Updates have been coming thick and fast from Niantic over the last few weeks, starting with Poké Fest up to the release of Zapdos, last week. And it seems they don’t stop there. Again, Niantic have delivered excitement and controversy in equal measure, with their latest announcement of the arrival of Mewtwo to the gym raid scene. Sounds like good news right? Trainers have been waiting for Mewtwo since the game’s release a year ago, and many are happy to hear they may soon have the chance to catch it. The “may” is proving the controversial bit.
Niantic have announced that the Mewtwo raids will function differently to the current legendary raid system and have named them “Exclusive Raid Battles”. It’s this “exclusive” bit which is causing the player outcry. In order to fight in an exclusive raid it’s been announced that a player needs to have recently beaten a raid at the gym the exclusive raid is being hosted at, meaning you can’t just see a raid, throw in a raid pass and battle in it. It means a lot of players who would have happily joined in will be barred from the battle and groups of friends may be split between can and cannot raid, which does seem to be a strange choice for a game that claims to be all about building a community. There is also the ambiguous term “recently”. What is considered recently? Days, Weeks, a couple of months? So far there has been no clarification from Niantic.
In other Pokémon news, Niantic has announced that all four of the legendries previously released: Articuno, Moltres, Zapdos and Lugia will all be spawning in legendary raids from now until August 31st, to give those who haven’t managed to catch them yet another chance. This announcement has had a much better reception, as a number of bugs blighted the legendary raids, many of which have only just been compensated by Niantic over the last week. My capture rate seems to have normalized over the last week, with 2 out of 4 Zapdos raids resulting in a capture and then 1 out of 2 Moltres raids, which is a vast improvement over the 3 captures out of 25 raids over the two previous weeks. If this is due to a fix on Niantic’s end or just an improvement in luck is currently unknown, but I’m thankful for it. So happy Mewtwo hunting for all you trainers out there.
