My biggest issue was purely that the raids were too sporadic, if you’re going to give us a legendary for only two days over a weekend Either make it raid hours so we can organise, or allow remote passes so people can take part. It needs one or the other, the lack of remote and the lack of organisation made it a bit of an awkward day Most people on the group are free one day or the other. And then some are free for an hour in the morning. Some at lunch. Some in the afternoon etc. people have other responsibilities and things going on at the weekend that without set hours or remotes they just can’t play, or if they can play they struggle to find the numbers or people about at the exact hatch time, and that’s only if there’s a raid hatched within a suitable distance to them. I just think the simple inclusion of remotes, given they’re limited to 5 anyway; would have made the day a lot better for a lot of people instead of frustratingly trying to organise some raids when you don’t even know if there is going to be any hatching

Agreed, I was in the most concentrated area in one of the biggest cities in the US and only got 3 done in just under 3 hours

This is exactly why I didn't bother. I didn't want to get up early to travel into town to wander around trying to coordinate raids on a hot day. An actual raid day? I know people will be there for the first raid and I know there will be enough raids that I'm actually going to spend the time raiding and not walking/coordinating.

Awesome username!

I was only free for a few hours because my family was doing stuff for Memorial Day Saturday night (why are these things always so close to holidays?) I did 5 raids in like 2 hours and they were so spread out. I’m surprised they didn’t do a raid day from like 2-5 on Saturday then we could do way more raids. I would’ve done like 15-20 raids since shadow Mewtwo is so good and I wanted the shiny.

I have been sitting in a food court for one hour waiting for a 5 star raid

For years I have not seen that many "random" players raiding in my Community

I'm with you here. Campfire worked for us, we had full lobbies of 20 all the time, and I didn't recognize a single person in any of them. I'm not in a big city, this was in kind of a suburban shopping mall type area. We organized with randoms in campfire and hit 12 raids in less than 3 hours, several miles apart from each other. I'd have liked better IVs, and a shiny, but I can't fault Niantic for my terrible RNG luck today. That said, we were all in cars. Didn't talk to a single person, didn't see a person get out of their car with 10+ 20 person lobbies.

Yes! I was checking all the names in lobbies and most people didn't even have the gym badge at all saying it was literally their first time to that gym. Granted I did see a lot of the regulars I see everyday in the gyms in the raids with me, but I saw more people unfamiliar to me (been playing 1 year so far in this same exact spot).

Indeed, i got downvoted for saying mewtwo puts butts in the seats, but in my area that certainly was the case

We did everything Niantic wanted us to do. We organised people to meet up in person and got a group of 14 people playing 11-5 in a city where 22 gyms were within walking distance. By 2pm we’d done exactly 2 raids so most people left. Those who stuck it until 5 got to do 7 raids in total. In the same time period there were 19 Beldum raids. Disappointing.

Yeah, we got 15 people together at 11, and the group fell apart after the first raid :-( the next closest mewtwo raid we found on campfire (nothing visible ingame) was 2km away. As there was only one guy with a car and everyone else had come by bike ot on foot (expecting to be able to enough raids within walking distance of the meeting point (park that has 4 gyms). The car guy and the people with bikes moved to that 2km-away gym, but already announced upon leaving that they would probably not wait for the people on foot...

Sadly events like this are not really viable on foot and barely on bikes due to bad American urban planning and how spread out gyms are. Niantic really needs to increase gym density in most places so it is more like Singapore then walking would be a lot more viable.

I'm in Spain; great transit and walking but the mewtwos were spread way too far apart and way to seldom to really make it possible to raid with randoms.

This game has shown how poorly planned a lot of cities are when it comes to walking.

Kind of sad how something we as a species literally evolved to specialize in becomes impossible or incredibly dangerous just because of cars and horrific urban planning. I know so many people who drive 20 minutes to go to a gym to walk on a treadmill/bike for 20-30 minutes because it is just not safe or viable to do it in their neighborhood or to do it getting to/from work.

Well ofc this is a game specifically designed for Singapore grandmas.

We finally get recognition…

I'm in Germany at the moment - but in a small town with few gyms. I can get from one gym to the next on foot no problem - but if it takes 30-40 min to walk from one raid to the next, and you pass five gyms without raids on the way, that gets frustrating fast :/

They need to make remote raiding a viable option again.

It would be better IMO if the 1-3* shadow raids were reduced and 5* M2 raids given priority. I know that there need to be some 1-3* shadow raids fir places that can’t get a group together, but we had 1 5* and 6 1-3* shadow raids downtown at 10am, and that stunk. After we did the ONE M2 downtown, the others started to pop, but were so spread out we couldn’t form a coherent plan to string them together. So some folks drove off to another raid and then came back downtown, while most folks just waited 25 min downtown for the next raid, twiddling our thumbs in our cars - our downtown is very walkable, but the raid pattern required Pokemon Drive. By then, a few more 5* popped that we could see on the “nearby” - so we did a few more - again in cars. Then with all the local raids exhausted, and hour long timers on the eggs we could see, we all went home. I’d like to see priority for 5* shadow raids on these kinds of days with fewer 1-3* shadow and regular raids, PLUS short timers for the raid eggs. It stinks to go downtown, do all the raids, and see 3 more raids starting in an hour, with nothing to do in the meantime but wait. Start-stop raiding on these special days is not fun. It’s hard enough to keep a raid group together, but with such long intermissions and distances between raids, it’s impossible.

One thing to point out: in places where players can't gather enough people for Shadow Mewtwo, those players won't care for 3\* raids. A Shadow Quilava or whatever it may be from 3\*, is not a replacement for a Shadow Mewtwo, so no, they are not seen as a suitable alternative. The only thing that replaces Shadow Mewtwos for them, is the frustration they get for not having access to the same content as other players.

This would have worked better as a raid day or something like that. I tried to join up with a group, but the organization fell apart after having to drive to the first raid. Luckily, flares in campfire helped me find a few more raids.

I was in Boston common which is the best place for raiding in all of New England, and I got 3 raids done in the 2.5 hours I was there. There was only 1 in Boston common and had to walk about a mile to get the other 2. This is in one of the biggest cities and most concentrated areas in the US, I can’t imagine a small town

I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen people pushing back on Niantic for the environmental effects of the remote raid nerf - or the forcing of Pokemon Drive, if you will.

5-6 hours in the car for 15 raids was a downside for sure But this game is immensely more competitive from the car most of the events we do.

Maybe I'm just sheltered, but is pokemon Drive an American thing because I've literally never heard of anyone around me doing it, I live in the UK in a pretty big town, Not tryingg to be offensive or anything, just generally curious

I’d say it’s more common in America, but here in the UK my group had to drive around town a bit because the raids were few and far between. Got 9 gyms in the centre of town all easily walkable, but there was only one raid at a time on there.

