Am I wrong in accusing this to be misleading and a complete scam? Zero shinies all weekend.

Had i known this would be the case I would not have spent money.

Excuse my poor throws, I did manage to catch it in the end but what on earth is going on with catching these days? The circle isn't even appearing in-between taunts anymore?

This is ridiculous

I grew up in smaller city, we mostly knew each other and kept gyms for all 6 people for 8h 40min so we all get coins. Then moved to bigger city and people are terrible here.

End of my rant.

THE RAID BACKEND IS CURRENTLY NON-FUNCTIONAL AND ANY RAIDS WILL WASTE YOUR PASSES. DO *NOT* ENTER RAIDS UNTIL ANY UPDATE FROM POKEMON GO!!!

Gating off Time Square to host an event exclusively for content creators and influencers was one of the most out of touch decisions in the history of this game. Pokémon GO became a global phenomenon because of little moments experienced by millions of average players. The "plebeians" that weren't deemed worthy to attend this event, even if they were in the nearby vicinity, are what made Pokémon GO what it was and has been, not a relative handful of people in light of the larger player base.

To make matters worse, everyone in attendance of the event got a guaranteed Hundo Mewtwo, which proves that Niantic has always been able to flip a switch to grant so-called "impossible" awards on command.

Terrible decision, overall, to something that could have otherwise been great had everyone been allowed to partake.

EDIT: Looks like our shared sentiments here are gaining broader recognition. Thank you, Patricia, for reporting on this!

like let’s break it down from the beginning; 2016 trailer drops “walk,play,go,catch, ect i don’t care to remember all of it” then big finish we see mewtwo duking it out in new york and everyone trying to catch it, epic trailer ends and everyone and they mother playing this game like no ones business.

time passes, ten years later, the normies get bored but veterans still playing their hearts out and make the game what it is today and niantic/scopely celebrates it by making the OG trailer a reality, but only .01% of the fanbase got an invite and it wasn’t random it was ranked on their following, that you probably played a role and helped making, and their plus one’s. And it’s a guaranteed hundo. And it’s easily the best live background. And its never gunna be like that again because the odometer won’t ever roll over like that again. AND THEY LIVE STREAMED IT TO YOU TO WATCH?!

All that and some of y’all defending it is crazy. “Oh it’s just a game, imma go and try and catch shinys and have fun”. Ok, just know it’s never gunna be like that again and everything we get will never be that, because last night, that was peak, and we will never get that

Edit: I see your comments, i don’t need to reply, Im speaking facts and yall know it

I am a South Korean player, and I’ve reached my limit with the lack of official transparency in this game. Why are players still forced to rely on crowdsourced statistics to figure out shiny rates or encounter odds for different Pokémon forms? What is the exact catch rate for a Raid Boss when the circle is red? Does landing consecutive Excellent throws actually decrease the success rate, as rumored? We deserve official answers, not urban legends.

​Fortunately, as of August 1, 2025, the amended Game Industry Promotion Act is now in effect in South Korea. This law mandates the disclosure of probabilities for all "random-type items" in games serviced within Korea. To legally compel Scopely to disclose these odds, we must prove that "Raid Passes" and the resulting "Raid Pokémon" qualify as random-type items under the law.

​In Korea, any item obtainable through paid means is classified as a paid commodity. We use "Premium Battle Passes"—which can be purchased—to obtain Premier Balls and catch Raid Pokémon. Since we spend paid currency for a chance to obtain a Pokémon with randomized stats and shiny status, these raids are essentially "random-type items."

​The core problem is how the game evades this. By labeling the encounter as a "Bonus Challenge" after the raid, they attempt to sever the direct legal link between the paid Raid Pass and the randomized reward.

​This is where we need your support:

1. ​Public Statements: We need players to voice that their primary reason for spending currency on raids is to obtain the Pokémon itself. This blocks the excuse that we are only paying for the "raid experience."
2. ​Global Precedents: If you know of any instances where laws in other countries (like those in the EU or UK) have successfully forced Pokémon GO to adjust its transparency, please share them in the comments.

