#remote raiding

i gave back my friend's spare phone so it's just me and no alt pokeymanning around now. it was kind of annoying to have to manage two phones all the time but it was also nice not being alone. i can just about solo a T3 raid now on my main but I'd managed to get the alt up to level 31, which meant he could actually be useful for those. I still couldn't do mega raids with just the two of us though. That's the dream, a lot of the mega raids are ones I want to do.

I tried the Campfire TeamUp feature a couple of times, once I was on my own. The first attempt, I waited fifteen minutes to be paired with a raid, missed the notification when I finally was so I had to start over (which is bullshit, i was staring at my phone the entire time and it did not pop up anywhere) and had to start the queue again, waited another fifteen minutes and then got into one which was great, but then I waited a full ten minutes beyond that and the host never sent invites, so I had to leave-- I hadn't budgeted for basically a full hour of just waiting by my phone. It didn't take up a raid pass at least but like. That was so frustrating. My second attempt went better, but only in that after I missed the first notification and then just stared at the app for the whole second fifteen-minute waiting period I got into a raid that then the host sent invites to fairly promptly so it only took another like five minutes of waiting, and then we did the raid pretty easily.

I keep thinking I should try to host a raid instead on that feature, but that means I have to get to a raid near when it begins and sit around on my phone for ages coordinating stuff, and I just haven't had that kind of time.

Anyway. Remote passes are stupid expensive and I'm in-game brokety broke.

So okay, I've relocated for the summer season to work on my sister's farm, which understandably is not located in a city. You might ask, "how well does campfire work in a rural area?"

the answer is it doesn't. On Raid Night, I'm used to opening the app and looking at all the gyms I can see, maybe scrolling slightly down to see the line of them that I know our local group from Discord goes through systematicallt?

On Raid Night here, I opened Campfire. No gyms are in sight at the default zoom level, so I zoomed out a little.

Zoomed out, the gyms don't show you eggs or raids. Or at least, they didn't show them to me. I tried zooming back in but could not get anything to load.

So the only way to use it would be to scroll without zooming, all around the map, and see whether anything in your expanded rural circumference is popping off at all. If you're lucky it'll show them to you.

Understand that the gyms I'm looking at will require me to get into a car and drive a minimum of five minutes, but in order to access several in a row, I would need to drive at least fifteen, more like twenty. Not being able to see eggs at a distance makes it impossible to choose which gyms to aim for.

So, in short, no. Unable to make any plans, I did zero raids on Raid Night, and expect that pattern will continue. Raid Night eggs don't show up until 15 minutes prior anyway in some cases, and it takes more than 15 minutes to get to most of those gyms, so even if someone did put a flare on one, I couldn't possibly get there in good time.

(To be fair, the raid night coordinator in Buffalo uses some third-party app or service that gives him access to the information about the gyms in advance anyway, and I could look into something like that here I suppose, but the biggest one doesn't serve this area. I was hoping Campfire would be in some way useful to help fill in that gap but it is Decidedly Not.)

ha ha haaa i wrote this up like last week and little did I know it would become a historic oddity before it's even published! I decided to make it a two-parter and then the news about remote raids getting less accessible broke literally as I was completing the activity for the second bit! So anyway enjoy this as a historical document of a brief shining moment from March of 2023.

So U Want Whatever Legendary Is Currently In Five Skull Raids, But You Have Only Shitmons And Don't Know How To Improve? Here Are Five Easy Steps, Already Now Deprecated, And We'll Just Have To See How It Shakes Out For The Future:

Step one: live somewhere that has an active Discord

Step one-A: that Discord has A Guy on it, who has the Campfire app and likes to coordinate things

Step one-B: wait for him to announce the raid route. Spin a gym the day before so you have a free raid pass in your inventory.

Step two: go to the street where several of the gyms are. Don’t spin your target gym’s pokestop yet. Wait for the time he says. Then go into the lobby, in-person, using the raid pass you collected yesterday. 

Step two-B: Study the raid counters suggested. Naturally you have none of them. Choose your biggest piloswine as usual, and the singular avalugg you’ve managed to evolve. Fill out the other four raid party slots with your favorite guys regardless of type since you don’t understand that shit anyway. Include your buddy, for the heart you’ll get even though she’s worthless for this.

Step two-A: Wait for like six Lvl 45+ players to hop in remotely with huge stacked raiding lineups. 

Step three: mash the button a lot and watch all your guys faint. Get kicked out. Rejoin with whatever random shit the app auto-suggests, which is universally terrible. 

Step three-A: Watch the six high-level players win the raid anyway. Wow one of them remoted in from thousands of km away!

(I took that screenshot entirely accidentally because my screen was wet because it was snowing on me and it's very hard to control a touchscreen that's wet, I promise I was helping. Actually you can see that I just pressed the "Avalanche" button down there, and that "super effective!" is my attack landing, thank you very much. I'm sure the like 2 points of damage my tiny guy did was very useful.)

Step three-B, optional: sometimes you get an achievement anyway. Once I was the last one to hit so I got Final Blow credit. This was amazing and also entirely unwarranted. I also once got a Style Maven credit which is hilarious since I’ve outfitted my dude in the only shapeless sweater I could find in the inventory.

Step four: Now try like hell to catch the raid boss trophy. (A genuine tip: At the beginning, use a nanab berry on every throw, to hold the fucking thing still so you actually hit it. Do your absolute best to curveball it if you can: raid boss guys have a HUGE target area so this is easier than normal. When you only have five or six balls left, start putting a razz berry or golden razz on every throw instead.) (Caveat: I succeed about mmm *half* of the time with this, so it’s not foolproof.)

Optional, step five: NOW spin the gym’s pokestop and collect your daily raid pass for *today*. Then run like hell down the street to the next gym on the itinerary, and get there (hopefully) just as your raid coordinator guy is opening the lobby to the remote raiding party.  Now repeat steps one through four. 

You can go on but you have to pay for passes after the second one, which may be worth it to you but I was doing this in the winter so by then I was usually frozen anyway and wanted to go back to where I’d left my partner in a bar near the first gym, to go get some beer. 

Another lovely update on Pokemon Go. Remote raiding is live, allowing people to raid from the comfort of their couches. 100 coins per pass is a bit steep, but the first 3 are available for a single coin. Choose your raids wisely I guess?