I never knew this fate will befall me.
Answers
This actually confirms my beliefs that the location is predetermined because i was getting it from a charmeleon, not a t4 or t5. Yes, you read it right, it was from a charmeleon raid yesterday. Further proof the locations are fixed at the start of cycle. If it were like the devs said it's likely the t4 or t5 raids (Or any raid that has over 200 participants) netting it, in which it's not.
And ironically, the raid didn't have whole crowds in it; There were only 6 people fighting the charmeleon but i suppose something else appeared days before. I've did raids with giant crowds and the end result is i didn't get chosen possibly because the pool was too big. Either way it confirms what i believed.
The difficulty of the raid doesn't matter (whether it's a Magikarp or a Kyogre). I doubt the locations are predetermined, as there's been evidence of people successfully triggering EX raid passes at parks by gathering massive groups to raid there (50+ people). If I had to guess, Niantic has an algorithm that looks at gyms in any given S2 cell, checks to see if it's at a park/sponsored location, then looks at how many players have raided there in the last week or so. If it's over a certain number, then it might get queued up as an EX raid.
If places were predetermined, you'd be seeing a lot of instances of a location chosen for an EX raid, and passes going out to two people because they were the only ones who raided there. That would be abysmal.
I've heard those reports as well, but the common theme amongst all of those instances, is there's absolutely no way to track all of the passes handed out for any specific EX raid. We had the same thing happen in my local Discord: only three people got an invite to an EX raid location. A fourth showed up who wasn't on the Discord, and sadly they didn't have enough to beat it. That, however, does not mean that more passes weren't issued for the location to players who aren't part of a chat group and couldn't make the raid due to work/school/etc.
Those of us who belong to local chat groups for organizing raids and post on forums like these are a subset of the larger playerbase. So just because only X passes were accounted for, for an EX raid at Y location, doesn't mean that more weren't issued.
