"The Raid bonus system penalizes co-operation across teams and between individuals"

#PokemonGO: The Raid bonus system incentivizes you to not co-operate with other teams and to not include other players and instead raid in small, high performing groups of single team color.The end result is such that, given the choice, players start avoiding raids where they would represent the minority, and they'll end up in situations where they're left out of raid groups.While both effects are part of my daily raiding experience to some extent, I've seen both of them taken to their extremes as well. For example, there was this couple that received an EX Raid invitation to another town. It would have been their first Mewtwo, so they decided to drive over. However, the locals, arguing that they'd lose out on Premier Balls, left them out and raided in a private group.The most common argument to this is that it's the player's job to play the game in a way that's fun, and also it's the players to blame if they leave others out or won't co-operate with other teams.While it is true, that players can and will have fun regardless of the shortcomings of the design, I would still argue that this is a common mistake in game design.Heck, it's a common mistake in anything really, even has it's own Wikipedia page: Perverse incentive.There was recently this GDC talk that I think also summarized it nicely: https://youtu.be/QHHg99hwQGY?t=2385 (next half a minute from that point).I like to call it bad incentives, or optimizing for the wrong thing.The current systemThe Raid announcement[1] originally promised us this:What are Raid Battles? A Raid Battle is a cooperative gameplay experience that encourages you to work with other Trainers to defeat an extremely powerful Pokémon known as the Raid Boss.Let's see how it turned out.There are three main ways to compete for rewards in the Raid system.Gym control is more related to Gyms, so I won't discuss it here. It does have some issues as well, mainly that you can snipe a Gym that someone else made the effort to work on.Team damage is, at a glance, determined by which team did the most damage. The way it actually works is that your team has to do at least 50% of the total damage of the whole battle to get the highest reward.[2] The winning strategy is to only raid with your own team, which is an automatic win, and failing that, at least be in the majority.Individual damage is similarly, at a glance, determined by which player did the most damage. The way this bonus actually works is that you individually have to do at least 20% of the total damage of the whole battle to get the highest reward.[2] Thus for balanced raid groups the bonus is more about the amount of players in the group than it is about competition. The differences in individual damage are small compared to the difference adding another player to the group makes. I suck at math, so I could be wrong, but I think to get the maximum rewards after 5 players, you have to beat the average by 25% at 6, 50% at 7, 75% at 8 and so on. That means that with +4 players, you have to deal twice as much damage as the average player to keep the rewards you got at 5 players. The winning strategy is to leave players out of the group until everyone left becomes a winner! Or failing that, join the group with the weakest players, since you have an upper limit on your damage, but others can always pick Blissey and be removed from the equation.To get an in-depth look into what exactly the rewards are and how they are determined, have a look at these articles:https://ift.tt/2vRbJdC for a solutionThe easiest solution is to just remove the bonuses and leave the competitive gameplay for Gyms and PvP in the future.However, saying that probably just enraged the majority of the people reading this, so here is my alternative suggestion.Gym control bonus might be fine as it is. I don't like it much as it unnecessarily causes the Gym competition to bleed into the Raid system, but it's something I can work with. It has authentic competition, and also authentic co-operation to take down the gym for your team. I may not like it but I can't argue against that.For team damage I would remove the rewards and keep the scoreboard. The way it currently works you rarely get to see which team actually did well in the raid. If instead it didn't provide any rewards, you could, with no penalty, team up with the other colors and see who has the best line ups. The scoreboard should also be modified to show actual results, and not those fixed length bars that only highlight the winner.Individual damage calculation I would change to be based on who did the most damage, not the amount of players. One way to do this would be to take the player who dealt the most damage and the player who dealt the least damage, and place the other players on that scale. Top gets the most rewards and bottom gets the least rewards. This should however be stepped so that if the group is very balanced, everyone gets good rewards, and not so that the player who did a couple damage points less gets the 0 reward.While we're at it, making it possible to raid without a pass and without rewards would also reduce all Raid system related issues a lot. Not just the issues I've pointed out.You could keep all the current systems unchanged, and players who are interested in the rewards could do their challenge raid, and after that they could help out everyone else if needed. Or you could just do solo raid challenges with no item/Pokémon rewards at all. Or you could go around and help out raid groups in need.You can ignore this partI took the time to try and write this as objectively as I could, so that I can bring this up, but I admit I have a lot personally at stake here.When I first heard that the Raid system was being introduced, I was overjoyed at the thought that it would add some non-competitive gameplay and co-operation across teams to the game.It quickly became apparent that this was not the case, and it has been gnawing at me ever since.In my local community there is a lot of toxicity between the teams, and as a not very competitive player myself, I'd rather not take part in any of that. Quite the opposite, I'd like to be in good terms with everyone.Raids were the way out of that toxicity, and I was really looking forward into playing with people regardless of team, but that was immediately taken away.I could just try and forget about the incentives, but I can't make everyone ignore them. And doing so even for myself would probably kill the motivation, because optimizing is what I like about games.Optimizing for the wrong thing hits players like me especially hard. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2r66SAl