"[Analysis]What this raid of EX-cancellations learns us about regular raid spawn mechanisms"

#PokemonGO: Even though all these EX-cancellations bring us a lot of disappointment, we can use this to gather some more data about regular raid spawn mechanisms. A good summary of our current knowledge, I think, is linked here: https://ift.tt/2yc8pHY short:-Gyms can spawn raids starting from a specific starting time up and until a certain end time. This varies per region (e.g. the Americas has raids ending at I believe 7:30PM whilst Europe and Asia have raids go on until 9:30PM).-Gyms can spawn a raid egg between x:00 and x:45. They will then have a 60 minute timer.-No raids will spawn between x:45 and [x+1]:00. (Remember this, this might be important).-Occasionally eggs seem to appear with shorter time duration, but these are visual glitches, the egg has been around for the full 60 minute period when the raid egg hatches. EDIT: This appears to not just be a visual glitch. See https://ift.tt/2OoHVx1 (linked in comments).-Raids last for 45 minutes after hatch time.-After a raid has finished, there is a cooldown period of 30-45 minutes, until the next full hour (so [x+1]:00), unless it ends between x:30 and x:45, then the cooldown period is 90 minutes.Now, after receiving some screenshots from an EX-cancellation from a player from my local community, I think I learned something new. If you look at https://ift.tt/2y4Lpue you can see an EX raid cancellation being sent to him at 11:52AM local time. He decided to visit the gym afterwards and arrived there at 1:30PM exactly. He then noticed this: https://ift.tt/2OuCpc5 Mewtwo raid was clockblocking the EX raid, causing the cancellation. However, the raid had 30 minutes remaining, meaning it hatched at 1:15PM and the egg didn't spawn until 12:15PM!. The EX raid however was already cancelled at 11:52AM, almost 30 minutes before the egg spawned.In my opinion this means that raids are scheduled a certain amount of time before the raid eggs actually appear. If we would gather more data we could possibly narrow this down even further.A hypothesis could be that the game uses the 'no-spawn' period of x:45 until [x+1]:00 to schedule raids for the coming hour. Another hypothesis could be that the game schedules raids approximately 30 minutes in advance.If we have more data from other cancellations we could find data to support or reject these hypotheses. Hoping others can add their data! via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2P5jgL1