New "Legacy" EX-Raid Wave Confirmed Bug
According to Niantic, the 2/10 EX-Invite wave, which was confusingly characterized by not requiring a completed raid, a recent raid, or by taking place at a gym raided long ago in a far away land, was due to a bug in the Invite-selection process.
Moreover, as of now, more gyms will be eligible for EX-Raids (Meaning more gyms will qualify as "Park" gyms), more Trainers will (supposedly) get EX-Passes, and Gym Badge Level and # of raids in the past week will play an even greater role. Don't be confused by this bugged wave - now, it seems like the only raids that may count for invites need to take place the week of the EX-Raid.
Thoughts?
Source: https://pokemongolive.com/post/exraids-update-020718/
Answers
Some of the information is repetition of what Niantic said before: more raids and higher badge level increase the ex raid chances. Although the above statements have not been firmly disproved, but neither are they firmly proved. So this time I will remain skeptical until the facts back up the claims.
I cannot wait to see what are the new eligible gyms, maybe they will include more park gyms, or they can add more eligible osm tags to include some non-park gyms.
What I'd really like is if they gave us some notice if a gym was EX raid eligible or not. Sponsored gyms say so, and if there was some little EX symbol somewhere on the gym, people would know where to focus their attention, instead of poring over S2 cell maps and running strange scripts. (Frankly, I enjoyed doing that, but I expect most people don't.)
More importantly, finding out what size S2 cell they are using is very important. Level 12 makes sense for dense gym concentrations, level 10 for sparse gyms, but I don't see how they can pick and choose intelligently. It's ironic that people in rural areas could force 3-4 EX raids at the same time in gyms they frequent, while city dwellers still have to rely on the chance of a lottery for a hope at a pass.