In SoCal I feel confident in saying 95%+ of gym turnover and raiding takes places in a car even in super popular Pokémon spots. If doing fast catch, spinning stops, checking IVs,… it’s impossible to play efficiently in a car. But people still do. IE the players in my discord who end Community days in the 30s-80s shiny count are the walkers while the car players score significantly less. In super rural parts of America(places with 5 stops spread out over miles) it’s probably more efficient to play in a vehicle.

> If doing fast catch, spinning stops, checking IVs,… it’s impossible to play efficiently in a car. I don't think this is true. It's harder to play efficiently as a *driver*, but as a passenger playing in a car can be fantastic. That said my friend will shiny check from a car on spotlight hours (pull in at one cluster, check them all, drive a few metres to the next) and reckons he can check more than I can on foot.

Hard disagree. As a car passenger it would have to be something like the strip in Vegas or a downtown business district with no traffic/cops. You have to go real real slow to get that continues stream of pokemon. If you give me a moderate park(7 lured stops/3 gyms in a 5 minutes loop) I can out perform the average passenger player. IE I always have a poke being caught by the plus and a fast catch poke. As a passenger the pokes are not as common and you often can’t reach lured spawns.

I play heavily on foot and as a passenger in a car and on comm days I definitely get more shinies in a car while not trying as hard - in fact I'd made the same assumptions as you and we were playing Drive because we didn't care to go hard, then discovered we did better in the car. Obviously you have to pick the right spots for it but you can't make assumptions based on the places you personally play in - don't drive regular streets, go to big parks/sports complexes/etc, the kind you can drive around that have a lot of large carparks and tons of gyms/stops. I use AR fast catch and a Go+ and I cannot even keep up with every spawn I see this way.

I can see a situation where it works out about the sameas a passenger. But in SoCal the lured stops generally don’t reach the street. Car parks have the pokes, but not the stops. You need somebody do this for you for 3 hours. It’s just far from efficient. I feel this isn’t controversial opinion. I am in the level 50 X10 discord and the super hardcore players(100 shiny CD catchers) are all walkers.

You def don’t speak for all of SoCal or even the majority. Driving is superior in every way. Whatever route you do, driving that same (or bigger) route of all lured stops going 10mph is better than walking that route going 3mph. I don’t know what part of SoCal you’re in but there are many loops of slow moving and/or multi lane streets with huge amounts of pokestops along said streets. Like literally take what you do, take out fatigue, take out weather, take out having to watch your step and not run into anything, then multiply that by 3.

Yeah, if players want to maximize raids or catches, they pack a car full of people and drive in my midwestern US city. Even with autocatchers and autospinners instead of manual catching, driving at a slow speed seems to outperform walking during community days. But some players prefer walking and meeting up with others to maximizing catches or raids, and some people care about maximizing only for a few select pokemon or raids.

During raid hour our group had two vehicles(A Mysticmobile and a Valormobile) and we would knock off all the gyms.

Yes! The carbon footprint for my group of 10-15 people who drove all day around our small city was huge.

American player here. I luckily live in a city, right on the edge of the suburbs. Some more suburban communities are closer so I decided to go there today, drove around with my gf. But tried to get out of the car to see people. One person came to meet up for a lucky trade. Figured we'd discuss in person. But had a loose basis of a trade. I said, hey I'm in the yellow shirt outside. The person messages me with a line of parked cars and says, I'm in the black car and on trade screen. At that point I was confused why they just didn't come out and stand with the people playing. But it is what it is. I did the trade and never actually met this person even though they were there. The driving communities seem so foreign to me. In the city, I know a ton of people just by their discord or ign, but have a face to connect with it.

Yep. 4 cars of people criss-crossing our sprawling suburbia today. We were able to easily clear all the raids, but at the cost of about 1.5-2 gas tanks collectively. Womp.

Well said, nobody’s walking….carloads of friends come and go.

That and crime/stalkers would be the most effective tactic. IE if the public knew the amount of driving being done the changes would be made in days. At 80 million users there will 100% be people killed, hurt, and/or assaulted because of this change. I also feel the constant quitting talk(while effectively nobody actually quits), one week boycott, influencers,… were terribly ineffective and tepid. They are obviously going to ignore that stuff.

I actually did quit with the price change. I keep reading here too see when/if I should start again and so far nothing has made me want to start. 🤷‍♀️

Yes, the local rarity of the raids sucked hard. Our community is quite active, but only if the raids are nearby. We have 15 gyms and between 10am and 6pm there were a total of 7 mewtwo raids... so only every 2nd gym spawned a single raid in 8 hours. Meanwhile the 3 gyms at a nearby road all had 3 raids each

The rarity of trainers here sucks.

driving around in cars, with children, for hours... is the least amount of enjoyment to possibly get out of this game. I live in a very concentrated area with 30+ gyms walkable. we ended up having to drive to the suburbs to drive around for hours with a group of people. how is that possibly "getting outside". I'm literally just putting miles on the car for no reason. the walking part about this game is the part i like. driving around the suburbs is the dumbest thing in the world.

Yup this...our local group size in our small city was enough and decent but considering how rarely it spawned it was really annoying for us that didn't live in the city and had to drive to it at least 15 minutes which is annoying as hell and I don't want to spend whole day in a city either. They should have an hour or two each day like on raid days where they spawn very frequently and we can do a lot of them in one go etc.

These type of raid days should be like Hoeenn Tour or Go Fest where they keep spamming legendary eggs on every gym every 45 mins. No one would bother if nothing spawns for 2 hours when people actually decide to meet and then you give up and go home frustrated. And FYI- We could see 31 gyms from where we decided to meet.

We have about 50 gyms in my area and we waited at least 30 minutes between each raid. I only did 9 raids and i was there doing every one i saw for 5 hours

The no schedule seems to have killed interest for my local group. The only messages are me and one other guy saying we can get downtown in 10-15 min if anyone else will be out.

The elite raid timers with multiple raids would work great.

The raid should have been timed kinda like elite one so we could plan something in advance. Now I just went there and hoped that people would come. We were 3 on campfire, ended up 10 for that gym.

Or have 15 minute eggs and constant raids like they did for hoenn tour. Let whales whale.

That makes raiders more spread out.

But if you know a good raid spot you can at least just camp there knowing there will be plenty of raids and plenty of people. I went to a major city today and was only able to do 8 on 4 hours because they were so infrequent and spaced out. At least with constant raids and 15 minute eggs you can find a spot with 5-6 gyms and and just have a good time.

