Help.
I recently found out a ton of the players in my community are simply casual. Take this as an example: last month, I was battling a Regirock with 4 other trainers I couldn't see, it had Focus Blast, and I picked my most optimal counters to the fight(Kyogre, Machamp, etc.) And when the battle starts, what do I see? 4 Lugias firing Sky Attacks at the boss. And just the other day, I was fighting a Mewtwo raid with 9 other trainers, we won with 5 seconds left, and all because at least 6 of the other guys were using a lot of Aggron. Trying to find another fellow trainer for a short-man raid is almost impossible. How can I help to improve the community?
Answers
Luckily my community has a lot of good players to offset the players like this. Many just don’t care. I was doing a Mewtwo raid and we had 9 or 10 people, and there was a level 40 using Aggron. I mentioned that Aggron was bad and there are much better options and his response was “we have enough people so it doesn’t matter what we use.”
Except it does. Using useless Pokémon for attacking like Slaking, Aggron, Lugia, etc. screws over whatever team they’re on for team contribution balls as well as running out the clock.
This might change with the stat rebalance but who knows.
Anyway, constructive criticism is best. Before the battle starts you could give subtle hints like “make sure everyone’s Mewtwo and Tyranitar are healed” or “if you don’t have Mewtwo or Tyranitar you can use houndoom or pinsir”. Many casual players don’t power up their best counters so they just use whatever has high CP.
I used to be a hard core player in year 1 pogo. When the raids were introduced it was fun at first but then became the worst gaming experience in my life. I hate the mechanics of the game now. It doesn't matter how hard you grind. It doesn't matter the time you put into the game anymore. Now all that matters is what the other people have. Literally, your progression depends on other people. I hate that Niantic thinks I have friends, the reason I play games is because I don't have friends. Even if I did have friends our schedules wouldn't always line up. And the Casuals... let's talk about the Casuals.
Mewtwo Raid:
Casual: What's good against Mewtwo?
Me: Do you have Gengar with Shadow Claw?
Casual: Ganur what?
Me: Do you have Mewtwo with Shadow Ball?
Casual: pfft.. if I had Mewtwo I wouldn't be here.
Me: .... Tyranitar?
Casual: Idk if I have that.
Me: (looks through his phone) Yup you have a couple lvl 20 tyaranitar use those.
Casual: ok.
--During the Raid I see Lugias--
Me: Who is using Lugia??
Casual: That's me I don't like how Tyranitar looks Lugia looks way better:
Me: I dOn'T LiKe HoW tYrAnItAr LoOkS!??$IO#IOFj
Niantic really needs to allow us to solo all raids 1 thru 5. It may force these casuals to actually learn how to play the game or quit it.
100%
And the toxic admins really kill the game. I only have one local discord and they are full of toxic admins. To join it you get paired with an admin. You have to send them a gift every day. After 41 days you have to give them a legendary of their choice as payment to be in their discord. I of course refused this. Now I can't even do an ex raid because the admins have warned everyone if they join a lobby with me they will be banned to. Groupthink is running rampit and Niantic as created the perfect environment for toxic adminship. Admins are pursing their personal power. The followers, being mostly casual these days, are easy to conform and the other admins take advantage and collude. The environment forces these followers to obey the admins because they think they won't be able to find people to do raids without their discord.
Don't even get me started on toxic admins. I was removed from my local discord because we had a group of 9 people waiting to do a regi raid. Some guy said he was leaving his house now to go do it but he was in a town that was over an hour away and we had 40 minutes left on the clock. One of the people had to go to work in 5 minutes so we communicated to the discord that we had to start now.
Niantic can fix toxic adminships by either having solo raids for all tiers and/or in game messaging systems just like xbox, ps4 and PC have.
Wow thats trash, asking for gifts and legendaries? Super low? Our admins for Line and Discord are good here in WA. Everyone is quite fair with handling things and most people if they don’t care about optimal counters they at least have them. I think groups of 9+ can spare a couple of Lugias but not level 40’s, they should know better. Don’t know how somebody can play enough to get to 40 but not understand how to use counters. It’s like in CoD where 10th prestige players are terrible because they simply played a lot but not well
I remember reading a Reddit thread about why spoofers spoof. Toxic communities were among the most common reasons. Unless Niantic provide official raid maps and groups, I doubt this will change. In Singapore, legendary raids require no coordination, so the toxicity is over gyms (specifically, multiple accounts and golden razzberries).
Yes, that's a load of crap.
Start your own discord, or use facebook messenger, or telegram. Go to local raids, tell all the players you won't expect gifts or unfair trades, and only boot people when they are offensive or inappropriate.
It's a free market, and if you give the casuals better options, they will take them, and the pay the admin to play model will wither and die.
We've had good success with telegram, allows 1000 members in the group, so we can have a lot of inactive players and still be well below the cap.
Good luck, and good for you for not knuckling under to the admin's demands.
I've tried this and actually got about 30 members. However since I have full time job, family and college I can't keep up with the demands of being an admin and I didn't have any volunteers to help with adminship. So they ended up going back to the other discord. I don't blame them, a smaller discord means fewer chances of finding raids.
How admins like that exist is beyond me? Trade a legendary? Wtf?
IVs get rerolled, and if you're new you're not going to have any legendary they want anyways - just the current boss. Sending gifts 41 days in a row is stupid, but at least not hard.
In Toronto our admins are great. They act like they don't exist, except to let people know when they're using the wrong chat channel, or to clear out old rare spawn reports that are no longer there. Otherwise they'll give you a free badge for attending community days and stuff like that. Absolutely love the community here.
