Pokemon Raids Are Completely Broken
Two years after launch, Pokemon Sword & Shield’s Max Raid system is still borderline unusable.
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Despite being out for two whole years, Pokemon Sword & Shield are still glaringly flawed. I’m not on about the lack of a National Dex, nor am I here to pointlessly discuss how Game Freak made a kids’ game relatively easy so that kids could play it. My issue is with Max Raids – more specifically, the fact that Max Raids are still completely broken, if not even more irreparably wrecked than they were at launch.
You can initiate a Max Raid handy enough, and so the problem isn’t necessarily that they’re absent or even inaccessible. The issue is that once you start raiding, there are about 500 different things that can go wrong at any given moment. It’s worth noting that I am only slightly exaggerating here – allow me to describe all of the hacks, inconveniences, and frankly stupid design decisions I witnessed yesterday alone.
First off, the hacks. Last week, I reported on how Sword & Shield are still rife with hacked and illegal Pokemon, to the extent that the entire trading ecosystem has become overrun with artificial shinies genned by grifters looking to make a quick buck. The main reason this happens is so said grifters can advertise their websites via fabricated Original Trainer IDs, which is a methodology we can also see being applied to fake Raid Dens. The amount of Gigantamax Gengar and Gigantamax Charizard Raids I saw yesterday that were shared by trainers with Discord links for names was absurd. They’re all automatically full by default because, actually, they don’t exist. The only reason you see them at all is because the genner is hoping you’ll look up the link.
So, inaccessible hacked lobbies clogging the flow of Raids in the already wonky and hardly usable Y-Comm interface – that’s not ideal. It’s also not the only issue by a long shot. Some of the problems we encounter are more directly related to Nintendo’s own lack of insight into quality-of-life features – others are just brazenly silly design choices.
Let’s start with the more general stuff. Say you find a lobby, right – you’re playing Pokemon Sword and you’ve finally managed to snag yourself a spot in a highly coveted Drampa Raid. Unfortunately, the host is either a) unlucky enough to lag out, or b) a selfish dick. Despite refreshing the Max Raid feed for potentially hours and finally managing to find one with space for you, you’re kicked. Has anyone at Game Freak ever heard of host migration, the ancient art employed by every other online game in history, maybe ever? “No communication partner found.” Mate, make me the host and let me find a few trainers to raid with. It took me three(!!!) hours to find a Drampa Raid yesterday. That’s three (3), as in the number after two and before four. I’m going to a gig tonight purely because yesterday evening was such a colossal waste of time that I feel the need to overcompensate today.
I’d also like to draw attention to those three hours of feed refreshing. The thing is, the Max Raid feed is actually pretty useless. When you connect to the internet, you’ll see a few Raids, but if you want to refresh it you need to boot up a Surprise Trade, which for some reason allows you to load new stamps three or four times. Now you need to back out of Y-Comms and re-enter, at which point you get three or four more refreshes. Sometimes you need to move around a bit between each reboot, but sometimes you move for too long and have to go through with the Surprise Trade before you’re allowed back in. Counterpoint: a refresh button that works. You can send me my Nobel Prize in the post.
Outside of hacked lobbies, no host migration, and a non-functional refresh system, we’ve also got the vaingloriously stupid design decision that after spending hours, days, even weeks of searching for a specific Raid, you can tirelessly work towards taking a Pokemon down only for it to roll in its Ultra Ball three times and… break out?! What was the point? Why is that a mechanic? Why do Max Raid Pokemon, who are literally at 0HP, have the ability to escape? Imagine getting a shiny Gmax Charizard, for which the odds are around one in a trillion. Rolls three times, breaks out, disappears from the Raid Den. Are you, reader, going to tell me that you wouldn’t immediately incinerate your Switch with your rabid, molten gamer breath? I would.
It’s been two years since Pokemon Sword & Shield launched and, for some reason, their Max Raids are still needlessly unintuitive and borderline unusable. Given that Gen 8 itself is pretty damn good, it’s a real shame nobody has thought, “Actually, maybe we should fix the most shit bit” yet.
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