The Problem with Legendary Raids in Pokemon GO

During the Hoenn Tour, we actually had a lot of raiding to do. Both Primal Groudon and Primal Kyogre had come out, and they were insanely powerful. In fact, they were so powerful that we needed much bigger teams than normal. While a standard Kyogre generally goes down with 4-6 players, Primal Groudon needed 8 for a comfortable victory, and was only just doable with 6 players, all using Megas. The Primal Legendaries were actually a nice bit of challenge, an excuse to bring out all the best gear, for a big fight.

But the difficulty of these raids also shows off the largest problem in raids overall: not having enough players. Or, at least, enough veteran players to carry the raid.

Of course, this problem is quite different in major cities with high populations. Filling a raid can be quite common. I’ve played in a 20-person raid (against Primal Kyogre) and it died fairly quickly. The sheer number of players guarantees that a boss will be beaten, even if not all of them are bringing good counters.

My raid experiences

Everywhere else though, things are different. Well, they’re different for me, but there’s a huge number of variations here. Where I play, getting enough players to raid can be a genuine struggle. In order to arrange enough players for a raid, my local group uses a Facebook group where we organize ourselves. Or see whether anyone is interested. If we have enough interest, we meet up at the gym and send out invites to people who can’t make it in person. Depending on the raid and time, there’s a chance that someone will be late, so we just have to wait until everyone’s ready. Once everyone is present, we jump in, invite as many people as possible and then hope they make it.

For a lot of players, it’s a similar situation. People have local groups, with which they coordinate with third party apps. Discord and Facebook are popular choices, since it’s easy to invite people to a group and chat freely. And both apps are both free and easy to access. These groups aren’t all the same though. In the city I live in, we have Facebook, but in the next town over, they prefer Discord. The big downside is the initial entry into these groups, since they’re hard to find online and require being invited into these groups.

Everywhere else

It goes further than that though. If you are serious about raiding, there are third party apps like PokeGenie, which allow you to be invited to raids across the planet. These apps allow you to join raids hosted by other people in other countries, by adding you as a friend and then inviting you to the raid. These third party apps can be the only way to do raids at all in rural areas.

So what is the problem? The problem is that it’s a massive hassle to organize raids, and we often have to rely on third party apps for a half-decent experience. All of this should be available inside Pokemon GO. We shouldn’t need an app just to be able to do one legendary raid.

A solution?

But the thing is, there already IS an in-game version of sorts. Using Campfire, an app inside Pokemon GO (currently not available to everyone), you can see if there are many raids around, and you can see a lot more raids in Campfire than you can on the Raids tab. Campfire even has the ability to send up a flare, stating that you want to do a raid and are looking for players. However, it’s all incredibly basic, and I’ve not seen anyone use a flare around here. Most people just don’t know that Campfire exists, and even then, there’s no coordination or communication anyway. In fact, the only thing I’ve found Campfire good for is searching for specific raids. It was good in the Ultra Beasts event, but that’s it.

So yeah, even though we have a potential solution to people trying to communicate to do raids, that potential solution is a half-baked idea that doesn’t really help at all. For now, we just have to stick to our third party apps.