Third consecutive Ex pass
Almost our entite group of 100+ recieved at least 1 on their main/alt or both. Has the ex system turned a new leaf?
Answers
As a follow-up, it's great that y'all are getting invites. The system still does not work in all areas, though, and simply gifting everyone Mewtwo passes is not the solution either. 100+ people in a single Discord getting invites sounds suspect, honestly, unless nearly all active raiders in your area are in that Discord and there aren't that many locations in your area that can host an EX raid. It would be so easy to make a system that works for nearly everyone and yet they continue to make everything completely RNG-based.
the key to our success was discovering the distribution pattern within the cell and raid the gym in the cell that was next in line to produce the pass. I.E, cell A had no parks and 2 sponsored which meant only 2 eligible gyms were in rotation for that cell. we saw that starbucks was the week prior while last week was sprint so this week it was starbucks turn.
Right...there are no cells here with only 2 eligible gyms. There are some with at least 20. All of that is fair logical deduction, but it doesn't work when there are too many gyms per cell. Since cells are of a fixed geographical area regardless of population density, it's bad for big cities.
An equally challenging problem is that spoofers claim the vast majority of passes here. It's very common to be at a sponsored location and join a raid with a full lobby but have no one else physically present. At particularly hot locations, T5 raids get hit with what must be thousands of spoofers. I remember one time where I was raiding with a couple of other people; we all joined the raid at the same time and were each placed in different immediately-filled lobbies. There were certainly fewer than 60 people around us. On the one hand, spoofers make it relatively easy to get enough people for legendary raids with no raid organization through a platform like Discord, a problem for more rural areas, but on the other, EX passes are stolen week after week by cheaters. I'd personally rather be more actively coordinating with people physically playing the game to take down Kyogre and crack down on spoofing, but this is a split opinion in our local community. However, Niantic clearly derives a lot of money from spoofers, so they have no incentive to get rid of them in a meaningful way.
First, spoofers are the bigger problem for EX raids in highly active areas. Important disclaimer.
However, alt accounts are definitely soaking up a significant fraction of invites and are probably contributing to the problem. I'm starting to think my best chance at an EX is to get an alt account and raid while low level.
Another reason for an alt is to make a lightly attended raid viable. There have been a lot of cases where a raid hasn't been doable until someone with two phones and two accounts showed up to save the day. At first, the alts would always be described as an SO or child's account, but after a while people started openly admitting to having an alt. ...the path to perdition is long and slippery.
