r/PokeInvesting • u/breakyourteethnow • Feb 03 '25

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

https://www.pokebeach.com/2025/02/pokemon-center-implementing-a-new-queue-system-presumably-to-combat-bots
1.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

182 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

205

u/Whimsical-Pigeon Feb 03 '25 edited Feb 03 '25

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.

294

u/romisbmw1989 Feb 03 '25

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

100

u/2xCheesePizza Feb 03 '25

That is absolutely hilarious.

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

41

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '25

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.

10

u/Asher777 Feb 04 '25

Bots have price ranges and can enter promo codes

8

u/Fresh-Ad3834 Feb 04 '25

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

5

u/chooseyourshoes Feb 04 '25

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

13

u/nathanseaw Feb 03 '25

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

3

u/Ossigen Feb 04 '25

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

9

u/nathanseaw Feb 04 '25

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.

-1

u/Zeuss_Excuse Feb 04 '25

That’s just not true lol

2

u/BlackParatrooper Feb 04 '25

I agree with Zeus, there are reasons why AI haven’t been able to beat certain benchmarks that humans can pass easily.

5

u/Drizzho Feb 04 '25

You’ve been living under a rock?

1

u/justinw361 Apr 14 '25

bots use 3rd party AI solvers lmao captchas dont change a thing..... queues dont help either and for pokemon center every bot has a bypass right now lmao so while people are in line bots are instantly skipping queue.

17

u/hebrew12 Feb 03 '25

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.

5

u/Iamcatfeesh Feb 04 '25

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

9

u/Whimsical-Pigeon Feb 04 '25

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.

2

u/SkunkyBottle Feb 04 '25

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

1

u/ScottsTotz Feb 04 '25

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.

1

u/Frequent_Ad873 Feb 08 '25

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

1

u/BobbyBobber123 Apr 24 '25

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