"Varying numbers of EX raid invites"

#PokemonGO: Let me start by sharing the story of my very disappointing first EX raid experience that happened yesterday. The raid was for a park area in the center of a university campus just outside of a major city. We have a large raid group on campus with a decent amount of fairly active members, as well as a lot of casuals we almost never see. I was really happy when I saw that I had received a pass, and posted it in our group. Unfortunately, as the day went on, we had more and more people saying that they didn't get a pass that round, and only 2 of us had received the invite to this raid. I was pretty stressed for the next week about if enough people would show up, but made sure I had a couple of teams ready for battle. Finally, the awaited day arrives. My group is great and they made sure to take down the gym in the morning and we held it as instinct all day, with others who didn't get the raid pass golden razzing it whenever someone started battling it to try to help me keep it. When the time finally came for the raid to start, the other person who had said they received the raid pass and I were the only ones we saw around. This was worrying. We entered the lobby and waited for others to join anyway, hoping that maybe there would be spoofers ready to jump in. We saw one other person enter the lobby, so we waited. And waited. And waited. Nobody else entered. I recognized the name of the other person as someone I rarely see around, and who had done the suicune raid with me where I probably got the EX raid pass from, and we found her inside the only building where you can just barely reach this gym from if you're at the entrance. We created multiple lobbies and waited the whole time of the EX raid, but nobody else ever showed up. We tried to battle the mewtwo, but with only 3 trainers (levels 40, 30, and 23), we couldn't. It was actually a really demotivating experience. Others from the raid group came to try to cheer us on, but they couldn't join the battle to help us out, and just had to watch on our phones as the timer counted down and the mewtwo eventually disappeared, undefeated.Looking into other EX raids around the city yesterday, I heard stories of 10 people at some, but around 40 at others, and I had to wonder what is going on. How can one raid have 3 people and another have 40? I very much doubt that 37 other people were invited to the one where I was, but just never showed up, considering that invites seem to be sent out for raids within the past week mostly. There are also those reports of EX raids that scanners are picking up that don't have anyone show up at them.I'm wondering if these variations in numbers of EX raid invites sent out aren't really Niantic testing out different numbers anymore, but actually a bug in the EX invite system, where passes that are supposed to be sent out don't get sent out? Maybe the number of passes sent out is a proportion of different trainers that do raids at that gym in the past week, with no minimum set, allowing for single-digit numbers of passes to be sent out?Tl;dr: I went to an EX raid yesterday with 3 attendees, but others around had varying numbers up to 40. Is this huge deviation in numbers of invites sent out possibly a bug in the invite system that prevents invites that should go out from reaching trainers?Edit: yes, it's true that some passes maybe went out to casuals, spoofers, etc., but how many? A point I'm wondering about is why is there such a huge difference in the number of people invited to each raid? What determines whether 10 or 40 people are invited? via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2nSYOUo