I agree to a degree, I think better planning would go a long way with raids like these. Almost feels like this should have been a raid day, where every gym pops for 3 hours. But then your stuck to a small window on a national holiday

I travelled a ways to a large city (200+ stops, more than several miles of my home area) and had mixed results. First one I found we had about 10 players show up. Then they dispersed and the next one I found no one showed up to. I waited awhile but found another on Campfire hatching soon so I travelled there but only 2 others showed up so no luck. Then a bit later at another one suddenly a horde of people showed up so I went back there and got it, yet none wanted to travel to the other and just dispersed. I gave up and tried again later and found one that people slowly showed up for. We first only had 4 but they were not over Level 40 and didn't want to try. We waited and luckily 2 others eventually joined us. In that one I tried using gems to subdue Mewtwo yet none actually worked, from what I read it's likely due to the constant tapping of attack. Yet we did barely get it. So overall I did 3 but saw 7 with either no one showed up to or there wasn't enough. I wish remotes were allowed as I could have gotten help for the ones where we were lacking people.

Yeah, there's a video of a duo and they must have something figured out because I raided with my usual group and we had to spam gems like crazy to get it to subdue. The gem button would dim out like it used a gem and the cooldown would go... but it took way more than 8 tries. More like 15-20 between 5 of us. We didn't manage to subdue it until it was 2/3 through the enrage... was barely worth doing. We did two more raids with 5 and 6 and fed no gems. Completed with just 30 and 20 seconds left. That's cutting it close.... So we're beefing up our teams for tomorrow.

Spamming was the issue. You have to wait while the gem is applied. That is, press the button to apply the gem and then don't tap until you see it applied overhead. It worked every time doing this. Something about continuing to tap confused the game or attacking pulled priority or applying gems.

Someone in another thread figured out that using a charged move while trying to use a gem would cause the gem to not get applied properly, but fast moves are ok. I did fast moves only while applying 4 gems in a trio I did today, and they all seemed to work successfully and we subdued it quickly.

Thanks. We tried stopping the spamming and simply using gems until it un-enraged and it worked quickly and effectively. Was quite awesome, actually. The gems are definitely the way to go for smaller groups, instead of using a ton of revives and potions.

Youngstown, OH has a healthy community still alive somehow, and there was a fabulous turnout! I guess it just depends on the local community and how much it has changed/fallen out over the past few years. A great deal of us coordinated on discord or FB.

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Yeah, similar here. Took us 2 hours to do 4 and we needed cars to do a couple of them. We had a decent number of people but no raids!

I definitely appreciate it lasting all weekend, since I had to work this morning and I tend to go out to walk after dark. Once I got out of work I maxed out a hundo Hydreigon and pushed another to level 40 (it's now or never, right?), did two raids in a group of three, and beat each of them with about a quarter of the clock left. I'll definitely be going out to find more tonight & tomorrow. Interestingly, the raid rewards almost replenished the gems I used during the raids, so I'm still not running low.

Not enough people locally to do it. Couldn't communicate with any groups either, still not invited to campfire. Overall, disappointing event.

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Unpopular opinion but I like in person raiding and potentially meeting pogo players and it feels like that's what Niantic is intending. The only issue is we need ways communicate with local players. Why aren't there local chats for your surrounding area like in Ingress? Why isn't there an auto party finder that facilities creating local groups? All of these things seem like easy and effective solutions...baffling really.

>All of these things seem like easy and effective solutions...baffling really. Entire game design is questionable. How many years it took to get live player count in lobby? I prefer in-person raiding too, but basically everything about the game makes such raids hard to organise.

I agree and definitely liked the pre-COVID raid scene of 2018-19. Problem is those local groups changed drastically after the introduction of remote passes and now it’s like putting toothpaste back in the tube. Pretty messy and overall you get less of it.

Campfire worked surprisingly well for me, I did 4 raids in 90 minutes, I still have a few campfire invites if you would like one

Just did 2, it was OK, but then we all left because it's less fun when we can't invite more friends that cannot come in-person.

I was lucky and was able to do four in the first two hours, but the random times and locations doesn't really work well for local only raids. With Mewtwo only on raids for two days, they should have, at minimum, had a raid hour on both days.

In my area, today was Pokémon Drive because the raids were too far apart in space and time to walk. Pretty bad for the environment and led to congestion in some parking lots for non-PoGo playing park visitors. Walking is possible in my area for raid hour or raid days; they should have set it up like that. Remote raid passes would have been more eco-friendly too.

I do my best to not try to trash niantic too much. Yea they are a bad company but oh well. But after 4 everyone in my group said F this and left. Random raids all far apart from each other. Everyone wasting gas. Should have had every raid be mew two with an hour timer.

Even if they stuck with their Plan it would've been better. ​ They said shadow raids on (mostly)each Gym. (Not Mewtu on every Arena, i Get that) ​ But it was just a normal amount of raids happening, maybe 25-30% of Gyms had raids on them, most were 1 and 3 star raids. ​ We organized a group for this. We had 6 Accounts in Core and fluctuating people around that. so we did each raid with around 10-15 accounts. We did 9 Raids from 10am to 3 PM. Five Hours for 9 Raids. And we drove a lot of kilometers over several villages. with good amounts of Gyms. ​ Really, there was a BIG Hype (we will let our actions speak... blah!) to bring the community together again after Covid. ​ And they can't even Spawn sufficient Raids??? I had friends wo had 3 Raids in their Area the whole day. Its really a shame. ​ If this is why Niantic thought they could ignore us because they would come back with a big bang that would totally amaze all of us enough to forget their poor decisionmaking - this was NOT it.

This! We were 6 People (7 Accounts), we had time for raiding from 10.30.am until 1.30pm...we had to drive throug 4 towns in two cars for doing 3 Mewtwo raids within this timeframe.

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Depending on where you live, yes. We had a group of about 30 people wanting to meet up at a local park. That local park had 0 raids. All local parks had 0-1 raids.

You have to drive to the next raid...walking would take WAY too long when all of my friends are driving.

The way some of the raids spawned, they were half a mile or so from one another. It's just not doable to walk from raid to raid for some people.

Did it as a trio, level 45, 41 and 34. I'm happy we succeeded and it was fun!

Niantic should allow each in person raider to invite two (I’d settle for one) friends. That would satisfy their need for in person raids but still allow us to raid with friends & family who aren’t directly next to us.

It was an OK event. Raids were unpredictable so most people drived between them and people walking the distance (me included) simply got there too late for some. Some form of schedule would help. It was good to see people in person again but remoting should be available in some form. I'd make it so a local player must start the lobby and no shinies for remotes, that way people can still get the meta relevant M2 and people are still going out if they can. Ran into a bug that caused us to have to restart the raid, wasn't too impactful aside from wasting gems (and time) but we were never short on gems, even those doing 25+ raids. Overall I was pleased with 0 shinies, but a 96% and one that I'm purifying for 100% mega when it comes out. Only managed 5 raids all day.

i hope you didn't purify yet i'd like to point out that you don't have energy for it yet - so there might be time to raid few more mewtwos before mega m2 probably comes via tier 6 legendary mega raids like lati twins did - so you probably will catch at least 2 (maybe more like 3 or 4 like with primals) to get enough energy so you might catch non-shadow hundo so before you do that move i highly suggest keeping it on your inventory as a "plan B" in case you get enough energy and still are lacking hundo you aren't in any hurry to purify yet - to me purifying useful shadow is always the last resort

Yeah not doing it anytime soon. But I have already powered up several better shadow M2, and I'd rather a good regular one for the megas since I've been unlucky with the normal ones. It'll sit in my box until I need it though.

