rockerhuh

I agree, I don't think dumbing raids down just because we're missing functions that are actively being worked on is a good idea nor does it promote longevity. I spent most of the event raiding and it was glorious. You hit the nail on the head: Raiding is endgame and I liked how challenging they are and fine tunning our approach with link members. 
 
This also adds another benefit to joining a team. Nothing builds camaraderie than overcoming a challenge together. 

I’ve been following this discussion and wanted to share my perspective as someone who started playing just a few months ago. While I’m relatively new, I’ve managed to participate in most of the recent raids (except for Suicune and Heatran) and have some thoughts that could add to the conversation.

First of, I think it's clear that these raids are designed for veteran players and I think that's okay. The difficulty level and preparation required make sense for an MMO. That being said, it doesn't mean newer players can't participate, it just requires a lot of preparation or access to resources. I personally think that is a good thing as it rewards progress and planning.

While I did enjoy the event overall, a couple of raids stood out as problematic, especially in random matchmaking. But as I am writing this the devs have already adjusted these raids:

Tangrowth:
The Ancient Power mechanic felt over tuned especially in random matchmaking. (I will not go further into it as it has already been touched on in this forum post)

Gardevoir:
The mechanic requiring players to switch move types was really interesting in theory but impractical in especially in random matchmaking. Without being able to see teammates teams or communicate a strategy before hand (which is not possible in random matchmaking) it was close to impossible to beat this raid. What I would suggest is either removing random matchmaking for a raid with such mechanics (see Suicune and Heatran) or allowing players in the random matchmaking to prepare themself with their teammates before hoping into battle. Because communication would be important for such a raid but the right preparation for a raid with such a mechanic seems to be even more important.

One of the biggest issues I faced was the randomness of matchmaking. In some raids, coordination is more than critical, but you are left guessing what your teammates will bring to the table. Even more so if they don't use the link chat and don't communicate in the same language. It makes adapting strategies nearly impossible and frustrating when players don't seem prepared. Now I do understand that through discord there is the possibility to go and find the right people. (Which is something I had to do for the harder raids) And its honestly good in my opinion. But I think having some 4* raids being doable and some not really without very clear communication that you can only get if you sit before hand with your team together, kind off confuses players, especially the players that are not in such a construct like a discord or don't have the time or necessary resources to go and find such a team (by team I mean link team of 4). And lets be honest global chat really wasn't all that for a team search. 
I think making some adjustments for random matchmaking, such as having a team viewer to see all the 24 Pokemons, or also make a new chat channel for raids could be interesting in the future of this mechanic.

I actually like the time limited nature of these holiday raids with a special Pokemon at the end. It adds urgency and makes them feel special. However, holding these events during the holiday season might not have been the best choice. Many players prioritize spending time with family during Christmas and New Year, and trying to squeeze in 12-13 raids with all the other mechanics of the event seems overwhelming. Perhaps spreading events like that over a slightly longer period so it doesn't clash with important private and family time would help.


TL;DR
The raids were overall enjoyable and challenging. Some raids like Tangrowth and Gardevoir where problematic in their mechanic, especially for randoms. Some adjustments for random raids especially could go a long way. Time limited is interesting but having it right now between Christmas and NY makes it difficult to fully partake in.

It is your duty as a player to learn the game if you want to do harder contents, so yes. Aside from the rng factor that they are removing, its easy enough that anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge can do them, and yes like he said nothing is private info you just need to search for it and stop expecting to be spoonfed by others.
 
Regarding finding people to do it, join a proper team that has active members and youll likely always find a group.

Getting a foothold into this game is probably at one of the easiest points in the games history. Just purely with the amount of information thats available to new players that didnt exist even when i started back at the end of 2021. I personally had to make significant contributions to pioneering advanced gym runs stratergies bringing the standard from ~20 gyms an hour up to the 30-33 that most popular stratergies today do, being the first player to hit 27,28 and over 30 gyms in a single run. The amount of money making guides that have been created from e4 solve documentation to optimised ditto farming to Trainer rerun route just to name a few examples within an endless list. Additionally, extra money makers have been added to the game for example red refights and ho-oh boss fights. 
Less content and less high level content means its objectively harder to make the step up from a beginning player into an advanced one. Now the curve is far more refined for players in that middling transition that those starting before werent privy to.
Perfect example of suvivorship bias at play here. For every succesful investment that an OG player has made and that you actively see playing are hundreds who have quit the game because their investments did not pay off at all. However due to you only seeing those that are successful, it highly warps your perspective of what the standard is.Also an investment of a period of 5-7 years is for sure not an instant financial win
 
My problem with this is that during raid testing LNY 2023, most these restrictions did not exist and yet the same problems arose of the community figuring out a simple stratergy that worked and then on mass sticking to it rather than seeing significant stratergic variability like you'd like to see in an ideal world. Id agree that the stat boosts loss is a little to aggressive for my liking, but stratergies that rely on flinch and confusion rolls should not be inherently succesful stratergies due basically being rng shutdowns with no counterplay. Taunt was invariably used in order to entirely skip the boss mechanics with 0 possibility for it to counterplay so is rightfully ignored. 
 
