Very informative from someone whos experienced.
Me and my girlfriend started playing almost a month ago (in the middle of the fighting event) so we are deffo new to the scene. We live in a smalltown where people raid on several accounts because otherwise the raids wouldnt go down.
Your concerns are legit. If 2-3 people from the old team stopped playing we wouldnt even be able to take down tyrannitar (which we failed with 4 people) so imagine not being able to do legendary raids that for some reason occupy half of all raids in my town.
We would probably quit in less than a week because theres nothing new to catch and the counters for many legendaries are far too rare for us to ever stand a chance.
I hope you and other "old fogies" try to help new in what capacity you can if you enjoy getting new people.
No one is helping us get Ttar and if it werent for the event i wouldve never seen him which would hurt our chances for EX raids if we would ever get an invite.
PoGo - Not dying but having regrowing pains?
Something I've noticed in my area is that there are a LOT of new players in the last 2 months - it might not be hyperbole to say that our area has doubled in active population since the beginning of April. A lot of new faces coming to raids, taking down gyms (thankyouthankyouthankyou) and joining our Discord server, almost all of whom are below level 30. Which sounds great... except there also seems to be a problem integrating them into the general Raiding scene around here.
With Latios, Latias and Ho-Oh being barely Meta-relevant for those of us who have been playing for 1+ year, once we get our Dex Entry or Shiny, we tend to stop going to Legendary Raids. And the new players simply don't have the Pokémon yet who are powerful enough to 6-man these Legendary's, so on a regular basis they're failing at Legendary Raids. (I've only failed 1 Legendary raid in the past year - a Lugia when it recently returned, because I was the sole player with high-powered counters to Lugia at the raid and forgot how high Lugia's defense was. And, because I was used to raiding in the area with people who had far more powerful Pokemon than I do, I neglected to quiz the newbies before we went in to make sure we could actually do it. Whoops.)
So there seems to be a divide going on between the Old Players and the New Players. I've done a few raids with these newer players in the past week and almost to a person they're grateful and surprised that a player who can put them over the top is actually coming out to do raids with them, and it has me wondering if this is unique to my area, or if this is something more widespread. Looking over the Discord Raid channels, I'm seeing a regular number of "Next time we'll get'em!" or "We need at least 8 to take down (Legendary)... and we only have 6. Next time, hopefully." posts when these players are trying to organize raids amongst themselves - something that has become extremely rare for us old fogies, who can generally 5-man any Legendary and a few of us are able to Trio Legendary's - and I'm wondering if those failures, coupled with the lack of support from us old fogies, might cause these new players to go "Meh, I'll wait for the next interesting Mobile game to come out." and quit.
So PoGo in my area isn't dying (us old fogies are still around, just not raiding as much) but it seems to be experiencing some regrowing pains. I'm wondering just how bad those regrowing pains are, how widespread they are or if they actually exist at all. And if there is an actual issue here, wondering if there might be some way to bridge the divide to keep the newbies in the game.
Answers
Me and a couple other level 40s were randomly at the same park when a tier 5 hatched (they wanted Ho-Oh, I’d rather do Latias). It was Latias, we had it 90% beat and some lower players walked up...we back out and battle it again...after my dragon party fainted (against outrage), I bugged out Unable to find GPS signal (Error 11). Yeah, I didn’t ask them to start over. Only save: I was already at the park and I never had to chat about that raid.
How much of the newbie failures are them not having the right counters in Pokémon storage and how much is due to using the autoselect teams, which are weighed heavily toward avoiding damage instead of inflicting damage?
I have experienced both in recent months. I had to rescue a group of 6 who failed latios. They were using all the wrong stuff. Would have been easy if they had chosen good counters.
The research is trying to train newbies with tasks like “use super effective charge in gym battle” but the newbies may not be applying the learning to raids. Even though Niantic is helping, you actually get credit for any charge attack after you use 1 SE in a given run through the gym. that’s not helpful.
Yesterday I had use 7 SE charged attacks and get 1 max revive, used my Mew with Psyshock and it did give me credit for more SEs than it should have.
Relying heavily on shinies. While I was lucky to get a shiny Wailmer, Meditite, Hariyama, and Ho-Oh, I’m still lacking Kabutops and Omastar...one of the few reasons I’m out trying to catch any of the 5 species that are massively spawning right now
The ones in my area that I've raided with mostly have the problem of not having the right counters because they haven't been playing long enough to have the right counters. Did a Ho-Oh raid with a player who had 0 Golems - she hadn't been playing long enough to have enough Geodude candies to evolve a Golem. And two of the players who wanted to do a Latias raid had plenty of Dratini candy due to the Community day, but were struggling to get enough Stardust to power up even one past level 30.
Those of us who have been playing for a year or more seem to take for granted that Level 30 players should be able to have full teams of Level 30 Attackers because when we were earning our levels, by the time we hit Level 30 we had gained probably 1,000,000 Stardust from grinding to get there. Meanwhile with all the Triple XP Community days, 10x XP for new Pokestops/Gym spins, 10,000 XP for winning a Legendary Raid, 7 Day streak bonuses, and so many special boxes with Lucky Eggs in them that people who started playing 3 months ago have hit Level 30 without grinding, so they don't have what it takes to power things up.
So we've got all these Level 25+ players who can't power more than 2 Pokémon up because they simply don't have the Candies or Stardust to do it.
And yes, the Autoselect is (CENSORED). Horribly (CENSORED). And gets used by players - new and old - far too much. It's part of the problem, but not specific to these newbies.