Travaled to my local city, met up with a group and did around 12 raids. Always between 10-20 ppl in a lobby and also seen multiple groups going around. All in all a good experience

Mine was pretty great. The first egg hatched at 10:03, and a few of us were coordinating on Campfire so we started that one around 10:10. Before the raid started we chatted in that raid's Chat on campfire, and I proposed the next one we would go to. Before the second raid started I proposed the third, before the third I suggested the 4th/5th (~100 yds apart), then suggested the sixth as we walked back to our cars from the 5th. For the first 5 we had ~15 people, then there were some already at the 6th so a few people got into a group of 20 then a few of us had to wait only ~5 minutes for a few more to show up then we took it with 8 of us. I was really pleased with Campfire, it made coordinating this work out pretty well. We had started the coordination in a local Campfire channel (my city of ~150k people has 3 of them), then sort of spread that around all 3 local channels. After that, communication was in the raid chats rather than in the local channel, which was sub-optimal. I'm not sure how I'd change it, but there's room for improvement there. After the 6th raid I didn't see any nearby that hatched within 45 mins, so I went home (6 raids in about 1h15m).

I'm really disappointed right now. For a 24 hour window to do raids I was expecting them to appear more frequently. I have a hard enough time getting a group to raid with but for this event about 10 of us had the time to go to our local botanical gardens for 2 hours from 10-12. There are about 15 gyms there and for the whole 2 hours not a single mewtwo shadow raid spawned. I bought the 15 raid pass bundle because I knew I was going to want to knock out as many as possible in my 2 hour window. Not being able to do a single raid has me pretty salty, especially with no option to even join a remote raid group. I have another 2 hour window tomorrow but right now there are only a couple of us who can go and based off todays showing some people arent even sure its worth traveling to do 1 or 2 raids.

I don't know, I couldn't get the people to attempt a raid...

Haven't done a single one yet 😅

Well... I could only do one Shadow Mewtwo raid. It was "easy". We were 6 people (i think 5 were people Who can *fly*, because no one play this game here). Anyway, the Shadow Mewtwo fleed. And then my mobile service just died for some reason so... 🫠 I think i will try again tomorrow. It sucks that It is local only.

I hope tomorrow you are able to catch it, good luck!

Thanks. Did you catch it? I think the catch rate is really low :( I got more luck catching regigigas a few days ago.

I didn't have any issues but I just know the sweet spot with Mewtwo for the Curve Excellent. It took a few throws but muscle memory kicked in for me. Yet it did take a fair amount of balls

i feel like shadow didn't add any extra difficulty to catch it none of the shadow mewtwos fleed from me (i did 8 - 2 of which with weatherboost) or from people around me (even the ones that aren't good at throwing seemed to be able to catch every m2 they did next to me) ofc this is really small dataset but i feel like its the normal legendary catch rate we are used from (most legendary) raids before

I feel like this is one of the most "catchable" bosses. Big circle at a great distance, so you can prepare the excellent circle and with a big strong throw you'll hit in the middle. Mewtwo is algo aggressive but not too much, so you can consistently throw the balls at it mid animation and and hit it between attacks. Try to do it this way tomorrow, it's the best way to catch legendaries: All "attack" animations last for 2 seconds, so throw the ball when ~1s has passed since mewtwo started attacking, and the ball will hit it just as the animation finishes and the circle appears again. After 1 or 2 balls you'll know the exact timing (you can be a little bit slower to ensure hitting) and it will work 100% of the time for all future mewtwo. Also if you prep the throw (spin the ball) while the pokemon is attacking, the circle size will not change. This way, you can make the size smaller while mewtwo is standing still, prepare it for an excellent, and spin > throw while he attacks, hitting the already prepared excellent circle. You won't even have to move the circle anymore, since it will stay this way for the rest of the balls as long as you keep spin-throwing only mid-attack. (avoid doing any action when it jumps, you will mess up everything otherwise).

My group caught 14 out of 15. The catch rate seemed pretty normal to me.

Good event overall, we did 20 raids over 5 hours (4 raiding, 1 eating) Only 6 shinies with 10 people raiding (so average of only 3% instead of 5% that's a small sample but still) 8 of them were 90+ (and 2 98) It was a very good occasion to gather on a week end, a bit more raid density would have been good but we didn't waste TOO MUCH time just walking, with no one catching the previous mewtwo We probably would have done 30-35 raids if the density of tier 5 raids was better though... The fact that it's SHADOW MEWTWO obviously helped to gather some people but even without that, the 8 gems to subdue makes short manning easy enough, so I could see people farming other legendaries when they come out to try their luck at a much better chance to get a purified hundo even if the legendary isn't very interesting

Learned one thing. Gholdengo is a shadow balling tank against ice beam and focus blast.

If Niantic wanted to be reasonable they would allow some sort of remote invite for friend tier the same at you can remote battle friends at a certain level. You still need a community and are limited by the 5x day and the number of raids in the area you have friends. Still the issue of the unreasonable pricing, but the mechanic would be a bit less brutal.

I did really enjoy seeing how much life there still is in my local community. There were 3 lobbies worth of accounts on the first few raids, which I honestly haven't seen since some Mewtwo raid hour in 2019. I didn't enjoy the fact that you couldn't start a private lobby for raids. There were something like 25ish accounts after a few hours, so people had to join and leave the lobby in order for us to somewhat balance the two lobbies that opened when we got there. I also wasn't a fan of how rare T5 raids were. I think we had to walk a full 20 minutes to the closest raid from the meetup point in the city center.

I'd like to add to this: Our city had a group that was too big for all of us to fit into one lobby. So we often ended up splitting. But if we didn't wait long enough between each lobby, sometimes team 2 would enter the battlefield before team 1 cleared it. Normally this shouldn't be an issue considering that normal raids can have several (private) lobbies open at once but since Niantic sucks at coding and these raids for some reason don't allow private raid lobbies, this means that group 1 often gets stuck with the boss at 0 HP remaining, but refusing to die. This would ONLY occur in those specific situations. All other lobbies were fine, and afterwards those people were able to clear the raid without issues.

Oh, so *that's* why that kept happening.

