I think most of us are in the boat now where we utterly ignore levels 1-2 Raids, and only go for Level 3-4 raids for specific Pokemon (Tyranitar, Machamp, etc.), preferring to do Legendary Raids. So what would bring people back to wanting to do Rank 1-4 raids? Even the "powerful" Pokemon (Gengar, Alakazam, Snorlax, etc.) don't motivate me to do a raid - I've only ever done 1 Charizard raid because it was Day 1 and there were 7 people around at the time. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered; I don't need another Charizard, so I'd rather spend my Raid pass on something I could use right now. Or something interesting...
For me, if the raids had these kinds of Pokemon:
1) Region Locked
2) Ultra-Rare
3) Unown
Region locked:
I'm never going to travel to Asia and Europe while Pokemon Go is active unless my life situation changes dramatically in the very short term, so I am not going to ever be able to get Mr. Mime, Heracross, Farfetcd, etc. They will always be shadowed Pokedex entries for me. So the idea of being able to do a Mr. Mime raid would motivate me to do that raid. I'd even be willing to do a Tauros raid because of how rare they've gotten in the past 6 months. (if I've caught 2 since May, that's 1 more than I would expect; which is amusing and aggravating because I decided I was going to use Tauros as a Defender when the Gyms changed but I got rid of all but 2 low level, high IV Tauros because of how common they were when I transferred them. Really wish I hadn't done that now...)
Ultra-Rare:
Miltank and Mareep/Flaffy come to mind immediately as potential non-Unown Ultra-Rare's that could make for fantastic Raid Bosses. But others that are Rare or Uncommon like Porygon, Scyther, Stantler, Vulpix, Sandshrew, Mankey, Doduo, Onix, Omanyte, Yanma, Snubbull, etc. could make for attractive Raid bosses.
Unown
Imagine Unown being a Level 1 raid. Imagine getting a random Unown letter each time - the letter you saw as the Raid Boss was not necessarily the letter you got to try to catch. How hard would it be to walk by that raid if you were missing some letters of the alphabet? Would that be considered simply a Money Grab by Niantic, I wonder? It would certainly make it attractive to spend 100 coins to buy a Raid Pass to try to catch another Unown if I wanted to catch the entire alphabet...
I would never go for a Miltank. Unown will loose all it's magic if you can raid one a day.
I would raid Porygon, Scyther, and other cool stuff that have a meaningful evolution. Plus of course Golem. Problem is that even good Pokémons that are not top tier will never attract anyone to a T4. Just look at Rhydon. I hope Niantic finds some attractive Pokémons to fit in T3 with increasing difficulty to solo.
1) Mark in your pokedex if you have completed a raid against that pokemon. "Oh I haven't completed a Blastoise raid yet. Let's go do that one!"
2) Add a lot more pokemon to the T1-T4 raid pool and adjust the rarity of those raid bosses every week or so like nests. I thought the Yokohama raids were a sign that they were getting ready to do something like that.
No matter what additional Pokemon they add to raids, eventually people will have all of that Pokemon they need and then stop raiding.
Meaning... they need to change the primary reason for raiding from "I need Pokemon X" to "Raids are a good source (or only source) of ______". That blank could be... coins, stardust, rare candies, TMs... whatever, but that's what needs to happen.
Personally, my interest in raiding went way down when the potential to only get potions and revives happened. I get those from stops and throw away a lot of them... why would I go out of my way for a Raid when it is probably going to give me stuff I don't really care about (exp) or stuff that I actively throw away?
This is exactly right. Once you do one Mr. Mime raid, you'll never do another one. I mean why would you? The rewards are the main driver, because they are consumable. Once you have enough High IV Ttars you'll eventually stop doing those too.
The second way to generate more interest for lower level raids is to make the cost/benefit comparable across tiers. The reason no one does T1-T2 is because it costs the same as T5, yet you are much more likely to get TMs and rare candy from a T5. The only reason people do lower tiers is to avoid a lost opportunity, i.e. wasted pass (for instance if it's too late in the day, or you are on vacation, etc.).
