"Let’s encourage people to care about what they use in raids"

#PokemonGO: So a popular thread was made on Sunday...https://ift.tt/2y5AksS the OP makes a great point. Often at raids it seems people don’t care too much to be effective when the overall objective is to “get the raid done” and move on.Yesterday I went to a Deoxys raid and while emphasizing that it’s about as easy to defeat as Absol, and your best counters against Mewtwo will be your best counters against Deoxys, people still just grouped up with their team in high numbers, beat it in seconds, caught their Deoxys and moved on.While this is perfectly acceptable, the main issue is, especially now with friendship bonuses, people don’t bother using optimal counters in most raids as long as the boss will be defeated, pretty much what the OP said in that thread.It sparked a lot of discussions in my local discord with most people saying, “pretty much” and we just got done having a meaningful discussion on what could change to improve the situation and better encourage to use Pokémon that are effective rather than just using the recommended, which many would agree is often “incorrect” and in effective.I myself spend a lot of time on TSR, always learning the best counters and, if I have the dust and candy to spare, will often try to prepare a decent team of 6 Pokémon to properly counter the raid boss. However, my issue is, despite being “needed” often in Mewtwo raids, as I can’t solo the thing and if I want to shortman it to maximize my rewards, which takes at least 3 decently skilled folks away from the core group, some people that “don’t care” are then left with not enough members that also “don’t care” and they fail the raid. Meaning that folks that do want to maximize the rewards for a pass they paid for look like jerks.Niantic also tweeted recently to “remember to help new and old players alike obtain their Mewtwo”. Fair enough, but why am I losing my own rewards in order to help others even get a chance? That doesn’t seem very encouraging, especially when I’m already spending more potions, revives, candy, and dust to use the best DPS counters to the boss.We can bang our heads against the wall consistently trying to encourage someone to better their Pokémon, but if they don’t care, they simply don’t care, and will enjoy getting carried and having enough balls to have a good chance of catching and getting their rewards. Why get 14 balls to get 14 bundles when you will get 10 for doing your +1 damage and being on the majority team, while also having a best friend?The biggest issue I have is that the game rewards folks equally for “not caring” while those that do put in the effort get equal or a small amount of greater rewards, when in reality it should be in favor of giving your best performance.Gengar, the best DPS counter, is about 2x better than Aggron in DPS. So let’s say player A used Gengar and gets 10% of the total bosses health. That means that someone using Aggron gets 5% of the damage. Both earn 1 damage ball despite one person doing double the damage. Let’s say the Gengar user does 14% of the bosses damage. Nearly 3x as much damage as player B, they still both get 1 ball.In places where half use proper counters and half use Aggron, it’s unreasonable to get more than 1 damage ball. It also seems unlikely that at a raid, the teams consistently are balanced with numbers. Let’s say a Valor player uses the proper counters, but is the only Valor player and the gym is Mystic. All the Mystics has sub optimal counters. If the Valor player does 14% damage, but all the Mystics individually do 5%, they are going to get far more balls than the person putting in the effort.The main issue with the current distribution of balls is that it’s team dependent, when raids are meant for everyone, regardless of team, to come together and complete the same objective. The team/gym game should have no place in the raid game when we are all technically on the same team when it comes to this objective. It also encourages friends on different teams to split into different groups and not raid together. I can have an actual best friend that I don’t get to raid with in order to give us both decent rewards and catch attempts, but be far better off raiding with my team of people I don’t know all that well but participated in the gift exchange for 90 days.It seems completely contradictory to have raid rewards be dependent on team performance when we all go in as one team.Now, while this is also a “suggestion”, I label this as a discussion because I feel there’s enough to discuss about this topic over just hearing my suggestions and giving input. What do you think can make “people care” about performing to the best of their ability? What can we do as a community in the current ball distribution? What are your opinions on this topic?Onto my suggestion on how ball distribution should be. Special thanks to the PDX discord folks that discussed this as well. Some of their ideas are put into this as well.Currently the ball distribution isRaid complete + 6Damage + 0 to 3Gym control + 0 or 2Friend + 1,2, or 4Team contribution + 0 to 3The idea to change it would beRaid complete + 6Damage + 0 to 5Gym badge + 0 to 3New Gym bonus + 2Friend + 1,2 or 4New gym bonus is if you haven’t raided at the gym before, to avoid punishing travel. One raid would give you Bronze. 4 raids would give you silver, assuming there are no other interactions with the gym.The damage would be changed to a new formula. The current formula is 5%, 15%, and 20% of the boss’s health dealt by you individually. This isn’t reasonably achievable in larger groups.The 5 damage balls would be either tiered between players and/or if you achieve the breakpoint to getting that extra ball.If you do 5%, you are guaranteed at least 1 ball. If you do 25%, you are guaranteed at least 5 balls.However, in a group of 10 or so folks, doing 25%, even while using the best counters, is unreasonable and depends on your opponents performing extremely poorly. So, the damage balls are also distributed based on how you perform compared to the other raiders.If you are in the top 20% of damage dealers at the raid, you are guaranteed 5 balls. If you are in the next 20%, you are guaranteed 4 balls. And so on. However, if you do less than 5% damage, you aren’t rewarded any damage balls despite being in the bottom 20%.So in example, if you are doing a 4 man raid, and one person does 30%, another does 27%, another does 26%, and another does 17%, the one person doing 17% isn’t going to only get 1 ball, they will at least get 3 for reaching at least 15% total damage. The person doing 26%, despite being third, will still receive 5 damage balls for doing at least 25% of the bosses health.You’ll always get whichever will reward you with the maximum amount of balls as long as you do at least 5% of the damage.So let’s add an example of a 10 man raid.Person A does 19% damagePerson B does 16% damagePerson C does 13% damagePerson D does 11% damagePerson E does 10% damagePerson F does 10% damagePerson G does 9% damagePerson H does 8% damagePerson I does 2% damagePerson J does 2% damagePerson A and B, because they were the top 20% in damage amongst the raid group, would receive 5 balls despite not reaching the 25% total health damage.Person C and D would get 4 balls, for being the top 40% in DPS, but not in the top 20%.Person E and F would get 3 balls for being in the top 60% of damage dealt, but not in the top 40% or 20%.Person G and H would get 2 balls, and you get the idea.However, person I and J would get zero damage balls. Despite being in the 5th tier, they did not reach the 5% damage done to the boss individually. This is a very unlikely scenario, but folks shouldn’t get a damage ball for tapping once or twice.So despite not reaching the 25% of the boss’s total health, player A and B are rewarded 5 total damage balls for being the best contributors to the raid.An optional idea is adding that you have to reach at least 2 tiers lower in total damage done to the boss to get the reward for your tier. If you’re somehow doing the most damage, you shouldn’t get +5 balls if you only do 9% of the bosses health. If players are in that situation, they can successfully do a raid by splitting into two groups.The idea to remove gym control and team contribution goes back to what I mentioned earlier. People shouldn’t have to rely on a public raid group having folks of their team, or shouldn’t be punished if they are helping out anyone, regardless of team.Helping others should overall reward you more, not punish you like the current system does.Thoughts? via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2IxPBHQ