"[Meta post]: In defense of raids"

#PokemonGO: This shaped up as a longer read than many posts here, but I hope my contributions to this community and others you may know (I'm an admin of r/pogoraids and write occasionally for GamePress) have earned me some of your time. Thanks in advance :)Hi all,I've seen a number of threads and comments on TSR over the last couple weeks maligning raid battles as simplistic and in need of a refresh, or else implicitly viewing the fights as mere means, a two-to-seven-minute-long wait for an item drop and a shiny chance. I'd like to offer a brief defense of what is to me the most engaging game mode in Pokemon GO, and propose an alternative explanation for why so many community members have come to look down on it.In my view, raid battles are not a fighting game, so much as a real-time puzzle game. The fundamental puzzle to be solved is this: given a partially determined stream of damage taken (and therefore energy received), what is the shortest period over which my team can put out [600 to 15,000] damage? Or, if you prefer, given that same incoming damage stream, can my team put out [600 to 15,000] damage in [180 or 300] seconds?The magnificent thing about this fundamental puzzle is the same magnificent thing about battles in any Pokemon game: the permutations are endless! Common compositions in GO are six maxed top counters with best friendship, six unique species, and PokeDraft teams, but those just scratch the surface. You could set up a puzzle using level 20 Pokemon. You could require use of shinies. You could fight in adverse weather, or with not very effective moves, or forbid fainting or relobbying. The limit to the possible matchups is strictly one of imagination, which for a puzzle-doer is exhilarating. (The limit to the actual matchups is somewhat lower, but some people do actually have raid partners, maps, and/or fog).Which brings me to my hypothesis regarding what seems to be the prevailing view of raids as vapid and boring. Raid battles, as a game mode, have the capacity for complexity, depth, and ongoing enjoyment. What they don't have right now is exposure and inspiration. Starting with the release of PVP, and accelerating over the course of 2019, raid content has tapered off. Why? Because the will of the most skilled and creative raiders to keep playing has been overcome by pervasive, unaddressed technical issues.Anybody who invests time in a matchup that requires dodging or swapping—in other words, anything more involved than button-mashing—quickly comes to understand that phantom hits and accompanying boss health regeneration are not the exception. For whatever reason, Niantic's servers and our phones have a hard time keeping in sync, no matter the manufacturer or the cellular network. When attempt after attempt after attempt is foiled by forces out of a player's control, that player will stop raiding and posting, and worse, find themself unable to recommend the game to others.In March, I wrote (but didn't publish) the following paragraphs in response to a Pokebattler contest being ruined by desync:" u/Bjorn_Helverstein retired from 1v1s [using a single attacker to defeat a raid boss without fainting] months ago. u/daveinspeare and u/kieng avoid frequent dodging, even when they would improve or simplify a challenging duo. On the pogoraids Discord server, we see aspiring 1v1ers try out a few matchups and quickly quit out of frustration. Those who have been directly affected by phantom hits are becoming jaded, and that is having serious indirect consequences for our local and online communities.In the ideal world, creative ideas are rewarded with success, which breeds imitation, enthusiasm, and knowledge-sharing. In the real world, desync is frustrating creativity,  impoverishing the entire playerbase as a result."Since then, kieng has switched to PVP full-time, u/ravencrawler has quit (for good this time), and r/pogoraids has seen an exodus of top raiders— u/ct9876, u/DavidKSA, u/icyquartz, and u/varunadi may not be household names, but they are (were) the best in the business. With the volume of inspiring fights already low and continuing to drop, I'm not at all surprised that raiding in itself has come to be viewed as a shiny gate instead of the deep, engaging endgame that it is.I appreciate the ideas that others have put forward to improve the experience. Boss scaling, incentivizing individual contributions in large groups, in-game communication, the ability to repeat raids for no rewards, and a sanctioned map with moveset info would all increase accessibility. I'm obviously in favor of a shorter lobby timer. But without better server/client synchronization, creativity will continue to be squashed, and the perception that the mechanics are stale will persist. The mechanics aren't stale; they're just so consistently nonfunctional that pushing the envelope is a recipe for frustration. And when a game mode isn't fun, why play?Niantic, for all their apparent incompetence and poor communication, has responded promptly in the past to outcry from the other two endgame constituencies: #Battlers, when the switching mechanics were under threat, and collectors, in the various cases of missing shinies. We started the #AntiPhantom2020 campaign earlier this year knowing that server/client desynchronization is a difficult technical issue to solve, but hopeful that Niantic would take it seriously. If they do manage to make the fights work as advertised, I'm confident that we'll see a raid renaissance, with no other changes necessary. It's a darn cool game. I'd love to share it with you. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2PQWF8d