Individual mission requirements were tied to 504 error checks
As is the case with most physical Nintendo products, the second Mario pin distribution process did not go so swimmingly today.
So what went wrong? Well, people started to slowly unravel it as it was happening in real time.
So at the pre-announced time of 3PM ET today, I logged on to find that my account was showing “0/15” required missions for the pin set. Wait, what?
Yes, 0/15. It made no sense, because mere minutes later, I had 22 completed missions to my name. But as folks started to check in online and put two and two together, it became clear what was happening. It seems as if individual missions need to be checked by the site in real-time, and can result in individual 504 errors.
So if the site is having any sort of trouble, any numbers of missions can error out and result in an incomplete mission tally. If you don’t have 15/15, you don’t get the code. Refreshing the page resulted in wildly different results. Sometimes I’d have 1/15 missions. Sometimes I’d get five. Or even 14/15! So close!
Eventually, after a full hour, I did get through. For the first pin process, a completely different portion of the site was actually hammered: the store you needed to complete the checkout process. That actually worked this time (at the time of publication)! Once my mashing-fest had ended, I was able to input the code and order them in seconds.
As a tip, make sure you wait for the mission progress bar (X/15) to completely fill up before refreshing. If you’re lucky, it’ll eventually lottery you into 15/15. If you’re still mashing, good luck out there. The Nintendo Direct is about to begin!
