Originally it was pretty good but required Dis-coordination first. Nowadays it depends on the time - weekends are generally good most of the day, most raids happen after 5:00pm and between 12:00-2:00pm. People don't like to split (I'm one of the few that tries to encourage it for groups larger than 13) and a lot use auto selected teams, though some will use better teams because they want more damage balls. However, I rarely if ever have problems with not beating the boss, because usual raid sizes are about 6-14 accounts.
GamePress
Raiding scene in your areas
In Singapore, organising raids is very rare. Most raid groups are simply consisting of the people you randomly meet at the gym right before the egg hatches. Nobody really bothers to split in smaller groups, or by team/colour.
I usually play in the suburbs (still very densely populated). Since raid trackers went down, raids usually have players only for the first 5-10 minutes during lunch hour, and 15-20 minutes after 6pm. EX gyms however, have players all the way to the last 10 minutes.
Multi-accounters are everywhere. I have never ever been to any T5 raid anywhere in Singapore without seeing at least one person using 2 or more phones.
Most players just use the auto-selected team. They are too used to rolling with numbers, and have no idea what the optimal counters for the raid boss is. I’ve even failed Lugia with a full lobby, and another time barely made it with Lugia with 18 pax! Both were last year.
I like to raid with my alt account first, then my main account in the 2nd round, which usually has
Report
Answers
Since raid-scanners disappeared I've pretty much stopped raiding. I think I've done 4 Latias in total, where 2 of them were just random while walking in Paris. Since no legendaries in the near future are going to anything except dex-fillers I think legendary raid is on hold for me until raid-scanners come back.
I haven't done all that many T5 raids since leaving the States for S.E.A - one Kyogre, a couple of Rayquaza, and a couple of Latias. For the most recent Latias, I showed up with my girlfriend, saw a group of people, and joined their public lobby
One of the men there (handling two phones at once) promptly asked if I was 'thdrshn', to which I responded affirmatively. He then proceeded to accuse me of 'usually flying' (aka, spoofing). I said I'd never done that, and he responded that I was 'lucky that I was there in person, otherwise they would have exited the lobby and created a private group'. That was irritating enough, since I've never spoofed, and as such, never been shadowbanned, never received a red warning, nor have I ever multi-accounted. I don't sign in to my girlfriend's account to 'help her out', and best of all, I don't even raid that much!
Another lady there (also handling two accounts at once) said it wasn't very nice of me (and my gf) to knock her out of one of the gyms she was in at 11.30pm the previous night, since she needed to make it to past midnight to collect her coins (in the local currency, 50 coins equates to roughly 25 cents). That was even more irritating (and hilarious). It's as if she's suggesting that my schedule of playing Pokemon should depend on her ability to earn coins? What a joke. No, when my girlfriend and I are tipsy and we're sitting at a bar strategically located under a gym, we're going to take the damn thing down and hold on to it at least until we leave.
What both these accusatory idiots have in common is the fact that they're the ones blatantly breaking the ToS.
Needless to say, this one experience has entirely put me off T5 raids in the neighbourhood I live in. I will, however, continue to knock their mons out of gyms as often as my schedule permits. I honestly do miss raiding in the States, where things were a bit more civilised, organised, and friendly. Shout out to the Evanston, IL Discord crew.
Our area i think you would describe as regonal. Since the death of raid maps life has got a lot harder, you need to rely on someone having their app open and calling out locations when they pop, then having the 4 to 6 people willing to drive often up to half an hour to raid. As far as t1-4 go they mostly get skipped now as the 45 minute time and only 1 or 2 desirable mons in each egg pool means by the timeanyone even knows something worthwhile has hatched its to late to hother trying to get to it. Between this and the lackluster red toothbrush (latios) our community is getting quieter which then means less people available to notify raid locations. Etc.
In the suburb where I live raids are organized via a local group chat. Recently it's been almost impossible to get anything done, only the two EX gyms we have get any kind of interest. I'm part of the problem myself since I'm not interested in raiding gold gyms.
In the city you either show up for the start or bring your own group. Many people don't care about splitting, but if someone suggests it they don't oppose either. People seem to know that splitting equals more rewards but are too lazy to initiate the split.
Most high level players I raid with know their counters and are using teams of maxed Rays, Salamences and Dragonites and generally also organize a small group for themselves beforehand. Public lobbies are full of autoselect mons as you would expect.
Multiaccounting is common but nobody talks about it openly. Most multiaccounters are using their children's accounts to collect legendaries, some just have blatant double accounts that they use to gain an advantage in gyms. The latter do seem to be concentrated in the minority color.
EDIT: Why downvote a neutral description of my area's raid situation?
In my City (100k pop.) you rearly walk into a random player other than during comunity days. Which means u have little to no chance to do legendaries other than being in the local chat group.
People are usually 20+ and nearly everyone has a full time job (it surprised me at the beginning). So durring day time there are no raids.
Most of them are lvl 40. I didnt calculate how many hours playtime this is but it‘s really frustrating that a lot of them still dont have a clue about effectiveness...Best example is this couple. Both Lvl 40 for a very long time (one of the first in the city) and they somehow managed to lose against an Absol.
Due to auto select Aggron is by far the most seen pokémon on the battleground and not Tyranitar, Dragonite and Rayquaza as it should be.
So yeah, if you see some Japanes guys on youtube duo Ttar, Moltres or trio the other ones. Better make sure to double up the numbers ;-)
As a result splitting into smaller groups doesnt work that well either. They fear not to do it even in oversized groups. I really dont get how people spend multiple hours a day with the game but dont understand the basics like (damage balls, evectivness, or simple maths)
If someone is late for raid we usually wait or go out again. Which is annoying. So we are slow and ineffectiv. Some power raid days were organised but they usually lack in power...we never got over 40 even if the maps worked.
