Massively on the Go: Scopely sold out players for Go Fest 2026’s Go Fest

If you thought the original event was a letdown, Pokemon Go’s 10th Anniversary Go Fest finale, the so-called Mega Finale, was a mega disappointment, to the point that it reminded us not of the great things that have happened in the past ten years, but that the company is still having the same problems. It felt odd that the Kalos Tour, so soon after the release of Pokemon Legends Z-A, wasn’t more Mega, but clearly Scopely thought Go Fest and its finale were more deserving of the Kalos specific feature.

What we really got was just Mewtwo on Mewtwo on Mewtwo, plus a ‘promise’ of more Mewtwo to come. It feels like they’re not even hiding the fact that they’re milking the playerbase at this point, which is certainly not how to celebrate a game’s 10th anniversary.

Poor preparation

Usually, the prep events feel better than the actual events to me. This year’s Go Fest was lacking, to the point that even spoofers weren’t willing to come out and cheat. While admittedly I did see some of this for the Finale, the more telling sign to me was the low in-person populations I witnessed across the communities I interact with.

My weekly raid community was not all in on this event. Some vets were still trying to figure out the new system announcement the same day it launched, at the start of the prep event. The devs allowed some Megas to get a third charge attack while Mega Mewtwo also got Adventure Effects for both forms which cost, *sigh*, Mega Energy, further trying to push the feature onto players. Remember, players already need to pay 7,500 Mega Energy to unlock Mewtwo’s Mega (it’s only 400 for Groudon, which is a Primal that boosts three typings and gives a damage bonus to the raid through death or while benched), plus another 5,000 to unlock its final Mega level.

Admittedly, Mewtwo at this point has been pushed so hard that people are actually sick of it, but just the same, the cost doesn’t make any sense, especially since the effects aren’t great: Mewtwo Y lets you know if a Pokemon is a 3-star+ rated ‘mon on the catch screen, while X takes two shields off a Mega Boss and boosts its damage. I’ll get into this later, but suffice to say that while there are Mewtwo fans, even my more upbeat event community was pretty vocal about being tired of Mewtwo, even as they kept raiding it.

Now, before, I laughed about Mega Mewtwo X’s damage boost because, as I’ve said before, the shields are an artificial barrier. Without them, most of ‘Super Mega’ bosses can be beaten with a few people, maybe even soloed. Instead, the shields require you to have seven or more people who all have a Mega and click the button, which seems easy but POGO was not originally made as a strong combat game. Many of us are trying to focus on real-world stuff while playing, like traffic, oncoming pedestrians who aren’t playing, dogs who have no idea why so many people are standing around not giving them treats, etc. Then of course there are bugs, lag/bad connections, and weak/new players.

That doesn’t excuse people for not being somewhat aware of the mechanic, but it’s a very real truth that still got played out during the actual event, to the point that players in my event community failed Super Mega raids, but I’ll get to that later. Frankly, the fact that people don’t focus on POGO’s combat combined with many players not actually using Megas even during major events, and that they’re essentially a rental Pokemon with a use tax, and a new more expensive level to unlock a bonus that costs nearly five times what we paid for the same power boost before, and you have yourself a feature that may be selling but is also robbing the game of its pleasure.

So I wasn’t surprised that there was a grand total of four of us for my usual “raid train” group on the first day of the prep event. Then no one came to the second day. I checked back on Thursday and, again, no one. I couldn’t even get my big-spending remote raiders to join Mega raids most of the week. I even went to my major event community, which usually has tons of players for the traditional raid nights, and I feel like saying they had half their attendance would be generous. Scopely may be all in on Megas, but it doesn’t feel like the community feels the same way, especially when recycling them for a finale.

The Mega feature is just bloated, designed in a very alien way compared to the rest of the game, and really makes players resent the company even more. In fact, one of the people in my group who pays for tons of raid tickets and travels to events said they weren’t going to buy the event ticket proper because there was no value in it for them, and I get it. For people who have been playing for Megas for each new release, yeah, there wasn’t a ton. I mean, Armored Mewtwo raids are neat, as the ‘mon hasn’t been around since 2020, but no shiny variant or new features for it doesn’t make it super appealing to long time players, including someone like me who kind of wanted a perfect-stat one. It is a highly sought ‘mon, but releasing it as a normal raid boss during the Mega Finale almost feels like Scopely admitting that they knew people weren’t on board for Megas.

The problem also is that all of these announcements– the new Mega moves, Megas being allowed in PvP leagues and scaling down temporarily to fit them from next season onward, and Armored Mewtwo– should have been in the event release notes. Even someone like me, who paid attention to data miners, wasn’t hyped going into this event, but casual players could have been. As it was, I just never bumped into someone in any of my communities or friend groups that seemed hyped for this.

Maximum milking

While my event community’s Go Fest proper meet-up had “lobbies full” for a 5 a.m. raiding according to one community ambassador, this time they were down to about twenty-five players. And during the day? What was hundreds of players during the actual event seemed like maybe 100 players for the finale.

It gets worse though. It wasn’t bad enough that this event had no event eggs, no event quests, no special event spawns, no new raid targets, or even extra free raid passes/raid currencies for a raid-heavy event, it also wasn’t stable. What some of us thought was a connection issue turned out to be server issues, just like ten years ago when the servers were constantly having issues, but because this event was so uneventful, several people actually just up and went home. Raiding was the main attraction and we were wholly unable to do it due to the boss loading screen getting stuck right before allowing combat. However, Rocket Battles were having the same issue, and, very new to me, the support chat option was lagging bad enough that people thought it was broken too.

