Safari-Zone Dortmund experience

Me and my girlfriend decided late to take the 1,5h trip to Dortmund to enter the Safari-Zone. We were there at 9.a.m. after a litte traffic jam. Finding a parking spot was easy and 5€ for the whole day is reasonable. We then walked tp the Park and saw the huge crowd at the entrance. It really wasn´t organized very well entering one-by-one without serious bag-checking but we made it quite fast to get in from a side string. Please Niantic, for the next event add to your list of animals being forbidden that people should not take their new-born babies into a crowd like this, it was really a pain to see.

So we got in, were handed a map of the park but were not able to enter the app. So we wanted to go to one of the announced Wifi-Spots. So we were looking for an information-spot which unfortunately was not marked on the map. We finally found a spot and were told where to find the Wifi-login. The code was so little that people were not able to read them from more than 5m away...anyway it did not help since the Wifi did not work either, so nobody was actually able to play and 50.000 people were walking through the park like zombies trying to get connection. This went for about an hour until there was an announcement that people should spread all over the park.

From time to time I was able to get into the app but it really wasn´t fun to play. Of course in those areas where wifi should have been available there were exactely zero pokestops and spawns...whoever organized this must have had no clue about the game. In total there were not enough pokestops in the park and they were pretty far apart. The quests being dropped by the stops of course included quests like "fight in an arena" or "win a raid"...again well done Niantic! There were no gyms in the whole park...again there was an announcement made to seperate to have an even better playing-experience...most people were not able to catch even one pokemon up to this point. Just a joke and probably half the people would have smaked the announcer into his face at this point. 3 hours since entering the park...

Then he announced that spawns were extended to the whole city of Dortmund. Unfortunately the quality was bad so you barely could not hear what he was saying...so we decided at 12:30 to go to the city. Two nice guys offered to take us with them with their regional train-tickets, thanks again! From there on it really was a fun day, but what remains is the anger about poor organzation from both Niantic and the Event-Organzation. I would say that it was embarassing. Entrance, Map, Wifi, Pokestops, Quests...a special raid-boss was not introduced (I think that was announced?). Everything went wrong! And it wasn´t bad luck, it was pure inability.

On a positive we met some nice people, did two raids, caught 3 shinies each, Ralts was a pleasant surprise, as well as the other spawns (Larvitar, Aerodactyl, Slakoth), but if I would have made a long trip to get there like many international people did it would have been a bad dissapointment losing the first 4 houres just standing around waiting for something to happen.