"Let's Focus on the Real Problem with EX Raids"

#PokemonGO: TL;DR: People with jobs, travelers, and especially kids can't schedule their lives around a specific EX raid appointment time and place. This is a major problem (I would argue the major problem) with the EX raid system, but Niantic can fix it easily by just making EX invitations good for any EX raid.There's widespread sentiment that the EX raid pass system is, ahem, let's be polite and say "problematic". But the reasons why often get muddled among a slew of complaints from players about not yet receiving an invitation or not yet having a MewTwo. The key problem with the EX raid system is not the fact that it relies on RNG to dole out invitations, and that some people will be on the short end of that stick in the early stages. It's that it makes the most valuable current prize in the game depend on a player getting to a particular place at a particular time. This is screwed up for a bunch of reasons. Among them:It penalizes kids. No one has a schedule more rigid and beyond their control than a kid. While many of us adults can take a long lunch or develop a sudden "illness" on Friday at 11:30, parents will not pull their kids out of school to battle a giant housecat. And even if the raid falls outside school hours, kids have all kinds of organized after-school stuff -- sports, music, you-name-it -- for which "I have to go play a video game" is not a valid excuse for skipping.It penalizes travelers. For a game obstensibly about "getting out and going", this system is really punishing for players who get out too far from home. Finally got that rare EX pass, only to check your schedule and find out you'll be a meeting/wedding/funeral out of town that day? Yeah, too bad -- you should have known better than to travel more than 5 miles away from your house when you play this game.It discourages playing (raiding at least) when even a bit away from home. Even if you've learned the lesson about travel above, and have resolved to stay as close to home as you can, it's impossible for most of us to live our lives entirely within eyeshot of our houses or our workplaces. Occasionally nearly everyone goes on a weekend getaway, or just drives an hour into the city for some shopping. When you do, it might be tempting to do an out-of-town raid. You know, meet some new people, check out the PoGo scene in an unfamiliar place, etc. Sounds good, right? Nope, better not. Raiding that out-of-town gym might very well get you an invitation to an EX raid you can't go to (and therefore rob you of a chance at an EX raid you could attend). Even in these early stages of EX raids, we've already heard lots of stories of trainers this has happened to.It penalizes anyone else who has set working hours, or appointments they need to keep, or other restrictions on where they can go and when they can go there. You know, a life.The good news is that this is very easily fixable by Niantic, making only a minor change to the current system. Just lose the restriction that an EX pass can only be used at a single raid. Make the EX passes good for any EX raid. That's all. They can keep the exclusivity. They can keep the invitation-only aspect. They can keep the predominance of sponsored gyms if they want to. They can keep MewTwo (and other EX bosses) as rare, or as common, as they want. They don't need to implement some complicated quest system or something similar (although I like the quest idea as a separate thing for the future). Just make an EX invitation good for any EX raid in the future (limit 1 in your inventory), and they've got a system that has that has all the nice aspects of the current EX raids without punishing people who have a life outside of Pokemon Go.(A postscript: I don't claim originality for any of these ideas. Many posters have made these same observations/complaints about the EX invitations, and several have suggested the invitation-good-for-any-EX-raid solution. Like I said above, I just felt that much of the earlier criticism got lost among the complaints about bad luck, and I wanted to devote a thread to what is, to me, the real heart of the matter.) via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2gShPn6