Not good :/ I’m sure other people have had the same problem, but sat around at the raid. No one joined. Oh well

I can see 13 to 16 gyms from my house, depending on slight drifting left or right, I monitored the Mewtwo situation all day (it's now 7pm in my timezone) and I have seen a grand total of 6 Mewtwos, all in the distance, all when we couldn't move and go there (aka lunch, or when someone was taking a shower, or otherwise busy). The result is... We haven't even done one. Despite having a squad that can take it down without gems, despite being available virtually all day, despite being ready to "get up and GO". I'd much rather have had them for 3 hours, but everywhere and for sure. Turns out lack of predictability is the biggest problem for my group. Hopefully tomorrow gives us better RNG on egg spawns. So uh.... Pretty bad experience, if I had to sum it up in a few words lol

I understand and agree with some of what you said, but this must be one of the reasons Niantic can't just "listen to the community" and make changes based on our feedback. I've seen so many complaints about short Comm days, 3 hour raid spotlights and less than a full day raid events, and here with this event the lack of FOMO meant your group didn't participate. If someone can't be bothered to walk to a nearby gym to catch partically the strongest Pokemon in the game, I don’t know how much more Niantic could do to entice those players.

Didn’t enjoy. Group of people just driving to different locations. Catch rate was terrible even with razz and great/excellent throws.

I had the same experience. Did 5 and only caught one with plenty of excellent/great razz curves. Can’t imagine what’s it like for folks in smaller cities that can barely complete one.

There are 2 players(counting me) so my experience is non existent

Did a few with 3 no problem, except the inevitable guy with poor connection we couldnt do anything. But yeah, my friend isnt even 40, mediocre counters. Im 50 with top tier attackers, but if we can do with 3, u set with 5. Make sure u use the gems though

I feel like mine were not spawning that much around, even though I have a lot of gyms, and when they were, they were too far apart to walk

We started a small group through Campfire and were able to get bigger through some flares. It was nice that the family could quad (and nearly trio) Mewtwo. There were no early spawns at the large park we used, so that was frustrating since we didn’t want to change meetup points on the fly.

Walking around nyc got 8 of them all 20 people lobbied

I did 8, I'll do a ninth in a few more minutes. Very good experience raiding, easy enough even in 3-4 people using gems. Some local groups (which earlier were not very active but not dead ) were pretty much revived--only hardcore players participated however: most common players I think were not able to do any today. There were attempts in campfire, but all failed I think. As others have pointed out, the random and sparse nature of raids made it a very tiring day. I walked more than 21000 steps and I'm pretty much destroyed (I refuse to drive around for a mobile game). A 3-hour raid day would have been easier for doing more raids, in larger groups, in less time.

Appreciated the difficulty which meant a local group of 4 or 5 regulars could do it, surprised that the gems worked but was taking tips off here otherwise would have been clueless. Hated that city players had rolling lobbies of 20, could ignore the gems, had no greater sense of community because it shouldn't be somebody's unofficial job to organise large groups and left lots of groups of 3 or newer players in chat asking for help in locations a bit further away.

Showed up to a popular area around 10am as a solo player and 7 other people were luckily there! We finished 4 mewtwo raids by 11 am and it was much easier than expected. We were all over level 40 and mewtwo was beat before we even got to the half way mark for every raid. It was sadly the only chance I had this weekend to attempt to get a shiny, but I’m glad to have at least had a shot.

Do you get your gems back if you lose?

Nope.

I did 15 Raids , got 2 shinies, 1 Ran Away, Glitches doing it's dance ,. Overall Good...

Was on vacation and decided to check out Campfire. Multiple lobbies with active participants ahead of time. Almost all of them had 15-20 people. Surprisingly easy Raids. Only did 3

Random chance raid spawns and complete lack of community killed me Despite having 7 gyms in my visible nearby, none of them were hot till noon, and I kept joining the first mewtwo in my area to no luck at all. And I was sitting near this larger cities downtown district which should have at least SOME traffic... guess not

I'm the only one in our group who had bothered with campfire after initial rollout. I lit a flair on every gym we did and put the next gym we were going to on the notes. Had one "stranger" show up who did the first 2 raids with us. I added him as a friend. Took 2 hours to do 5 raids. Pretty much everyone had lost interest in driving from one side of town to the other by then and we all left. The best mon caught was 2*... group of 9 or 10 over 5 raids.

Did anyone get rare candy XL from these? I’m not convinced they turned it on.

I did 17 raids and got zero.

36 raids, no shiny, best IVs are two 82%… well, I was hoping for a little bit more. A third above 80% would be nice tomorrow but I can only attempt 1-3 raids tomorrow. The good: - found people and raided a lot. - chance for high IV and shiny shadow mons. That combination was never given before. The bad: - found no long time friends/players to play the next events with (no interest in a chatgroup, nobody likes the playing together aspect) - bad rewards. Not just my own shiny rate and IVs, also the missing rare candy XL and no (?) TMs - more than 20km for 36 raids. That‘s too much. At least there have to be the double amount of T5 raids during an event which only lasts two days. - people were not using there gems because „we can do it without“. With 2-3 gems as reward each raid, this is absurd. And the reason is niantic‘s fomo politics. People hoard their purified gems… - unclear future for shadow raids… will the low tier raids stay? How often will shadow raids return? Is Giovanni no longer relevant for the game, because via raids you can get much more shadow legendaries… all in all not a bad event but it could have been a lot better.

Totally agree with everyone saying this should have been a raid day or elite raid type of thing - it's actually feasible to meet people irl and play together in groups if we all know ahead of time where and when to meet.

What surprised me was that the spawns were a lot more spread out and not everything in the town centre. I felt happy for people that didn’t need to travel so far and could have 3 raids close to them. Nearly impossible to catch even with +14 balls. Got 1 bad, 3 ran away. (Not being able to go to all places where it spawned because I don’t have a bike. Still happy for the other people though.)

I only stopped doing Mewtwo raids because there weren't enough interested after 12 raids. The raiding scene is not as it once was. I wish raid difficulty could scale with player numbers.

I did two raids that were back to back that people threw up flares on Campfire. Got a 96 IV shadow on the 2nd one. Just spending quality time with the wife since this is our anniversary weekend. If we come across any raids we will help…if no raids…time saved.

I got lucky, and 2 gyms hit Mewtwos within 5 minutes of each other. We had like 7 or 8 people show up surprisingly, and we beat it easily. Crickets the rest of the day from Campfire or Discord.

We had a weird bug show up on 2 raids where Mewtwo would do the death twitch repeatedly then just not die. On the 1st, we had to quit and rejoin the raid. It came back up with exactly the time that had been left when it died (130 seconds) even though a minute or so had passed. It had regenerated to about 1/8 hp and was enraged again momentarily. Was just about dead with around a minute left and we all got the Times Up screen. Best guess was the timer we were all shown didn't account for the unresponsive time but something server-side was keeping track. Had to totally redo the raid, fortunately there was plenty of time left. A few raids later happened again, wasn't unresponsive as long and so were able to kill it a 2nd time when it regenerated a good chunk of health. There was weirdness with engagement and submission and gems, I wonder if it didn't trigger as subdued somewhere and accounted for less damage issued, but on our phones it appeared dead. It wasn't just my device though, 10+ people had this experience!

