Other games have similar soft limits. WOW for example lets you kill a raid boss only ONCE a week. I feel like this is something similar.

I ran into the same thing this morning when I was in Central Park. I thought it was the bug again, or I was very unlucky. But reading this article makes sense. It’s annoying, but I’m cool with the game having a softcap. A lot of games have soft caps embedded so some people can’t jump too far ahead (like WOW)