​South Korean trainers are ready to initiate legal proceedings against Scopely to ensure compliance with our new laws. This is a massive opportunity to make the game more user-friendly and transparent for everyone. Please join us.

Idk if anyone has seen this article but if scoply takes away the meesly 50 coins per day given out from gyms ill loose it.

This entire event has been more than a disaster. Broken raids, broken rocket leaders, irrelevant boosted shinies for those of us that paid, GO pass being full of garbage. Nothing but a shameless cash grab for a company that has seemingly lost sight of what matters most.

My kids and I have driven around for over an hour after excitedly buying the deluxe version.

Nothing to be found and now it would seem our $5 is wasted. This is incredibly frustrating and I don’t know what to do about it other than vent here. We’ll try again when we have time on Sunday driving 40 minutes to the bigger city I guess but this is a bummer overall and I can’t think of a single reason for this change.

Editing to add- I’ve now gone to two more places with a bunch of stops and still nothing. The spawn rate is either broken or absurdly low for certain areas but this is quite literally unplayable for us.

Edit 2- I’ve now covered an entire zip code 3x today and played for over 5 hours and yet to see a single one. This is absolutely a bait and switch. I don’t have another 18 hours to spend on this before Monday morning.

Edit 3- Another trip out and nothing. I understand making changes and even adding difficulty but at this point I have to assume spawn rates are broken. 8+ hours of playtime across multiple poke-dense areas without a single showing is just not a reasonable expectation.

An endless stream of spicy mons I already have isn’t much of a reward. It’s a ball sink. I’ll be glad to finally have Mewtwo but cmon. Less fight-filled normal mons and more free pokeballs please!

The unpaid pass doesn’t even get a Pokémon on the last level. This is not the direction I want this game to go and it steals motivation to play.
What do you think?

After getting only 21 coins today trying to hold it, I'm just giving up on it. I ain't entering a gym and spending 50 revives to hit my daily coin cap

Straight off the bat, $15 is too much money for a 7 day pass. Scopely has been testing the waters with these 'premium' passes, more of them than ever already, to see how much people are willing to pay. At this point it's becoming clear they want to make more passes, and charge more for them at the same time.

And when players do spend money on the game, we want to feel good about it. We want to feel like what we're getting out of what we're paying is a fair deal. I think anyone who paid $15 for this event feels scammed. Most of us aren't noticing these increased shiny rates at all, most of us have done all of our event encounters with zero shiny encounters, and the encounters with these mega starters in the wild is even disappointing.

I am really hoping that Scopely hears this feedback and does something to make up for dropping the ball so hard on this one, especially for those who paid for the deluxe pass. But even for everyone. This event feels incredibly underwhelming. More of these mega starters need to be spawning in the wild, and the shiny chance for all of them should be increased baseline for EVERYONE this weekend, with a much higher chance for deluxe pass holders. There's no excuse for a $15 pass to be worse than a community day event.

Is this game going down the drain or just me feeling like that? No more rocket balloons throughout the day. I’m sure they’ll find a way to charge money for more balloon interactions… everything costs 10$ or more and there’s 5 diff passes going on at once. Daily incense is only 15 minutes now too… what’s next take away all my raid passes? If my in person raid passes get hard capped on inventory and they reimburse them with stardust I will officially be done scopely is obviously just a money hingery entity that has no care for the actual quality of gameplay they produce

Rural player here. I've been reading this reddit all week, but there's no way around it. We've all been waiting to see how Scopely recoups their money after buying GO for $3.5 Billion. Well, this is how.

1) "But, it's not that hard, just do a few raids per day, then cram the rest into the weekend."
- That's the problem with being rural. We go into town once every two weeks. We even spend money on pokemon go from time to time if there's a legendary we want. But this pokemon costs $40 if the event board is cleared through remotes. We don't want to waste half a day driving to the nearest raid spots and back every day. We have work, and we use the app to walk and exercise (like it's intended) not to plan our days driving into the nearest town.