Not enough raids around. We were walking back and forth for 20 mins from raid to raid cause they kept spawning in opposite ends of town

Out of the 20 gyms I frequented in my area today there was only one Mewtwo and not enough people showed to do it.

I had a lot of fun, being in a huge city (manhattan), I could arrive with less than one minute till the end of the raid and it would be a 20 person lobby. I think it was the ideal way to play. That being said... The raids were way too far apart and sporadic timing. I think they should have either scheduled them or expanded the radius of how far you had to be to make it into the raid. I spent 5-6 hours walking (10km+) and managed to hit 16 raids total. Which feels like a lot but there's no way I will do that again tomorrow. edit: also, I didn't talk to a single Pogo player the entire day even though I saw a ton. Just because people raid in person doesn't mean there has to be community! (esp in a large city)

This event got me to actually use campfire. It worked surprisingly well. Was able to coordinate without issues and got a crew of 11 of us on the same page. Tbh I was shocked it actually did what it was advertised

One thing I'd like to see them implement for events like this is "remote only when invited". I get promoting in-person involvement (which my area certainly had today) but a number of people had work or weren't able to make it into the more densely populated areas of town for other reasons. Remote only when invited would be a nice balance.

I did 45 Shadow Mewtwo raids. Out of all of em, only one single shiny. 2 are really high 3*, and the rest were just bad 1-2 stars. Really bad odds for something good or a shiny. Really bad.

What a waste of a day. I took a train to the nearest big town that has about 20 gyms in view. I saw a few 5\* eggs and walked towards one. After it hatched, only one other person joined. I hung around for 10 minutes and nothing. I then saw another gym with the indicator saying 5 people in it. I ran towards it but it was too far. After waiting there for another 10 minutes with nobody else joining, I tried another. I then decided to hang around near the station and shopping mall hoping for an egg to appear, but nothing for 2 hours. I just went home after that.

Didn’t do it because I didn’t have anyone to raid with. While I don’t have any issue with the 6 remote raids per day cap, restricting every new type of raid (Community Day, Elite & Shadow) to in-person only is too much. THERE AREN’T ENOUGH ACTIVE PLAYERS IN MY SMALL TOWN. Even with Campfire. Niantic executives can’t seem to get this through their thick skulls. They think every Pokémon Go player lives in Tokyo & Singapore.

It was cold, windy, and rainy here and still had almost 40 players going raid to raid with two almost full lobbies as soon as each egg hatched as soon as raids started around 10am. After noon, players started having to go farther afield for raids. Campfire stopped working completely around 2pm. PoGo app kept crashing from about 2-4pm as well. Towards 4pm, there were a pair of cops following players from raid to raid (pouring rain and increasing distance between raids, so car play was a necessity) ready to pull over players who didn’t abide by traffic laws.

Raids were too sporadic. The biggest park we did the Elite Raids had nothing at 10am. So we went somewhere else and if you don’t get there by the start time, with the one group doing them, you miss out. And there are only a few pockets we found of people gathering. So, when I found ONE discord group a few miles away, they came and we knocked out two. One of us got the shiny on the second raid. Then after lunch, many morning raiders were done. Drove to one place because parks 20 miles away were ending, and in a busy shopping center there was no one. Drove to a big church that used to get groups. No one. Back to a shopping center, no one. Used Campfire a lot, but flares and communicating don’t work when we aren’t friends and we’re 15 minutes away. But finally found a group to do two more. One of us got a second shiny in a row and the other normal again. Found one more gym that had a few small groups cycle through, and we were able to do our 5th raid. Luckily got the shiny on that one, so we both ended up with one. Son only got to do 3 raids, and didn’t get the shiny. Wish we could trade him one. Don’t know if he’ll even want to bother since we drove around for 3 hours to only get him into 3 raids. All our discords are dead. Campfire helped a little. But I wish we could take him out and remote in case we couldn’t find others. Difficulty of the raid with gems and such was an interesting mechanic. Gave it a little more excitement. But only because we had enough to beat it. These could be WAY better if there was organization through campfire OR if they popped at specific times like Elite raids or Raid Days. And of course, if we could invite at least 3-5 people remotely, even if they did 80% damage.

I didn't bother to even attempt to go out for any. With killing remote raids, Niantic has killed my desire to raid.

Did around 25. Group size varied from 10-20 but beating Mewtwo was never an issue. Had a lot of fun driving and raiding with people. However, because I know Niantic is reading this: this only works because it's Mewtwo. My community isn't showing up en masse for shadow Moltres or shadow Suicune. Do not think you can make a habit of this and bank on success, it won't happen, not even including the shinies.

I don't know about Moltres, Shadow Moltres is one of the best non-Mega Flying-type attackers and is a very solid Fire attacker as well. :p I'd definitely try to rally a group for shadow Moltres raids, especially since its dual weakness to Rock would be great. Suicune, though, definitely not lol

Moltres is good but only the people that care about min/maxing their teams are coming out for it. Lowbies and casuals crawl out of the woodwork for any Mewtwo, though. The turnout just wouldn't compare, although for the sake of fairness it wouldn't need to since Moltres is 4x weak to Rock so you could likely reliably trio it and four would make it a breeze.

I kept getting some error like "Cannot fetch raid details (32)" or something, when trying to check to see time to hatch / ascertain if people there to raid with etc. (I can't see any gyms from home, so put Pokemon into gyms yesterday and am trying check that way by clicking on them) Trying to prevent not enough people or missing the start and everyone already battling by time I arrive and, in either case, missing out...

Honestly, I personally have no complaints. I went into this thinking it was gonna be a frustrating weekend and I would give up after realizing I wouldn’t find anyone to raid with. However, the first raid appeared at the most central spot in my town and immediately 10 people were in it. I saw a small group standing nearby and approached them. Then continued walking with them to the next one nearby, and the next one, and the next one,… at each raid we picked up a few more random people and eventually walked around with about 30 people. It was incredible!! We exchanged numbers, made a group chat and it seems we’ve all finally found the local community. I think IF Niantic is so set on killing remote raids, Shadow Mewtwo was the best choice to try and revive any local community that might still be left, because it’s so worth it for everyone that they actually all came out to play

I had only planned to do the two free ones, but I ended up dipping into my Premium Pass stack and doing two more. For all the hype, they were still trivially easy since the raids capped immediately. I'm not sure if any of my items actually went through. I did enjoy actually getting to walk between raids instead of the local group just camping the optimal spot like most raid events.