Ever the penny pinchers, though, Scopley’s compensation of two additional daily passes missed the mark. These raids were in rotations and only available on Saturday. That means people who couldn’t play in the afternoon simply lost opportunities they were promised, not to mention may have received lower Energy gains due to the bug, as sometimes people could attack but then the bug would strike and make it impossible, Since Mega Energy rewards are based on how fast you can defeat the boss, the bug immediately guaranteed that participants wouldn’t be able to achieve the rewards they would have properly earned.

Admittedly, the issue may have only lasted about thirty or forty minutes, long enough for me to go get lunch and a walk a lap, but it was enough that people really had gone home. Some came back, plus probably some late comers, but visually I could see the population decline and crawl back to, well, still not great numbers. Worse, though, was that the few people who did complain, like myself, bumped into severely incompetent support staff. I spent maybe forty minutes getting my roughly $1 refund due to a combination of the app crashing any time I needed to something beyond type a reply, and the support person either repeating questions they’d just asked me or suffering from shockingly bad reading comprehension, to the point that I literally had to re-write part of an official tweet I had screenshotted and highlighted because said staff member was quoting everything but the highlighted section. And this was part of my success story!

Suffering support ineptitude after a dull event isn’t the memory you want to make, especially when people came and left the event early due to the shallowness of the offered content. Since I had time to kill on both event days, I ended up popping in on other communities I’ve generally disregarded for major events after they’d failed me multiple times before. I was told one group was ‘popping’ but if the lobbies aren’t full and I’m able to pop in quick just to see who’s there, it’s not that busy in my opinion. The other communities I checked were also mostly dead, including my usual raid location. While I did see people in lobbies, I didn’t physically see many people, and no familiar faces at all. It seemed like it was mostly remote raiders and casuals who didn’t realize most folks abandoned the area for major events.

Morale was also the lowest I’d seen in the area I actually did the event. Not that people genuinely seem to enjoy the game, per se, but they seem to enjoy each other. This event was more of a whine fest as people continued to open their wallets. Those people who went home? They gave up on raid passes/access currency. When I mentioned submitting support tickets, some of them sort of shrugged, as if giving the company money for features that broke was normal and should be paid for. It’s probably not exactly a shock to most people, but it’s disheartening to see the passionate people in the community are being replaced with walking wallets who consume whatever Scopely will spit, even when they intellectually can spell out how poor the event is.

People complained about Mewtwo being in Mega raids again and Mega Mewtwo coming back again, but they kept raiding it, half joking they were chasing shiny variants with special backgrounds, yet truly paying to actually do it. A few of us who were more cynical noted the lack of shiny Armored Mewtwo was specifically so they could milk it more was sadly accurate, as the previously linked hint about Armored Mewtwo Raid Day will probably announce the shiny variant’s availability. It’s blatant milking in such a short span of time that makes it hard to believe Scopely or its devs really want to build a good game rather than a virtual casino.

As someone who loves Mega Pokemon, Pokemon Go’s always struggled to hit the target, much less anywhere near the bullseye. Many of those I spoke to this weekend felt similar, in that the way they changed the system, multiple times now, at the very last minute, was both insulting and hard to get hyped over. I know some min-maxers love the idea of the third move, but many people dislike how both the Mega and now its third move are rentals, putting things like Psytrike Mewtwo into a weird spot: what once was a useful move on the top Psychic type falls, not just because of its Mega form, but also because it gets a move to overshadow it’s best move during the ‘rental’ Mega period.

I really would love to say these additions are objectively good, to say that casuals don’t understand it, or that the min-maxers are missing something fun about them, but as my friend and I said, Megas are basically just for candy generation once you hit a certain level. The other stuff is just fluff. Paying 5,000 Mega Energy to unlock roughly the same bonus we got from simply waiting out a timer for roughly four months seems insane, especially when it only cost 920 if you had evolved it every day instead of waiting out the free cooldown period. I know you can walk it, but as someone who seems to walk more than the average player from how people reacted to my progress walking the newest Megas, it’s just way too much work for way too little, even with the new changes.

Admittedly, of all the Mega changes that were announced in connection to the event, one thing I really didn’t get to touch is the scaling Megas in PvP, which is set for the new season coming later this month. While the current PvP cups all allow Megas, we didn’t get to use the scaling system. That being said though, there is a Catch Cup in the new season that allows Megas. That means you need to find a new Mega-able ‘mon and pay the initial Mega evolution cost (100+ Energy, not including the completely astronomical exception that is Mewtwo’s previously described 7,500 energy, which I’m sure some whale will figure out how to sneak it in).

I can see that Scopely wants Megas to be used in combat, and I get it, but the current system– not just Megas, but the game itself– wasn’t built for it. If the Go Fest Finale was supposed to show off those new features, it failed, miserably. Whoever is steering the POGO ship right now seems to be clueless, and the long string of failures in the Mega system itself is the best reminder that, frankly, this company really didn’t know what it was doing with Megas in the first place aside from trying to use them to raise funds.

Massively OP’s Andrew Ross is an admitted Pokemon geek and expert ARG-watcher. Nobody knows Niantic and Nintendo like he does! His Massively on the Go column covers Pokemon Go as well as other mobile MMOs and augmented reality titles!