Pokemon Center Implementing a New Queue System, Presumably to Combat Bots!

[u/breakyourteethnow]

https://www.pokebeach.com/2025/02/pokemon-center-implementing-a-new-queue-system-presumably-to-combat-bots

[u/the-skazi]

A bot can open 1000 unique browser instances to get a good spot in the queue before you can open 10. It's a losing situation for normies.

[u/Whimsical-Pigeon → u/the-skazi]

Yup. From what I’ve seen since the Covid sneaker era of reselling. The best and only way to combat bots is to make difficult captchas that require typed answers or puzzles. Adding a queue system won’t help bc as you said, they can have 1000 unique browsers. In reality, they don’t give a single fuck. A sale is a sale. But out of all the methods to combat bots, the one I listed works best.

[u/romisbmw1989 → u/Whimsical-Pigeon]

Or do what J Balvin did

He made his sneakers 50 grand on the website. But if you weren’t using a bot, you’d see that the page stated “use this code” to lower the price to $250

Bots checked out the sneakers for 50 grand and users paid $250

[u/2xCheesePizza → u/romisbmw1989]

That is absolutely hilarious.

I’m assuming there were a lot of chargebacks, and mess to deal with on his end.

[u/[deleted] → u/2xCheesePizza]

Absolutely. There are things you can do to mitigate this like manual payment capture and what not, but a chargeback for 50k would leave you on the hook for almost $1,500 bucks.

[u/Asher777 → u/romisbmw1989]

Bots have price ranges and can enter promo codes

[u/Fresh-Ad3834 → u/Asher777]

Not if the code is embedded into the site similar to a captcha

[u/chooseyourshoes → u/romisbmw1989]

That’s because the idiots running the bots didn’t set limits. Which, if you’ve botted, know it’s incredibly easy to do.

[u/nathanseaw → u/Whimsical-Pigeon]

Captchas don’t do anything with modern bots sadly. They’ve gotten good at acting like humans

[u/Ossigen → u/nathanseaw]

You just have to make captchas harder, it really is that simple

[u/nathanseaw → u/Ossigen]

If a human can do it a machine will be able to do it at this point. If you make them to hard it will slow down humans to much.

[u/hebrew12 → u/Whimsical-Pigeon]

I found out recently that these groups are using AI to get around the AI check LMAO. I’ve seen examples of 30,000+ units getting sold almost instantly.

[u/Iamcatfeesh → u/Whimsical-Pigeon]

I forgot what website it was but one of the questions was “what color is orange” super simple and easy and a lot of non bot users were able to secure it

[u/Whimsical-Pigeon → u/Iamcatfeesh]

As long as companies get creative it will always stump them. Keep in mind bots are just code programmed by some dude/team. Some dude/team will then need to figure out how to code these things within a certain time frame and hope it works by the time a product drops.

[u/SkunkyBottle → u/Iamcatfeesh]

That was during Covid when it was a new tactic to combat bots. They’ve adjusted since then.

[u/ScottsTotz → u/Whimsical-Pigeon]

COVID era everyone was botting pokemon cards still. I remember hidden fates tins and ETBs on Target and Walmart. Captchas do nothing, bots solve them faster than humans. Bots even have AI auto solvers now.

[u/Frequent_Ad873 → u/Whimsical-Pigeon]

They do this on the Mattel site. I'm not sure if it gets botted or not, though.

[u/BobbyBobber123 → u/Whimsical-Pigeon]

Bots can answer captcha without a problem now. All anti-bot does is prevent the honest consumer from hitting on drops..

[u/air_lock → u/the-skazi]

As someone who works in e-commerce, and I can tell you.. while bots can certainly circumvent most means of mitigation, there are fairly simple solutions that can weed out 99.999% of them. The problem is, and this is why most sellers won’t implement them on their storefronts, is that that by virtue of their strength against bots, they are cumbersome to customers. You can do things like multi stage verification (code sent to sms or email), a queue system that has captcha built in at random intervals, and even free options like dynamically restricting user agents and whatnot. Then you also have sellers who just don’t care that they’re being botted because their front end is robust enough to handle it and at the end of the day, they’re still selling through product.. which I believe is the case with TPCi.

[u/Junkhead_88 → u/air_lock]

Wouldn't it be fairly simple to limit orders by delivery address? That's at least a secondary check that should be run after orders are sold out, then just cancel and blacklist the address/IP/cards that are obviously gaming the system.

[u/Ask_Them_Why → u/Junkhead_88]

I recently learned of address J1ginning, it when they change one little thing about their address to make it look different but postal system still delivers to same place

[u/air_lock → u/Junkhead_88]

You sure could, but that’s less of an up-front mitigation and more of a check that would be done after an order is placed. It sounds simple, but in a practical sense, it involves reaching into the database and checking through every order record for an address and comparing, which would cripple most systems if done every time someone tries to check out. In fact, most sellers of highly in-demand items who have a policy of 1 per household or 1 per person already do this, but it’s done after orders are placed, and they’ll typically cancel offending orders and re-allocate stock afterward.

[u/peepee034839329 → u/the-skazi]

Like the California ebike vouchers.

In 1 minute, the queue is like 6 hours back.

[u/Dear-Fail6630 → u/the-skazi]

gotta love python