Team got to put pokemon in gym while I was taking it??

We started about a half hour before the raid. People showed up about 15 min before and started healing the two Pokemon still left inside that weren't even theirs. Then they got to slot in.

And by easy mode, I meant because Mystic has 90% of the population in my area. It wasn't a big deal having so little allied help before raids, but now to see this is how it works with raids? That's significant reward differences. I can do more damage than them in the raid, and heck my smaller team could even out damage them in total, and we'll still get less balls because they'll always have gym control. Sure, I could randomly take a few gyms and hope a legendary raid spawns on them, but that seems completely impractical.

If I'm willing to show up super early for a raid to try to take the gym, I should have a shot at it. I'm not saying it should be impossible to defend, but you'd think 10 Golden Razz on 6 Pokemon each when it takes 3 iterations to knock out, that's 180 gym battles. That's a long ass time to defend. If you're not around and I get a solid jump start by knocking out 4 defenders before anyone starts defending - I should be rewarded for being the person actually going there early. Not the guy who shows up 15 min later and happens to be on that team that 90% of the players were on. It just seems to matter too much with the best rewards being directly tied to how big your team is.

We started taking it 25-35 min before the raid. No one was there to defend it until we had nearly cleared it. It wasn't a last minute steal, it was a full effort through enemy Golden Razz.

My issue isn't that you can Golden Razz, it's that once we make you use the limit of berries, if 10 min has passed it doesn't matter.

As for the comments on Mystic - obviously it's different in different areas, but here about 90% of the players are Mystic. Almost every gym is always Mystic unless I take it myself - and it's obviously not practical to take every gym hoping a raid will later spawn on it. The players at the raid who "defended" the gym aren't the players who were IN the gym - none of the names were in the raid lobby. It's "easy mode" because they have so many teammates that they'll have every gym by default, and when I take a gym they only need to clear 1 Pokemon, whereas I need to clear 6 (as in, if I take a gym there's a 90 % chance a Mystic finds it next, whereas after Mystic takes a gym it's most likely they'll fill it up before another team comes by).

Then on to team damage. I've been in raids with 14 Mystic and 3 each of Valor and instinct, and Mystic only gets most damage by a small margin. I've also been in raids with 11 Mystic and 8 Valor, and we've done what looks like 70% of the total damage. Which just further goes to say they're playing on easy mode here, they generally don't need to bother with counters or DPS because they have such a big numbers advantage, and when they happen to not actually have that advantage they don't do the damage.

I liked the challenge of beating the bigger team at first, but with gym control giving you extra rewards and balls at raids, it's really an unfair scenario to smaller teams. We're actively there trying to take the gym a half hour before the raid, and randoms not in the gym can show up 15 min before and defend it, then slot their own stuff in.

It wouldn't be a problem if the gym control bonus was if you personally had a Pokemon in the gym. It's a problem when you have expected bigger rewards just because your team is significantly bigger. And again, this is obviously location specific. And when I say problem I don't mean problem really, just that it's definitely easy mode.