Trainers,
over the past few days we’ve collected bits of information, mostly from official reddit comments and interviews, confirming that Niantic is indeed developing a raid coordination mechanism.
The details of the mechanism are not clear, as their official communication is purposefully vague, but one thing is clear: something is cooking! At this point, we don’t know anything about the feature – maybe future data mines will reveal more.
The first trace of this was observed in a NianticGeorge reddit comment, posted roughly 6 days ago:
[…] I would bet that with time we’ll see near parity between rural and urban players. As for difficulties finding a raid team in rural areas, we’re working on that too (but we’re not ready to announce anything just yet) – source
A mere day later, George reiterates the point, directly referencing his previous comment:
[…] At the end of my comments, I mentioned that we are working on mechanisms to make it easier for players to come together for Raid Battles. – source
And then, Tatsuo Nomura, Sr. Product Manager at Niantic, confirmed in an interview with GO Hub that they are aware of the raid coordination issue, but not ready to announce anything:
We are also aware of the coordination issue and have some ideas of how to improve it. We are not ready to announce anything at the moment, but improving Raid playability is our major priority right now. – source
Further exploration and speculation
We expect that the future updates will contain hints on how this system will operate. If it’s an extension of the in game map, there will be hints: new icons in the assets, code references, etc.
If it’s an extension of the existing “A nearby raid is starting” notification, it could be just a server side message change – it will take a while to figure that one out. In any case, we’re positively optimistic for future APK mines.
If you ask us, a perfect solution would be a RSVP based system, similar to how online calendars work: public events and you can choose if you’re coming, maybe coming or not coming at all.
