"Team bonuses need to be removed from raids."

#PokemonGO: I know complaining about the game is frowned on in this sub, but Niantic staff reads this, and prominent streamers and YouTubers are here as well, so this is an important forum to talk about things that don't work in the game. While Niantic doesn't tell us what's in the pipeline, they have indicated that changes are coming to the battle system and to other features that aren't providing a great experience. And the current system of allocating raid rewards based on team affiliation needs to be looked at.Here's why:Team-based rewards are arbitraryCurrently, you can earn a maximum of 14 premier balls for a raid. You get:6 balls by default2 balls if your team controls the gymUp to 3 balls for team contributionUp to 3 balls for individual contributionThe number of balls you get also dictates the amount of TMs, rare candy and other rewards you receive from the raid.If a spoofer spoofs to gyms his team controls in places where other spoofers will be doing the same thing, then he will get gym control bonus for every raid and he'll get team bonus most of the time. In other words, spoofers get 11 balls every raid even if they do zero damage.If spoofers raid on a bunch of accounts (in anticipation of trading), they can get 11 balls for their raids on each account without having to grind or invest any stardust. It doesn't matter if their actual raid contribution is very low because they can get team bonuses.Meanwhile, if you are a high-commitment, high-spending WAFU raider playing in a city with lots of spoofers, you will often have to do raids on gyms your team doesn't control, and those gyms will often be swarmed with spoofers from the team that owns the gym. This is why you see many top YouTubers getting only 8 or 9 balls for many of their raids.The 3 individual contribution balls are awarded for doing 5, 15 and 20% of total boss health. The first one is easy to get, and the second two are pretty tough; to get two balls, you have to do three times as much damage as a player who only gets one. That means, in many cases where 9 or 10 people participate in a raid, a high commitment player might do more than triple the damage of a free-riding player, and get only one more ball.Here's an example: A player on Team Valor and shows up (or spoofs) to a Lugia raid on a Valor gym. His raid team is 6 level 20 raid-caught Aggrons, and the group he joins is six valor, three mystic and one instinct. His Aggrons die 90 seconds into the raid, and he doesn't rejoin because he either doesn't know that the rejoin bug was fixed months ago, or he just doesn't want to use his revives. He does 3% of the total boss health as damage, and he is likely to get 11 balls.Meanwhile, suppose that one Instinct player is a level 40 with 6 level 40 Raikou, and he does 18% of the boss's health as damage. Since he's the only Instinct, his team also does 18% of damage and gets no team bonus ball. He gets 2 balls for individual contribution for a total of 8 balls.This isn't a reasonable way for rewards to be allocated. I can understand if Niantic doesn't want a system that is insufficiently rewarding to new or casual players, but weighting rewards so heavily toward teams is not the way to fix that, especially since doing so rewards spoofing and multiaccounting.The community is no longer structured around teamsDespite the other problems, it might make sense to build the reward system around teams if teams were an important part of the game generally. But they have not been, since the June 2017 gym revamp.Under the old system, members of teams coordinated with each other to take down or prestige up gyms together, to retake gyms that had fallen, and to generally lock down their neighborhoods, because the system incentivized holding gyms for days or weeks.Under the new system, motivation decay means that it's very difficult to maintain territory for long periods of time, and since you now only get coins when your Pokemon is defeated and the gym turns over, there's no incentive to try. That means that gym control at any particular time is basically arbitrary, instead of being a function of a team's work to hold their neighborhood.Players are also less likely to form social networks based on team affiliation, and more likely to form them based on commitment to raiding. The team bonuses inhibit these kinds of groups. If the six most committed players in your neighborhood want to organize a meetup to take down some raids together, some of them will get significantly fewer balls and rewards and have a worse experience for no reason.Further, most rural and suburban players have to travel outside their usual territories to find groups for legendary raids. For these players, team control on the gyms they raid on has absolutely no relation to their commitment to gym battles, because the gyms they must travel to in order to find raids are different from the gyms they routinely battle. That means that their bonuses have absolutely no relation to their efforts. They just get more balls for some raids and fewer balls for others. And, keep in mind that the spoofers can get more balls for all their raids.Basing rewards on something other than teams is better for everyoneSuppose everybody just got 10 balls as a baseline, and then you could earn 4 balls for individual contribution at 5, 10, 15 and 20% of boss health. How is the game worse if those are the rules? Raiding on gyms your team doesn't control is more rewarding, casuals and newbies lose nothing, and an advantage that favors spoofers is flattened.Giving players the balls as baseline doesn't cheapen or trivialize any meaningful effort, since these balls are given or denied for essentially arbitrary reasons. It makes no sense to base these important rewards on controlling territory when the territory-controlling aspect of the game no longer exists in any meaningful way. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2HVhJTI