"Community wide legendary raid burnout. The 5 big issues with the raiding system, and how to fix them."

#PokemonGO: First, I'd like to say that I'm aware that there are a lot of cool raid bosses right now that aren't Registeel. Between legendary days and the cool new bosses, it’s obvious Niantic is trying to keep our interest in other ways. It’s also worth noting that I’m not talking about technical issues, but rather why people are currently disinterested / discouraged with the whole system. So that being said, let’s dive into the issues with the raid economy and how to fix them.Problem 1: Defensive legendaries have no role to play.One year later legendary Pokémon still aren’t allowed in gyms and yet one year later Blissey is still much harder to defeat than any available legendary in a gym battle. So why not? If you can’t take out a Lugia, then you probably don’t have the counters to take out the Blissey before it. In addition, TDO is never as important as DPS because of how damage balls work in raids, which reward people for doing more damage, not for living longer. This means the defensive legendaries have nothing to do but sit in our inventories and take up space. For whatever the reason, we’ve been cursed to 3 months of the worst offenders of this issue.Solution: Allow legendaries in gyms.Personally, I’m a fan of allowing one legendary per gym. It would incentivize taking over gyms so that you can be the one to show off your legendaries, but wouldn’t ruin the current metagame. It would mean Suicune, Regice, Registeel, Regirock, and Ho-oh would go from useless to at least okay, and would let Lugia reach its true potential.Problem 2: Formula fail, the case of Registeel.A while back I made a post about how I believe the defense stat in Pokémon Go is broken. The way the current cp system works greatly favors Pokémon with specialized offensive stats. A simplification of how the cp system works is that it takes all of a Pokémon’s base stats in the main series games (hp/att/def/spa/spd/spe) and lumps them all in an equation. That equation says to take the higher of the Pokémon’s att/spa and def/spd and multiply it by 7/8ths, and add it to 1/8 times the lower stat. This makes sense for attack with respect to the main series, but makes no sense for defense. Registeel in the main series has 150 def and 150 spd. Regice has 100 def and 200 spd for comparison. See the chart below for as to what this means in practice.Ratio1:12:13:14:113:1def7510011212011spd75503830139speed100100100100100Defense158197217229258ExampleRegisteelRegiceSteelixCloysterBlisseySolution: Adjust Registeel's stats.The simplest way to fix this, in my opinion, is to just change the 7/8 and 1/8 to 5/8 and 3/8. Unfortunately, the likelihood of Niantic adjusting the CP formula at this point is unlikely. The other solution is to impose a universal 9% stat buff to legendaries under 2500cp, similar to the 9% stat nerf to legendaries over 4000cp. It wouldn’t completely redeem Registeel, but it would help at least.Problem 3: Even if most people want to raid, they’re at work.My history here will probably be a bit shaky, because I don’t have any old data to reference. Currently, in the Americas, raids end at 7:30pm. The sun goes down in the summer in New England around 7:45-8:30pm, meaning raids are completely over well before the sun sets. In the rest of the world, raids end have ended between 9pm and 9:30pm since late March, which I think is honestly very reasonable. Many people don’t get out of work until 6 or 7, meaning they literally don’t have any time after work to raid. My personal experience is that after about 6:15 raids become very scarce.Solution: Universal raid end-times.This one baffles me. I have absolutely no idea why this is the case. It’s nothing but continuous lost revenue. The solution is simple, have raids end at 9:30pm universally. I’m honestly not sure why this isn’t a bigger issue in the community, but it’s a major issue in the Americas.Problem 4: Loss of 3rd party tools.Discussion of use of 3rd party tools in the Silph Road can be very divisive, so I’ll keep this one simple. If you aren’t part of a community of players in a city, finding raid battles to do is half the battle. And I don’t mean because we lack gyms, I mean we can’t see them. Many gyms in suburban areas need to be scouted because no one will be playing within range of the gym for long periods of time. On 3 separate occasions this week, 2 of my friends and myself wanted to trio Registeel. All 3 times we failed. Once because we couldn’t find one to do and twice because the weather changed before we were able to all get to the gym. If we had known where to go, it only would’ve taken one try (this is in a discord community of over 1500 people btw).Solution: Make raids easier to find and coordinate around.There are two things here that should be done, but one is much more important. The lesser of the two is that raids should be longer, and eggs should be shorter. Even if raids were 60min and eggs were 45min we’d have much more flexibility as to when we could actually do the battle.The second has been suggested many times for good reason. Niantic should release an official raid map in the same vain as the Ingress intel map, that shows accurate raid timers and bosses. Even if that’s all it did it would be a huge step forward, and would put a major dent in the battle against maps. Niantic gets to save time fighting off bots and players get a service that enhances their play experience. As far as I’m concerned that’s a win-win.Problem 5: FOMO and growing distrustIt’s no secret that many people were not happy with how Zapdos day was conducted. Having an exclusive quick move that vastly outperforms its normal quick move (plus it’s shiny) only be available in raids for a 3 hour window was not a popular decision. Even as someone who got to do 30ish raids, got a 98% and 2 shinies, and had a lot of fun doing it, it’s very obvious to me why people were against it. You couldn’t TM the move, even in the event window. More than any previous event people felt pressured to spend money, because chances are if they didn’t they would miss out. Plus if they had previously invested in a Zapdos, too bad. Larvitar community day was the same, just without money involved. If you’re busy during the window, tough luck, someone will have to trade you one. Not very likely considering it’s the best rock attacker by far, and it’s super useful.As a result of these 3 hour events many people feel like they shouldn’t invest into their good catches. Why invest in a 100% Ho-oh if it’ll just get sacred fire in a few months and become irrelevant? Why evolve a starter outside of a community day? Why evolve a perfect ralts, pseudo legendary, 10k hatch, etc, if they’ll just become irrelevant thanks to a new move? The fear of missing out is just as powerful at demotivating people as it is at motivating people, and worse, it can get a lot of people angry. Imagine if community day Pokemon could only be shiny during the 3 hour window? The reason the way it works now is great is because the shiny isn’t exclusive, it’s just much easier to obtain. This should be the case for all event bonuses, including moves.Solution: Event TMs and legacy raidsEvent TMs should drop from raids just like charge and fast TMs do. They should be more rare, but not stupidly rare. This is something has been suggested many times as well. It would mean getting event moves are easier during an event, but like shinies, aren’t exclusive.Legacy raids need to have several restrictions, but have the potential to make raiding a lot more interesting. In my opinion, the way it should work is that every ex raid cell should have a x% chance of spawning a legacy t5 raid each day (25% maybe). This way the system is balanced in cities and suburbia, allowing for a slow dribble of legacy raid bosses to be obtainable over time. Getting shinies and good IVs for these bosses would be very difficult, but would be possible. The eggs should also be visually distinct. Again, this is the idea of event bonuses being obtainable outside of the event, just much more slowly.Post Zapdos day, this would mean to get a thundershock Zapdos you’d need to 1) find a legacy t5 egg. 2) have it be a zapdos. 3) have it be worth powering up, and 4) obtain and use an event TM on it. All together, it would be possible, but just would be much harder post event. I think that people would feel their time that they've previously invested is respected with these changes, and would still let these events have purpose.The combined wish list (aka the tldr):1) Allow 1 legendary per gym.2) Adjust the CP of legendaries below 2500 (or adjust the CP formula).3) Have raids end everywhere at 9:30pm local time.4) Have raid eggs be shorter, and the raids themselves longer.5) Release an official raid map.6) Introduce event TMs into raid rewards.7) Introduce legacy (pokemon, not moves) t5 raids. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2K2g9zQ