That's awesome! and i'm super jealous of your admins. The admins in my community are in your face all the time. They celebrate each others birthdays by @everyone through out the day demanding everyone to give that admin recognition and fill all the channels full of the admins pictures of her/him enjoying their birthday.
They also refuse to raid with the members. When they show up to raids they make 1 group of admins and the other group members. members aren't allowed to join the admins even if they are short they are asked to use discord to find more members but admins can join the members if the admins are short.
...really glad I'm not in that area. I'd be taking every gym I could find and tossing Aggrons, Larions and Arons in them. Then Golden Razzberrying the occasional Aron when someone is trying to take the gym - not the Aggron, the Aron. Not because I like Aggrons (I think they suck) but to troll the shit out of the assholes in your area.
And it would save me Potions and Revives when I could just transfer a fainted Aron rather than trying to revive a Blissey or Snorlax. It's a win-win for me!
I'd say find a group of friends/local group chat, back home there were only about 5 of us instinct players so we hard to really optimize our counters because we didnt raid with the rest of the town (better rewards, more throws to catch and unity among team) so we didnt have to worry about things like aggron and lugia after about a week or two of regice when we put together our teams for instinct only raids, Then us doing that kinda spread to mystic an valor when they saw us getting better rewards than the 20 person raids they did, plus we also got to be good friends with the other memebers of the team, raiding and gym taking together and trading helps being all of us closer.
Realistically, the only thing you can do is to slowly educate other players. Not to berate them, not to criticize them, not to do anything like that. But to show them the better ways to do it. When someone says "I just like how (Pokémon X) looks better than (Pokémon Z) looks - it reminds me of high school and cheerleaders." when using a Sudowoodo to fight a Mewtwo, bite your tongue; going off on a (well deserved, IMO, but ultimately destructive to everyone) rant about the stupidity of getting Raid advice from a YouTuber (because most of them are looking to add variety to their content, so when there's 20 people in a Mewtwo raid, why not use a Sudowoodo? Only person being hurt is the person using the Sudowoodo. Or a Bidoof - long live LORD BIDOOF(tm) - or some other lesser Pokémon. But you're doing a Mewtwo raid with 6 people, so every time a lesser Pokémon is used, it's harder for the entire group to win.) might feel GREAT, but it might mean that the next time there's a Mewtwo raid in the area, that particular trainer doesn't even have his game on so isn't coming to do the raid. Which sucks when you're already short manning things.
Which... might not be possible in your case, if you've got players who are in the same raid but not actually interacting. That's a problem.
BUT!
Here's some advice in case there are more chances for face-to-face interactions:
1) Pare down your own Pokémon to a great degree by trading with other trainers. I have 20 Tyranitar; I use 8 of them regularly. The other 12 I keep around to trade with new trainers. (And to use up CTM's and FTM's on these days because I've gotten 10+ CTM's in the last 5 Mewtwo/Deoxys raids I've done. And even got 2 CTM's from a Tyranitar raid last night. WTF?) Don't ask for anything important from them - trade a Pidgey for a Tyranitar if you have to. This isn't about you getting better (or even useful) Pokémon. This is about building up other trainers in your area, and a 0% Tyranitar is still a pretty good counter to a Mewtwo.
2) "Waste" your daily raid passes doing Tier 3 and 4 level raids with new trainers when you can. If Machamp comes back, help new trainers get Machamps. Help them do Piloswine raids in preparation for Mammoswine. Do Absol raids. Etc. It's a "waste" for you, but refer back to #1 - I may not need that 21st Tyranitar (I seriously don't), but one of the level 20's you just raided with probably could use their 2nd Tyranitar. And if they have 2 Tyranitars, that makes them 1 Tyranitar better at doing Mewtwo raids. (insert other Pokémon for other raids when applicable, naturally)
3) Explain to them what the "Recommended" list is on Raids, and how they can use that to guess the moves of the Raid Boss. "Going in on a Mewtwo, and it's giving me Groudon, Rhyhorn and Golem - that means we're likely dealing with Thunder Punch, so here are good counters for Thunder Punch other than those 3." Show them how to "read" the game, so to speak - it makes everyone feel pretty smart when they can look at a list of seemingly random things and see a pattern. When they get a taste of that, they'll probably try to improve that knowledge on their own. That's when you refer them to this site, or the Silph Road, or other resources.
All in all, you have to realize that you take this game far more seriously than other players do. Anyone posting on this board takes the game far more seriously than most players do. And we need to convince players to take the game slightly more seriously - not to our level, but higher than they are currently. Make them feel needed - if you have a Discord, tag people in personally, even if you know they can't make the raid. Make them feel appreciated - after the raid is done, post something on the Discord (or whatever software is used) thanking people who showed up. Make them feel as if their presence is a benefit to everyone and that it's wanted, and they will become more serious about the game.
Depending on your level of hardcore you can simply trade away a moderate collection of meta relevant mons at high levels and final forms.
I have traded away at least 15 lv30-35 Machamp to some old casual friends and returning original players. I started with over 4000 chop candy and still am sitting over 2300.
Obviously the average player can't afford to evolve that much and give it away for in my case, magikarp. However if you're are looking to short man raids you might be well enough stocked to make a couple of 'bad' trades for the sake of community development.
Even if you can't afford champs or Ttar a or whatever start saving up your lv35 catches. Evolve them when you can and give then away. Even a 35 breloom or Houndoom is a good option for people without extensive collections.