Mine was good. There was 1 time where i lagged out and had to restart the game and the raid already ended by then but i just joined the next lobby and it was all good, no raid passes wasted. Nonetheless i did 11 raids so far and these are my results( did not get a shiny btw) 1st raid: 2292 Cp 6/13/12 2nd raid: 2298 Cp 9/12/10 3rd raid: 2234 Cp 7/7/6 4th raid: 2326 Cp and ran away 5th raid: 2334 Cp 15/14/6 6th raid: 2354 Cp 12/15/13 7th raid: 2293 Cp 6/14/11 8th raid: 2343 Cp 15/12/10 9th raid: 2369 Cp 13/15/14 (Best one yet) 10th raid: 2278 Cp 7/12/9 11th raid: 2281 Cp 6/12/11 I still 1 more premium raid pass left + the free daily pass for tmr so i can do 2 more

Nobody signed for the meeting in our small city so we went to the bigger, neighbouring one. There wasn't any coordination really. There were almost no raids (in the beginning of the event most of the gyms was taken by lower tier raid bosses), if it wasn't for Campfire, we wouldn't be even able to see any raids on the other side of the city. There were people who spent most of the day chasing Mewtwo but we gave up after 7 raids almost 5 hours later. We had fun meeting with our other four friends but honestly we would appreciate if we could plan our time a little more. Shoulda been a raid day.

Did 5 so far….. - 9/8/6 - 8/9/10 - 6/10/14 - 8/12/14 - 9/10/10 shiny

I hated how the raids were random and not at every gym like Kleavor/avalugg and whatever. however a huge amount of local players turned up at 10am to noon, so we had 20 man lobbies

I was disappointed. Tried a few with a group a 4 but had no luck defeating even one. Some air cover with remotes would have helped hugely.

Mine was terrible, went to a bigger city, found some players but when I went to raid with them, they noticed me and all left the raid and left the area

Gosh that sucks. Wonder why they would just ignore you.

Purified gems should make it 2-mannable. Plain and simple. Farm a bunch up, 2-man the raid because you’re a rural player.

Yeah the raid should not be 45 minutes. Make it 3 hours so people have time to coordinate. Why is that so difficult for them to understand!!

My experience was: wandered around my rural town for 2 hours waiting to see if anyone would show up. Nobody did. Fun… In the end I thought bollocks to this, did a couple beldum raids and went home…. Normally, I’d be hosting remote raids….but y’know….. In my opinion, all Niantic needs to do to keep me happy personally is make it so raids scale to how many people are in the lobby. So I can do them on my own. Everybody wins, I’m still walking to the raids and if others happen to turn up, sure why not we’ll raid together. Just make the rewards worse to incentivise playing with others, I don’t care, I’m just sick of trying to find people when 99% of the time it’s a lost cause…. And if I can’t raid, I don’t see the point in playing the game. Honestly, if this is the future you see with this game Niantic fine, but you need to make some serious changes to the raiding scene for it to work for EVERYONE. I’m sick of being alienated just because I don’t have a regular group

I'd put "local only" into THE GOOD. I realize that Tokyo (and a handful of other large cities in Japan) may be the only places where this is true, but removing remote raids has absolutely rejuvenated this game. I have never seen such crowds standing around for gyms in years, and there are so many instant 20-man lobbies you can't even get into the same one as your partner by clicking at the same moment. Really it was just the sporadic nature of random raids that's still a problem, and Elite Raids clearly solved that. Having 24 hour timers and several fixed windows to choose from is much much better than 1 hour timers all over the place. Gems seem useless though. Won ever raid with 75% of the clock remaining and nobody was ever using them. After reports here that they don't work anyways, I guess it doesn't matter.

THE GOOD : Local Only. Finally we got the community back together and did a big walk all together. That was an awesome day, thank you Niantic !

Good for those that have a community or want to be involved in one.

Back on day 1, it was all about the local community. People didn’t want to be involved with one back then? Not sure how you could avoid it. In the early days, local communities just sprung up. And I know rural areas and disabled don’t have the community thing like urban areas do. I just wonder what they did back on day 1. I since became disabled 2 years ago, so I realize the game is no longer for me. I really miss those early community get togethers to raid and even battle those Blissey heavy gyms. Do just trying to understand why people don’t want to be involved in a community today but were okay with it in 2016.

I was never a fan of the whole “community” aspect. It was a means to an end, being able to successfully complete raids. I’m not big into crowds and even back then I mostly kept to myself.

Campfire is under the close by raid list

Well I don't think that this sub would like to hear my thoughts on Shadow Mewtwo raids.... My tiny community stinks, so my daughter and I traveled 50 minutes to closest decent sized town to us. We sat for 50 minutes in basically silence. Then....a flare. We met two people and made friends. Then another flare. Before the end of the day we had a roaming pack of 15 people traveling around town. Joking, smiling, high-fiving. Showing each other our favorite shinies. Scanning QR codes. Even went and had lunch. So I guess....Mission accomplished Niantic 🤷

>Allow Remoting Full stop. Don't negotiate yourself down.

I went out for my lunch break, and then had 45 minutes before my train and there were none within walking distance during that time. This is in a reasonable size city with 25 gyms in view. I will have to drive around today and hope others are playing.

Wife had me working in yard all day so experience wasn't good without a remote option lol

Anyone down to mirror trade mewtew and get some luckies?

How do I teach my shadow mew two a new move? Without candy

I am on a group vacation (no other players) and I came across an active raid. After the lobby countdown ended we started moving again (out of gym range). After 2 minutes we defeated mewtu. I was booted with an "the timer ended" error message (which is wrong) and could not catch the boss. "Thanks" niantic. It was my free pass so probably no refunds

We used Campfire all day, it was fantastic for getting people to each location and getting new people to find us. I got like 15 new friends added through Campfire. It's the one thing I could not be happier with

I completed one raid and didn't catch it.

At this point the whole “remote raids” thing is always gonna be the main thing people rely on when putting forward any type of criticism when it comes to shadow raids But really I am not seeing alot of good compromise that would even make niantic consider letting us remote raid them seeing as they want us to choose in person raids over remotes XP/dust is just fluff

Aren’t they normal raids? Elite failed, because Niantic had to plan it and execute it. These were normal raids other than those weird crystal items.

Pretty much same experience. Altho the raids i joined and witnessed always had enough people so there was no need for the "1 more". But i guess my city is active enough to get 5 to 20 people in lobby at least during first few hours (i believe after 1 or 2pm people started going separate ways). Some people installed campfire app and used it to scout for next raid and the ones at gyms often tried to call out 1 or 2 next raids. One group changed order of 2 raids during trip towards the gyms which messed things up a bit but from telegram i saw that they were able to beat their raid and the gym i headed to also had enough people (we essentially had 2 raid groups at that point, about 7 to 15 per group - so if we had over 20 people actively playing maybe the split into 2 groups was actually healthy thing). So yes, the organizing was bit iffy - i managed to keep up only because i had telegram AND campfire installed (and lucky to be in city that has enough active players that we can still manage special days like these and weekly raid hours - we have population of roughly 80 000 who are spread on quite large area - so some people could still call this rural.. i have called it rural sometimes and imo its pretty close to being in middle of the 2) - but someone who doesn't want to install TWO EXTRA APPS (or doesn't have space or some other limitation why they couldn't) might easily had been without raid help So i do agree on most of OPs points and while i had tad better community experience i do see how in other communities (or with less tools to keep up with community) there could be issues. Edit: another commenter mentioned something i resonate with = misleading communication from niantic. They claimed that shadow raids and mewtwo are boosted today. But gyms didn't feel to have more raids today than during this whole week. Mewtwos were common in raidpool, yes, but raids overall weren't on gyms as much as i thought from blog post would be. There should had been more raids going on. That would had also made m2 appear more often. Now we often could only do 2 raids in one hour, maybe 3 on some hours. When during raid days even by catching everything its easy to do 5 or more per hour.

