Raid Battles were one of the first big changes added to Pokemon Go. In July 2017, a year after the game initially launched, all gyms in the game were disabled. At this point, we had no Team Rocket, no PvP, no Special Research, no... basically, think of anything currently in Pokemon Go that isn't just throwing Poke Balls at Pokemon and it probably wasn't in the game when the gyms were shut down. There wasn't much to do. A week later, the gyms reappeared, this time with a new feature: Raid Bosses. For reasons never made especially clear, these gyms had been taken over by kaiju versions of Pokemon who could be battled by 20 different trainers at once. Beating the boss would net you some rewards as well as the chance to catch the Pokemon itself. Pokemon Go has never been the same since, but now it needs to change again.
So much of the game these days revolves around Raids. Most of the money the game makes is via passes for raids (you can only play one for free a day), and the game keeps running out of interesting Pokemon to introduce to the game naturally as it rattles through the gens. Raids therefore allow Niantic to introduce Legendaries, regional Legendaries, shiny Legendaries, and a few other special Pokemon, and they’re the only way to catch certain non-Legendary Pokemon and have a much higher shiny rate. Many of the Special Research tasks involve Raids, we have specific Raid days, and even as PvP takes off, preparing your team for a new Raid meta is right at the top of a lot of players' priority lists. I've written before about how I think the game places too much importance on Raids, especially as it develops in other interesting areas and fails to provide a useful battle UI. Even with that though, I still love Raids, just not the way they work.
When you begin a Raid, you enter a lobby and have 120 seconds to wait until the Raid begins. This allows you to retool your team, heal any important Pokemon you forgot about, and most importantly, gives other people the chance to join. In some cases, this is necessary. I used to be part of a Raid group in my hometown, gathering at three or four spots across the evening for the chance at a shiny Kyogre, walking from the Community Centre to the park to the other gym in the park, and then back. Giving everyone this time to join, especially for the first gym when a few stragglers would arrive as the countdown began, was important. In fact, I joined this group by accident, having clicked on a Raid only to see 12 people already in the lobby, gathered around across the street.
For some Raids, you can only access them via special invitation if you have successfully beaten that gym recently. When we battled Deoxys through these invitations, this countdown was used to strategically split everyone up into groups. There were more than 20 of us there, so we needed to raid in three different lobbies, all of which needed to be balanced with the hardcore players, the steady eddies, and the casuals to ensure nobody was left out and everyone could beat the boss. In these cases, the countdown makes sense. But this is not the typical playing experience for most players.
Right now, outside my house, there's a Rockruff raid boss. It's a weak Pokemon and a one-star Raid, and can be easily taken down by me alone. In fact, it will take less than the 120 seconds I've had to wait for the privilege of fighting it than it will to actually fight it. I entered the battle before writing the previous paragraph, and I won't need to pick up my phone until the end of this sentence. Okay, thanks for waiting, I'm back. Yes, I won easily. No, it was not a shiny.
It's not just for solo players looking for easy one star 'mons that the unskippable timer is a nuisance though, it also impacts the whales. I have driven around on a couple of Raid days hitting as many gyms as my in-game currency allowed me to buy passes for, and I know players who pump in hundreds of pounds a month that hit gym after gym after gym, day after day after day. I shouldn't be hoping that Niantic can better extract cash from their wallets, but it does feel as though a two minute cooldown before every battle soon adds up when you're doing it all day, every day.
There's just no reason for it not to be optional. For those battles with huge groups we're you're waiting for your full party or organising yourselves, it can stay there. When it's me, myself, and I up against the mighty Rockruff, just let me dive right in.