Pokemon Go: Find Out When Moltres and Zapdos will Arrive and when Articuno Leaves

Pokemon Go has seen a huge resurgence in players and excitement thanks to the release of the first two Legendary Pokemon in the game. Of course, with just one of the three legendary birds available from Generation 1 everyone has been wondering when the other two would appear. Now, in a post detailing the issues with Pokemon Go Fest, Niantic has laid out the schedule, including the deadline for when players will want to have secured an Articuno.

Starting July 31st players will be able to fight and catch Moltres at gyms around the world. This is also the day that Articuno will no longer be available, so make sure you’ve gotten him by then. Moltres will continue to appear until August 7th when he’ll be swapped for Zapdos. The schedule was determined by the teams inside of the game, with Team Mystic catching the most during Pokemon Go Fest, then Valor, and finally Instinct.

Of course, Niantic couldn’t post new information without talking about the failure that was Pokemon Go Fest. In a very open blog they detail a lot of the troubles they faced and how they tried to either avoid or fix them. “Both I personally and all of Niantic apologize for the inconvenience and frustration, wrote Niantic CEO John Hanke.”

“What happened? Technical issues with our game software caused client crashes and interfered with gameplay for some users. The gameplay issue was resolved with a server configuration change and the crashes were also addressed for many but not all users. A more protracted problem was caused by oversaturation of the mobile data networks of some network providers. This caused many attendees to be unable to access Pokémon GO or other Internet services. Network congestion also led to a login issue which affected some users able to access the Internet. This latency-related login issue was addressed with a second Niantic configuration change.”

As far as the connectivity issues experienced by mobile carriers, Niantic says they informed them beforehand that there would be this many people and they would require extra bandwidth. Some carriers responded with mobile cell towers, but others felt they could handle the capacity. Obviously they couldn’t though and the result were a lot of angry gamers.