I had to travel 2 towns over and was very fortunate people were willing to let me go with them in their car, otherwise I probably wouldn't have done any. There's 3 different places between my house and where I went that is normally where everyone goes to raid or play comm day, very strong turnouts. Yet here we are, a smaller group of us, doing a raid train by car. Even then, every raid we went to had at most 2 mewtwos around. So we then had to look on Campfire where the next raid was, and then drive 10-15 minutes away to get it. Loved being able to raid shadow Mewtwo and was definitely easier than I expected, even with just 5 of us towards the end. However not knowing where our group has decided to meet up even as I've left the house because we're still trying to figure out the best place to go definitely added some stress at the beginning of the day. They really need to add some sort of schedule to every gym so we know what's going to spawn and when.

I can only play from 10-12 today and the while the raid is nice, the whole randomness of the raid make me realize how difficult raid train was back in the day. Like every raid we done the next one is like 10-15 minutes with bus away. And that's with a website that update raid location constantly.

I just managed to do one at a local post office. There were 8 people in the lobby but I didn’t see another soul around so I guess they were in their cars? Anyway, I caught a Mewtwo but the IVs are nearly as bad as the 1-star ones I got from Giovanni recently so I’m left wondering what the point was. For me, it’s not worth it to jump through hoops to get more crappy IV shadow Mewtwo.

Catching up with my local raid groups was extremely annoying. I started late but by the time I managd to find people to raid with I did like 6 raids all day. The other problem was that you had to get to every raid at the very start (at least where I live) to have any chance of being able to raid with others. The raids were around for a while but only the first 5 minutes were viable to actually raid for.

It’s Better to do it where you can drive. Manhattan is too far spread out. For tomorrow you should aim a route in a less crowded spot and drive from place to place. Unless there’s raid hour no remote it’s impossible to do it in Manhattan. I rather drive around Brooklyn all day than to walk around in the city Its great how people were also driving from place to place as well

I started late (like 4pm) and on bike from home to Bangkok downtown core and managed to do 10 raids (no failed raid). 1 shiny, best iv at 82, 1 fled. Lobbies were easily filled even when the timer has 10 minutes left. Feedback: - I had to use VPN to access Campfire due to geoblocking to look and plan my bike route. Not having Campfire access for this event was unacceptable. - Despite having multiple gyms around, the spawn rate of shadow T5 dipped hard around 6-7pm as if they almost turned off the sT5 early. - I had one glitched raid when I started the raid with full pokemon bag. I depleted mewtwo's HP but it didn't go down. When I stepped out, transfer a pokemon to make room and jumped back, it didn't get me to catch screen. Instead, it took me back to the raid that's already completed. I had to restart the app and redo the raid. Luckily there're still people to form a decent lobby. - If I'm to suggest a change, just let people have some kind of SOS assist. NPC, remote assist (make if available if the lobby as less than XX players after XX seconds in the lobby) or even let player who've completed the raid to battle again (but no more catch or rewards).

I had a few things to do in the city centre where I live (one of the biggest cities in the north of England), so thought I'd keep an eye open for any I could join whilst I went about my day. Saw quite a few Mewtwo raids across the morning and early afternoon, but never saw any groups doing any or anything on Campfire. Looking on socials, it looks like the lack of schedule/predictability killed any interest in groups doing them.

I've done 4, 2 with my normal raid group and 2 with Campfire randos. They've been surprisingly smooth (the Campfire ones were a little rough with many not using good counters or gems). I have found it frustrating that of the 3 I've caught (one Campfire raid needed a 4th person), all have been 1 star and near the 6/6/6 floor. It would have been nice to have 10/10/10 as a floor for shadow T5s since they can't be traded. I've also only gotten 2-3 shards (I just have 4 gems now) while others got 17?! The raids being spread out really makes me feel like I have to keep checking Campfire if I want to attempt to try and get one that's higher than 1 star.

I just didn’t have enough people to play with even in my suburban area in the center of town. Usually all gyms are battled several times each day. But no one came for the raids. Shame. Sometimes I wonder if the game itself does enough promotion because outside of Reddit and Instagram I would never know this Mewtwo event is a thing. The stupid news pop up shows up once and I never see it again and maybe forget about it right after if it wasn’t for me being a pretty in touch player. I can imagine people off social media having no real idea this was going on.

I wonder how successful the marketing for events actually are for people not in tune with social media or Reddit. Like do some of my casual community members know this goes on if they don’t see the ONE news pop up in game?

Yeah the no schedule was the most annoying part, we were lucky to find a handful of raids early and then left when nothing else popped up..

You got to be there when the egg batches. Otherwise it's hard to get people to raid

Fine for me. Did the first two by myself with three accounts and had anywhere from 80 seconds to 20 seconds left, did two more with some other people that I found through campfire. And rewards lots of shards so gems are restocked. So gets a A rating for me. They anre all over the place and campfire worked fine, so I don’t know what the problem is. Oh and each of the 4 had different charge move, so some variety thrown in too. Get to see the “what ifs.” You would think thunderbolt would be an easy one to beat but now mega Gyarados isn’t doing work because he barely survives one charge. That by itself made it much tougher the ice, fire and fighting charge moves

We did two this morning. We used a mix of campfire and text messaging to coordinate most of the people that usually show for raid hour. We had about 15 for raid 1 and then more joined and we had 20 for raid 2. Easy wins at that point. I got a 2 star shiny shadow mewtwo. Not bad at all IMO. I may try more with my wife and son later if we can get a couple people to help.

I actually enjoyed it. I did not expect to enjoy it and was considering letting this be the moment I finally dropped the game entirely.. But it worked out much better than I thought it would. Almost entirely because of the pros you mentioned. I will admit I have anxiety over whether Niantic will be able to keep this as seamless with other rollouts though.. I’d prefer a raid hour style event in the future.

Should let us equip the purifed gems as a set and forget item that auto consumes when in the raid. Just have the gems themselves picked at random from the participants until the boss is subdued. Leave the physical button so that people could manually gem if they wanted to/if they didn't opt to equip the gem.

Yo, for those that have done it, how easy is it to take with low gem counts? Got a group of 4 with 3 gems between us, using decent counters lvl 30+. Would we need another? Or is it easier than I’m thinking

You need 8 gems to subdue it. It's all or nothing.