"Experience as an observer at the Columbus Circle EX Raid"

#PokemonGO: Posted this originally as a comment to this post, http://ift.tt/2wRUF5m , and I got a recommendation to give it it's own post due to the prior post's age, so that will explain references to "OP." Here we go:I was an observer at the Columbus Circle ("CC") raid (a handful of people without invites made it into the police barricade) and want to just highlight a few things based on what OP mentioned.Silph Road team members, who were acting as a street team of sorts for Niantic, confirmed raids go up to only 40 people as far as they know, and as we saw in CC and in the OP's post. Silph Road team also seemed to confirm Niantic is looking for gyms in parks that can hold people (i.e. not sidewalk gyms, which are the most common in NYC).The coordination part OP mentions is key. People tried to get the different teams to reconcile after Instinct locked down the gym and the hour started (people were definitely angry with the team of the gym), but everyone just sort of jumped in thinking they needed the full 20 in the raid. Only a few people were Mystic and some ended up with six balls and didn't catch. Dividing people up into smaller teams is totally key to increase balls. Moveset was likely Confusion/Psychic, so Mewtwo was defeated fairly quickly with TTars. No one tested for moveset - everyone was too eager to get in.One person experienced an error 2/3s of the way through the raid battle and needed to restart the app. It affected his damage and thus number of balls.There were no spoofers invited to the raid as far as I could tell (based on numbers in the battle and people in person) except for one individual who was a "local spoofer" i.e. lives in the city and plays there as well, but spoofed a raid at this specific gym a few days before. Even though Columbus Circle is loaded with spoofers (I did a Raikou raid myself after at a nearby gym and was only the "real" person in the raid when I went in with 15 others and a 20 person raid had just gone through with one "real"), no spoofers were invited to the EX Raid. These people were either handpicked and/or Niantic knows how to identify "long distance spoofers" and chooses not to act against them in most cases.It's been confirmed before, but to reiterate - any level of raid qualifies for a possible EX raid pass.Consider playing after the raid. Not sure what caused it (could have been increased spoofer activity in the area causing better spawns, could just be RNG, or could be EX Raid related), but the nearby spawns for the next three hours after were incredible. Within a half hour of the end of the raid hour a Togetic and a Dragonite (93IV) spawned a block over from CC. Within two or three hours after many Mareep, another Togetic and an Unown all spawned within the same biome (a grid of 4 avenues by about 15 streets). Needless to say, not normal for the area (at least as far as I know and I play in that area often). via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2wRXWAd