Pokémon fans call for ID checks after chaotic Pitch Black presale

If you managed to get the Pokémon Trading Card Game Pitch Black pre-orders from The Pokémon Center on Wednesday, there are two possibilities: either luck was on your side, or you were using a bot. Fans who joined the pre-order queue less than 15 minutes before launch often faced wait times up to nine hours, and the site suffered random crashes and refreshes that pushed many back to the end of the line.

Adding items to the bag, navigating the site, and checking out frequently failed as freezes and timeouts forced reloads. The Pokémon Center's anti-bot measures can trigger swift bans, so even using browser autofill or normal interaction left some users blocked; one Redditor said, 'I got a text an hour after the queue and was already blocked lmao.' Collectors reported that neither slow nor fast browsing reliably helped—typing and clicking slowly could lead to crashes, while speed sometimes resulted in bans, with early visits occasionally mistaken for bot activity.

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