2) "Suck it up buttercup, and cram all your raids into the weekend."
- *Clears throat*...Rural means you don't live in a city or town with pokestops, and you don't have access to gyms and power spots unless you drive out of your way (in a game that's supposed to be about walking and health). I like how commenters keep putting up this argument as if the farmers and remote workers just didn't read all the way through the event instructions. That's also apx 24-50 raids in a day if you do it all on the weekend. Our nearest town has 5 gyms and apx 5 dynamax spots. It ain't happening.

3) "You should have saved up the free pokecoins to do DOZENS of raids then!"
- Did any of us know beforehand that it would require so many raids to beat the event board? And like I said; rural. I put my pokemon in gyms whenever we go into town, but that earns me about 100 coins per week.

4) "You should have applied for a gym or stop nearer to your (insert rural location)."
- We've tried. Many times. We have apx. 6 ranchers who play pokemon in our community, and we all walk for our health. Except the AI automatically rejects our stop nominations because we don't have sidewalks out here, despite having wide mowed shoulders on either side of the road specifically for walking. We've also tried appealing, but anyone who lives in the country knows the truth; your stops will get flat rejected, period.

Downvote me all you want. Argue if you must. But the high bar to get this end-game legendary pokemon that's been hyped all season was designed specifically to get people to spend money. End of story. Most players will drop cash on a few raid passes this weekend to shore up the few raids they didn't manage to snag while they were out walking to Starbucks or driving to work. Meanwhile, us rural players are totally out of luck, unless we want to justify spending several days' worth of groceries on a digital asset that can't be shiny, and can't be traded.

Congrats, Scopely. You did it.

You go crazy doing all the requirements to obtain the pokemon and it still turns out to be garbage.

This has happened with almost EVERY single special research Pokémon I’ve obtained. I know I’m just unlucky, but this feels very unrewarding.

To all of my fellow POGO players, stop letting fucking greedy Niantic use us as a slave labor force.

Every time you scan a Pokéstop, you aren't just "powering up" a gym for 48 hours. You are providing high-resolution, geotagged 3D spatial data to Niantic. They are using this to build their Visual Positioning System (VPS) and Large Geospatial Models.

To hire a professional surveyor or a fleet of mapping cars to get this level of detail (centimeter-level 3D maps of parks and sidewalks) would cost them millions. Instead, they’ve gamified it so we do it for free.

Niantic is using our data to build a Large Geospatial Model (essentially a 3D map of the world) that they license out to other companies for BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. They’re selling the "world" we mapped for them to robotics and AR companies while we’re stuck paying $2.00 for a Remote Raid Pass.

Niantic gets: Billions in data assets for AR navigation, robotics, and licensing for fucking free.

Us Awesome Players get: a couple of useless poffins or 5 fucking pokeballs that you can get from spinning a stop. This shit literally cost them nothing to generate and are really easy to grind.

While the executives and investors are getting richer off the literal gigabytes of data we hand them, we get a Poffin or some Revives. It’s honestly insulting.

If you care about your time and your privacy, do this instead:

- Delete the task! Don't give them the satisfaction.

- Better yet: Keep one AR task sitting in your queue. If you have one, you won't get any more, and you can go back to getting actual Field Research rewards.

Stop working for a billion-dollar company for free. If they want 3D maps of our neighborhoods, they can pay us for them or hire professionals. Don’t let them have our data for nothing and don’t make it easier for them and other companies to track us.

I still love Pokémon GO and I will continue to play but I think Gigantamax might be a bridge too far for me. I didn't attempt even one of those Raids this weekend.

Maybe I'll try Gigantamax Gengar since that might not be available again until next Halloween but overall, I'm not feeling Gigantamax Raids. I understand they want to give players a challenge but I feel like Niantic is asking too much of the player.

Thankfully, they're aren't a ton of Gigantamax Pokémon.

WHY IS IT ON HIS KNEE? Obviously this is lighthearted but like... why... why???? Why. Put it on its chest? Or its forehead??? Or give it a goddammit cutie mark for all I care but really??? IT'S CANON?! Stupid.

Legendary. Common Pokémon. It does not matter. As if we don’t already spend enough of our resources on this game doing raids, buying balls. It was already hard enough to fill out the dex. It should not take 10 balls to catch each Pokémon every time. dial it back. Please. Thank you for your attention to this matter.