Unsychronized Raid Battles
Long version...
For my first raid boss, I just fought a Magikarp by myself, so it was a very simple introduction and had no problems. Then the next day, an Alakazam spawned at the gym I can see from my house, so I asked my local team chat group if anyone wanted to fight it. Several said they did, so I waited around 1/2 an hour for everyone to show up, and spent about 100k stardust powering up a couple attackers so I'd have more than just a swarm of Pinsirs to fight it.
Once we were all ready, we hit battle at the same time, and all saw each other in the waiting room, no problem. But then while waiting for the timer to count down, I suddenly noticed everyone else was already tapping away fighting the Alakazam, while my countdown said I still had 90 seconds before the fight would even begin. Then once it finally reached 0, my game crashed. I quickly reloaded it and tried to join the fight again, but they finished killing it before I could get back in, so my game crashed again. After that, I tried a couple times to solo it, but there was no way I could possibly win in the 75 seconds it gave me for the fight, so my raid pass went to waste, along with all that stardust I spent in preparation.
I thought maybe the problem had just been due to the absurd number of network errors I'd been getting for 20 minutes. They were so bad, I couldn't even manage to select a team of fighters, just network error, network error, network error the whole waiting time, so I pretty much would have used the automatic team it chose for me, had I been able to fight.
So when one of the same people said a Tyranitar had just hatched, a little while later, an even bigger group all started to converge for that fight, and I decided to buy a premium pass to try it again. I drove the 5 or 6 miles to get there, and everyone else was ready and waiting, so we immediately hit battle, again at the same time. I didn't have any of the network errors that time, so I thought I was good, but then again I suddenly noticed everyone else was already fighting while my countdown still had ~90 seconds to go. Fortunately, the fight took long enough that it wasn't over yet by the time my clock hit 0, and this time it didn't crash, so I managed to join the fight in time to help with the last 10% of the Tyranitar's health. Of course, I got 0 extra premium balls for the damage bonus, but luckily I caught the Tyranitar on my first throw (although it wasn't very good, it was still my first.)
Both times, I was the only one with this problem, with almost the entire 5 minutes going to the waiting room, with only 75 seconds left for the fight. I didn't even try to fight a raid boss yesterday, and just saved my pass to maybe do two today. The only solution I could come up with was to suggest that next time, I should hit battle a minute before everyone else, so my clock would be closer to everyone else's, but then that might just mean the fight would be only 75 seconds long for the entire group, so we wouldn't have enough time to win.
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Short version...
my countdown clock to begin a raid battle takes 90+ seconds longer than everyone else I'm teaming up with.
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And a 2nd question...
A little later in the day after the Tyranitar fight, someone else in the chat group who didn't make it to the first two fights had a different problem. She was with two other people, and she said that no matter how many times they tried, it kept putting each of them into separate solo fights, instead of together in a group, so there was no way they could win. She said none of them hit private battle, so we had no idea what to tell her, and I don't know if she's continuing to have that problem.
Answers
Reminds me of my first raid against a Level 4 Charizard. 6 of us had 36 Vaporeons going at it, but we all had various problems. Mine were:
1) Charge Bar and Health Bar dropping to empty, then going to Full, then dropping to Empty.
2) When the Health Bar dropped to Empty the second time or so, it would switch to a new Mon as per normal - but when THAT character hit 0 health... the game tried to switch between the two fainted Mons. Which then started going back up to full health and then down to nothing.
3) Switching manually to a new Mon lead to the new Mon suddenly having 0 health but full charge, and then joining the group of fainting, switching and fainting again, then switching and fainting again.
4) All the while I could use the full bar Charge Moves every second or third switch - while the Mon was technically at 0 health.
We did NOT beat the Charizard, though we got it down to less than 10% health every freakin' battle.
So while I like the idea of these Raids, I don't think I'm going to go after anything that I can't Solo until things calm down.
That's more like what regular gym battles are like for me now, although not exactly. It's a constant stream of rolling back the damage over and over, so sometimes I time out even on easy fights. In preparation for the Alakazam fight Saturday, I was trying to change the gym to my team, and at one point was trying to fight a Lapras that I'd already beaten once, so it had just ~1200 CP the second fight. But the battle was so unstable, it managed to beat three of my attackers, while all the damage I did just kept being undone over and over and over, until it said I lost the fight (again with 90 seconds left on the clock, I suppose the same problem as the raid fights). Then because of all the lag and errors, I just barely didn't manage to flip the gym in time.
And when I try to swap attackers, it takes about 10 seconds to finally do it, then usually switches back to the previous attacker two or three times too.
Hi! This is exactly what is happening to me. I wonder if it is some sort of softban for raids. My wife was getting the 180 seconds yesterday, but today hers is 90 too. Mine has been 90 since the raids came out. I have contacted Niantic to ask about it, since some of the battles I bought passes for before I realized I wasn't getting as much time for the battle as everyone else. I asked them for my coins back. We'll see what happens...
