When frustrations bubbled over last year in Chicago’s Grant Park, the Silph Road team was there to witness it first-hand. So when Niantic announced they would be boldly returning to Chicago to host another massive in-person Pokemon GO event this summer, our first thought, like many others’, was simply: can they pull it off?

It turned out, they could. Niantic’s GO Fest 2018 was a fantastic success by all metrics – and the Silph Road once again came along for the ride.

In the year since GO Fest ’17, the Silph Road has launched the Travelers Card network, a mobile app public beta, many research breakthroughs on mechanics like Raid Rewards & shiny rates, and the global Silph League. It’s been a busy year!

To celebrate our growth and the memories we’ve made on the Road together, the team decided to continue the tradition of a large Silph Road meetup after the day’s main event – the official Silph Road After-Party. And now that the team has all made it back home from Chi-town, it’s time for the Silph Road’s GO Fest Report!

Inside the Park

This year, the Silph Road felt a lot less like a small, niche research community and more like a global player network!

Nearly 100 volunteer leadership met up inside the park (donning easy-to-spot TSR shirts) to play together and to help check travelers in for the GO Fest League Badge. Throughout Saturday and Sunday, these volunteers were stopped wherever they went and asked to facilitate check-ins – which they happily obliged!

The Silph Road also rolled out an ‘NPC’ tracker – showing the real-time locations of community personalities like celandro, the creator of PokeBattler, or famous YouTube personalities. Thousands had fun locating these figures by their 8-bit sprite avatars on the map. Unfortunately, Apple (once again) rejected TSR’s mobile app submission right before GO Fest. This time the reason was: “things in this app look like Pokemon.” :/ But we’re continuing to work through that and were able to hook up a web version for our iOS travelers as a fallback just in time!

Handshake Stats

Finally it’s time for some numbers. Silph Road travelers were nearly everywhere you looked in the park! During the two-day event, 2,233 of the 21,000 attendees checked-in with Silph Road volunteers or influencers to collect their badge – more than 1 in 10 attendees!

2,881 travelers conducted at least one handshake, with nearly half of these handshaking with 5+ other travelers or personalities like YouTubers.

12.7k new connections were formed between unique travelers during the event.

The traveler who conducted the most handshakes at GO Fest was: TRNRTipsNick with 801 handshakes.

Close behind him were other Pokemon GO YouTube personalities:

ReversalYouTube: 718

PkmnMasterHolly: 688

MYSTlC7HWD: 582

DanielSchilling: 530

From 4pm to 6pm on both Saturday and Sunday Niantic hosted a meet-n-greet with the Pokemon GO Travel YouTubers. After waiting up to two hours in the queue, many travelers shook hands to collect the memento League Badge from their favorite YouTubers on their Travelers Card.

1,024 travelers shook hands with at least one of the 5 YouTubers in the Pokemon GO Travel gang.

The Silph Road After-Party

After Lincoln Park’s spawns dried up, the PokeStops ceased awarding items, and the heat died down Saturday night, the Silph Road After-Party began at 9pm! While we’d initially intended on about 300 RSVP’s, these sold out in <25 minutes. So we worked to increase our capacity with the venue – and it’s a good thing we did!

Right at nine, a line began queuing and our leadership volunteers jumped in to help get everyone wristbands, pre-loaded game cards, and drink tickets. Fortunately, the line typically took under 10 minutes and folks were able to join the party and grab pizza, drinks, bowling/billiards/ping-pong and barcade games. Here’s a few shots from inside!

AFter-Party-Queue AFter-Party-Queue After-Party-Inside After-Party-Inside In-Wine-Room In-Wine-Room Billiards Billiards Bar Bar Pics Pics Bowling Bowling Jay-Kim Jay-Kim Bowling-2 Bowling-2 Prev 1 of 9 Next

1,000+ travelers from around the world came to hang out with the Silph Road team Saturday night – including some who’d traveled from South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia – along with YouTubers who graciously posed for photos between bites of pizza, and even the occasional Niantic team member!

When the party finally died down at 2:00am, a ragtag group of travelers and YouTubers were the last to head home. To forever memorialize the last left standing:

The Verdict

All said and done, the difference between 2017 GO Fest and 2018’s was immense.

Of course the cell networks showing up with COWs, COLTs, and even Super COWs made a critical impact. But it’s clear that great thought was put into optimizing for the limits of the cell network infrastructure. Players were spread over a 1.8 mile loop. Spawn biome “Regions” in the park drew folks away from the densely-crowded entrances and into the center of the park. And Wi-Fi access points were even in place as a fallback.

Everywhere you looked, folks were enjoying themselves – whether from opening the surprisingly lucrative Research Award encounters (Metagross, Shiftry, etc!), taking AR photos of Celebi, hunting down the 6 Unown species (C,E,L,B,I,?), looking for a favorite YouTuber, or trying to trade for that elusive regional at their Team Lounge.

While Raids were conspicuously absent from the festivities in the park, they made a strong showing in the rest of the city. Transforming the host city into a lucrative game map appears to be the new normal for Niantic events – and we’re glad for it! But in the park itself, it was clear to us that the Research mechanic created a sense of purpose and progression that was a huge improvement over 2017. Folks had a to-do list that lasted many casual players the better part of the event. A marked change over simply ‘hanging out’ in the small Butler Field!

Niantic boldly charged back to the belly of the beast and clearly embraced the challenge of re-attempting a massive event in a US city – and there’s no denying they pulled it off.

Parting Words

The Silph Road network, too, has grown in amazing ways since last summer. We spotted Silph Road shirts everywhere we walked throughout Lincoln Park. And beyond that, simply wearing a Silph Road shirt led to travelers coming up for handshakes and check-ins all weekend.

Thank you to all our travelers who repped the Road at GO Fest! It was amazing to see just how many of you have been traveling the Road with us these past two years. But there’s no rest for the weary – we have more exciting things coming to the Road soon. Here’s to our next year together!

Travel Safe,

– The Executives –

p.s. The Celebi GO Fest ’18 League badge has been awarded to all travelers who checked-in with Silph Road staff or YouTubers during GO Fest! If you attended and forgot to check-in, email proof of attendance to team@TheSilphRoad.com and we can help you get your League badge!