But other than that its cool. I made some new friends and sometimes we go out with the group have barbecue and other stuff.
Its truely surprising to hear how shit the situation is for you guys. I would strongly recommend anyone to use Telegram. We used to have whatsapp and facebook groups, but it was a mess with 500 ppl in there, so we needed another alternative, which turned out to be Telegram. We have a channel for posting T5 and raids on ex raid gyms, another one for T3/4 ones, one for general shittalk lol and one for the admins. Lately we added one for posting rare quests like Chansey, Tangela and rare candy ones. Peopole can sign up for a certain time, usually you have 4 options (10-15 minute intervals, that are generated by the bot aswell).
It took a bit to implement it and now that the map is down, ppl have to sign in raids themself, the bot used to do it before. It still works pretty well, as it is quite easy.
About 250k ppl live here and we usually have multiple raids every day, ppl are still motivated, just for the sake of rewards. Plus we have some more competititve players including myself, that regularly try to help people with counters and give advise, so most ppl in the chat group know what they have to use, thus its possible to pull off T5s with just 4 or 5 people.
Discord still helps to keep up an active raiding scene where I work in London and where I live in Stockholm. People tend to stick to T5s and Tyras in both places. The disappearance of maps in London has had some impact on the number of raids that get done e.g. not many people can see the gyms in the Olympic Park so they only tend to happen if someone is already there or in the nearby shopping centre. There’s a noticeable pattern in Stratford. People who work there tend to raid between 12-2 and just after 5. The raids tend to keep going into the evening as people get home from work and school. In the Stockholm suburb, most raids after 4 or at weekends get good attendances. The daytime and lunchtime raids have almost disappeared since the maps went down as not enough people can see the gyms. People turning up with two phones is very common as most people started playing when their kids were interested and then kept their accounts going. We had one raid last night that had about 25 people and 45 accounts. One noticeable difference between the two locations is that Stockholmers seem to be more organised at dividing groups into teams if enough accounts are present.
Discord has our raid scene on "Life Support"
There were 2 discord channels one to my north, one to my south.
The north was in 99% dead. I might hear 2-3 raids get posted in it and if people speak up get organized and going. The south one has a bit better luck as there are more gyms along the main road and a couple heavy raiders that play 2 and get it going.
Pre-Scanner Death: People would see the eggs pop, use that hour to drum up interest and easily 3-5 times as many raids would get going.
The biggest company fail in PMG, is the fact that raiding changed PMG from a solo game, to a community game. Yet it didn't give us any tools to create community. Scanners+Discord worked as a work-around. But Discord alone is simply not good enough.
My area is full of people working 8am-6pm type jobs, so now that the Scanners are down, Raiding during the week is essentially dead. We might get 1 Legendary raid in a night in our entire area where it used to be fairly common that people would be arranging for Raids on Discord as they got off work, were on the bus coming home, etc. because they knew that a Legendary was popping at Gym X at N:nn, and they could be there 15min after it hatched, and others on their way home could make plans the same way, and quite often we did 2-4 a night.
Another thing I've noticed in the last week is that Raids in my area are finishing by 6:30 instead of 7:30 - except for 1 gym in the area that has a raid that finishes at 7:30. Three times this week I've had to work late, and when I got home (6:30) there is only 1 raid in the 20-30 gyms within a reasonable drive of home, and it's almost always a Legendary. (Or a Level 4; last night it was a Poliwrath, which had people amused but also annoyed because it was Partly Cloudy and we really, REALLY wanted a Tyranitar to pop) It sucks when you've got that "Win 1 Raid" Research Project, and you don't care what the raid is you just want to win to get your daily stamp... and there's no raids to take down as a Solo player! ARGH!! ("R"NG, man... "R"NG.)
I never liked scanners but I gotta admit, the raiding community here is really feeling the loss. My city has about 200k ppl and 200 players in the chat group, with about 20~30 of them being regulars in raids, showing up whenever they can. We coordinate raids via WhatsApp group but since the scanners are gone we have been struggling to do more than 3 lv5 raids a day, even during the weekends. We have about 35 Gyms, but they are too far apart from each other, so going to a lv5 and seeing another on the nearby it’s a rare occurrence. Most players work full time so we can’t expect them to notify about every lv5 that shows up. Also, we don’t get any raids after 7:30 pm.
Most of the “regulars” have an idea about what to use against each boss, but some of them still insist on putting Aggrons. It’s not an issue though, I don’t even remember the last time we failed a Lv5 raid.
Multi accounters are common, but they are not a problem in Gyms. Also, they all leave their alt accounts out in case we got more than 20 ppl. This almost never happens because we usually split teams.
I currently live in a small city with quite a few regular players, very different from my original country where I played until I recently moved. Most people are above my level (36), many level 40s and everyone has a second account. Or third. But literally everyone raids with multiple phones and that's no big deal whatsoever. People only do public groups which annoys me as spoofers are welcome, but it's fine as they're so few.
I do get annoyed because huge groups turn up sometimes and they do not split. On Mewtwo day, we were 19 and they didn't want to split. I tried convincing them it was worth for extra balls and items and they were all "oh that's too much trouble and Mewtwo is very easy to catch anyway".
One thing that annoys the hell out of me is how because they don't do private groups, when there are too many people and it is required to split, they just create a public lobby for just one team to go, while the others have to wait to create another public lobby. Blows my mind. Why not creating a private group for each team???
Oh well. At least people are nice, they give me lifts sometimes and legendary raids can be successfully arranged quite often via Discord.