This just isnt the case in my opinion, the items and moves that have been restricted in their power are ones that have been specifically targetted due to their ability to fully negate the entire principle of the raid design. The amount of possible options out there is significant. Its why every raid from this event has required a different stratergy. If you allowed hundreds of possible stratergies to work across all raids, people will just pick the one that works the best, the most often and therefore creating the same stale meta while also lowering the difficulty.

Did not read the whole thread but I have to say that this raid stuff is the best thing the devs did in years. They are challenging, fun and finally a multi-player thing. I did them in a mix of random matchmaking and with teammates and I personally think they are doable for everyone. You don't need perfect mons for that, I bred around 4 mons and not a single one cost me more than 70k. You don't need 5x31 adamant Heracross just breed 31atk 30 speed lonely, works aswell. 
 
You guys have to accept that raids are late game content and just not designed to be for everyone, that's a core aspect of every MMO. Saying that it locks the legendary is wrong aswell, you can just simply buy them. I'm sure that if you spent the same amount of time farming the event as it takes to prepare and do the raids you would be able to buy 3-5 of those legendaries. 
 
I think it's a good thing that they are season locked aswell, it gives player like me and alot of other older players an incentive to play. It's completely fine to not have an OT Jirachi btw. You guys need to understand that it is normal to not be able to take part in everything that's how life works aswell. I missed alot of other event only stuff just because I had no time to do them. 
 
I know im used to criticise the Dev team alot but this time I'm really satisfied with what they did.
 
 
TLDR:
 
Devs did a great event
When the Xmas event is over all of you snowflakes will melt

Managed to get this solo queueing 10/12 raids. Did Togekiss and Tangrowth with teammates found in pats discord, first link attempt.
Its certainly manageable to do solo, Yes it requires a lot of resetting before turn 1 and filling in support roles for more complex raids (for example for salamance i ran 3 support mons (Xatu magic bounce tw Gothitelle Heal block and murkrow mental herb tailwind)) as your teammates are far more likely to spam damage. The difficulty was at a really good level personally. 
Access to seeing your random link mates teams and being able to access your box at the pillar would fix basically all the problems that solo queue has along with popping out the link chat and forcing people into their respective language queue.
 

No key pokemon is fully gated behind raids. Also its a multiplayer game so collaboration should be expected.

This isn't necessarily true, you can find random people in chat to join you, just check their team and teach them the strat you're using on the spot, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the time people will listen because they want to complete the raid too.
 
Any 3 star raid can be done solo, some 4 star raids too, though coordination is more of a factor on the latter.
 
Regarding the difficulty of the raids, most of them can be brute forced spamming super effective move, Tangrowth used to have ancient power rng but the devs nerfed it so it became just another brute force raid.
Togekiss is another brute force raid but it's bulkier so some of your team members might need to live an extra turn, not that bad.
Gardevoir was probably the worst one to do solo queue but very easy with some communication, still got nerfed.
 
Devs have been nerfing every raid that is hard to solo queue or that has too much RNG.
Even the healing from raid bosses has been nerfed, which could always be stopped by one pokemon using heal block.
At this point I don't think anyone should complain about difficulty.

I think part of this is down to laziness from a significant portion of the playerbase who aren’t actually interested in figuring out a way to win but want to win by the easiest means necessary in order to get the reward. People see something that’s working and choose that option because it’s easy, making the meta feel more defined and pigeonholed than it could be if community collaboration wasn’t a thing.
 
Secondly it’s due to the strength of certain options in certain type matchups. Pure damage will always be pure damage. For example gardevoir post nerf, your turn 1 is gonna be sucker punch and 3 fast hard hitting assurance users or status + 3x hex. Yes other options are possible but like why would you when these exist. At least pre nerf you had to think about move choice and coordination (yes solo w was incredibly hard with it).
 

My issue with this system is that when someone forfeits, their Pokémon don't attack the raid boss but the minions of the raid boss instead. This mechanic is stupid because twice in a row on the Tangrowth raid, I was just about to kill Tangrowth, once at 2.5 percent and once at 0.5 percent. I would have won these raids if the bot hadn't attacked the minions but instead attacked the raid boss itself.
 
 
 
Another issue is the bot move selection. If it's a Tangrowth raid and I know for sure the Pokémon of the bot has a damaging move when the Tangrowth boss is at 0.5 percent, why did it click Softboiled? This happened to me when I was fighting Tangrowth. My Pokémon died, and my bot ally, who was my last hope, could have killed the raid boss with their Chansey that had Seismic Toss, but instead it clicked Softboiled and then died next turn. 

Id personally disagree with this point as they are still easily accessible (for a significantly lower cost than making raid teams) via the gtl, just without OT, so having access to these pokemon via the gtl. For kanto alpha starters you can even breed OT onto them with ease. That’s why i like the current levels of implementation. those that are too strong are purely cosmetic (for consistent repeatable use) via summons and those that aren’t are purchaseable with the only drawback being OT

Essentially.
Raids weren't meant to be accessible to everyone, more of a way for older players to put use to all the pokemon they obtained along the way and as a money sink.
 
