Pacific region.

Whether today’s disaster will mean the same remains to be seen – the issue was resolved before the event’s launch time spread beyond Australia. So far, Niantic – usually very fast to debug Twitter– has not recognized the problem, although it has only just caught up apologize for breaking the game’s news feed yesterday.