Recently, Niantic shared an open invitation to interview Trainers on the topic of how to improve Pokémon GO Raids. We certainly encourage and support the company’s effort to collect feedback, but we wanted to highlight a few key areas on how Raids can be improved.
These feature have been requested multiple times, on multiple occasions and quite frequently over the past few years. We feel that they deserve to be implemented sooner rather that later, and that all of them make sense.
All of the player quotes in this article were taken from this reddit thread. Some of these features were mentioned back in 2017, as written here Compendium of suggested improvements to the new gym and raid system.
Show the count of Trainers currently waiting in the Raid lobby
Being able to see how many people are in each raid lobby from the nearby list without having to click through to each one would be helpful…
This is a must. For years, we had to click, inspect and go through the whole cycle again. Waiting for animations is fun once, but it’s a terrible experience when clicking through multiple Gyms.
On top fo that, having actual visible numbers on the map gives the game a sense of being alive, promotes interaction and helps Trainers see what Gyms are hot and which are not.
Are there any safety concerns? Unlikely, you are already displaying that number when clicked on a Gym, this is just an evolution of the feature.
This feature should be visible on the overworld map and on the Nearby screen.
Start Raid Now button
Maybe start by adding a “start raid now” button like people have been asking for 5 years now… When you’re doing a solo raid this is especially annoying. Guess I’ll stand here doing nothing for 2 minutes.
If the 2 minute timer weren’t bad enough, why does the game find it necessary (for non-remote raids) to check my location AGAIN after the countdown timer ends? I know it allows a slightly bigger distance away from the gym than when initially joining the raid, but it’s still annoying. Sometimes it’s pouring hard outside & I want to run home instead of shivering in the rain for 2 minutes. During raid hours I want to use the time to walk towards the next gym.
Hopefully, whoever connects via Zoom will start the conversation by holding up a two minute countdown timer.
This is a no-brainer in our mind. If you can start a Raid and you have to wait for 2 minutes, you should be able to skip the waiting all together and just go in when ready. We don’t care if it’s implemented only for solo raiding, or for group raiding, but everyone should be able to enter the Raid when they want.
Following on that…
Reduce the Raid Egg Timer
Nothing worse than waiting for a level 1 raid to start only to finish in 5 seconds.
They also need to shorten the egg timer as well. Why does a level 1 raid require an hour before opening up?
This is true. It’s silly to wait for a Level 1 Raid the same duration as Level 5 Raid. There needs to be something special about Legendary Raids, and regular Raids should feel common and simple.
World of Warcraft raids versus dungeons are a good example of this. Dungeons are ran whenever you have nothing better to do, while Raids are big, pompous events where 20 players have to coordinate. Maybe it’s 10 nowadays, I haven’t played WoW in years.
Various quality of life changes
Raid signups
I’d like to be able to tag an egg with “I’m interested in doing this raid when it hatches”. Add that to the nearby list and suddenly coordinating spontaneous raids becomes less mysterious.
We really, really, need some form of communication system or alerts to show that people are currently joining a raid.
In-game Raid bosses list
Outside of raids proper, I can’t see what harm there’d be in letting us know which Pokemon are currently in raids. A banner in the today tab showing what is currently in rotation would be so useful. I shouldn’t have to run to Leekduck every time the raid bosses switch over.
True, you should go to GO Hub. Just kidding, but this comment is 100% right. This is a major issue to track, and we gave up on it years ago. Why this is not an in-game feature blows our mind.
Please don’t do this
They’re totally going to try to shove AR into them, aren’t they?