Need one of these competitive pokemon? GTL
OT won't affect your battle.
Want to earn your own OT? Spend pokeyen and time to make the team or get it from a friend.
 
Solo queue is ass? Make friends in PokeMMO. (Or use 4 devices like some people do.)

Id argue this objectively a good thing. Push the playerbase to expand their capabilities and provide a goal to work towards.
 
This inherently ignores the countless hours of community collaboration thats necessary to even achieve a reasonably stable meta stratergy for a raid
 
Significant problem with this is that its not something thats inherently fixable in pokemon as a game franchise. Due to the nature of the game you cannot create natural skill gaps that occur in other games like timing or aim. Your skill comes from your ability to understand what resources are potentially available to you and find the best way to use those resources.
 
This one is a problem thats inherent with all MMOs and isnt one particularly solveable due to the nature of how MMO's are structured in their gameplay cycles. The underlying concept of an MMO is make X number bigger. In Pokemmo, this will always be Pokeyen. You can argue about different aspects of the game like pvp, shiny hunting, vanity collection but eventually access to these is also gatekept by the fundamental concept of what an MMO is.
Personally, im not particularly concerned about this issue. This style of content is specifically designed for the players that are willing to search out communities in order to further their chances in this aspect. I personally believe solo queue should not be a thing at all for these raids to further push these currently more niche communities into the mainstream. 
 
Countering common stratergies is generally the easiest way to create team building variability. Otherwise you fall into a one team beats all raids hole far too easily. Its also an important aspect of the discovery phase that players go through that keeps events like these entertaining.
This is a problem thats due to how pokemon as a game exists. Its the same reason as to why pvp metagames exist, Because in a limited set of options, certain options are always objectively going to be better than others. No matter how hard you try. This is why the raid design is so important and why this point is relatively contradictory to your other points. Earlier you claim you do not want to players having large toolsets to be a main prerequisit to properly participating in raids however if you want to encourage a variety of stratergy, having a wide toolset at your disposal will be the best way of doing this. 
 
For years players have complained that end game content for experienced players with significant capital was missing from the game and that the current standard gameplay was far too shifted towards catering to the newer players. It is naturally good game design to have a progression ark for players to work towards with content that is inaccesable to newer players. This way you create a natural game play cycle that rewards long term consistent planning as well as providing clear directional goals for those that struggle with the open nature that MMOs provide. Being a new player without regions completed means you still have significant amount of content to enjoy before even reaching this open nature. Fortunately, these events are reoccuring yearly and therefore provide you with significant time to enjoy this content before the next cycle as well as make the progress you need. A lot of players have a certain level of entitlement to access and enjoy certain content without having to adhere to the standard prerequesits. Its like wanting to skip to world 8 in super mario bros without having beat the 7 before it. Enjoy those 7 worlds and then gain access to the 8th.

 
These ideas are ones that im sure theyre looking to impliment in the future but getting the feature raids themselves working properly is something they correctly prioritised rather than making the community wait for another year while complaining that not enough end game content exists. Also to make sure that im getting matched up with players who actually speak my language would be a significant boost. Far too often i have chinese or spanish players whose default game language is set to english and therefore get queued up with me.

Overall found raids really enjoyable so far, 3* raids were relatively easy, even in solo q. Having beat all of them in 2 or less attempts all solo. 4* raids are rightfully a significant difficulty jump and therefore ive been using Patrouski's discord to find links and pre agree on teams/stratergies and have had great results.

Yeah, these are fair points. I was mainly quoiting EATorDIE's post due to the hyperbole.  I completed most of the raids prior to any of these balancing changes so. I also was pointing out that I don't think the devs can do anything that's going to change the quality of links one would get into from match making. Pat's Discord LFRAid channel is a much better place. Should there be a better system? Ideally sure, but how does one even implement such a thing?

Personally, raids are endgame content and I enjoy that they are difficult and require teamwork/coordination. 

I leaned so far into my edginess that I'm standing sideways
IGN: rockerhuh

I leaned so far into my edginess that I'm standing sideways
IGN: rockerhuh

I love this event, thats it 
 

idk some of those poorly translated ban appeal posts are a delight to read.

Yeah this is annoying and also people are just here now to ask money for free and that's disgusting (my IGN : AwaXGoku, if you want to send some money to celebrate your comeback in the game)

Selling pokeyen enlargement pills.
 
DM for more info.

I made it bros, I pulled it off. I put few hundred mill into vanities couple years ago, then the market immediately took a dump when berry inflation was nerfed and I lost quite a lot. I then forgot the game exists and yesterday I logged in and found out I had billions.
 
This is a reminder to all my bros that with enough dedication and willingness to uninstall the game, you too can one day make it, cheers.

Nah, the world ended that year.

having the event run from Saturday night > Friday night is a bit lame, would have been nice to have a full weekend for those who couldn't play much during the week

Yes, you can participate from any channel, everything related to the event will be announced on global chat

the plan is to math an equation and beat elon musk to be the first plague to infect mars and create a sword art online horror experience