My magazine

Pokémon GO seems like it’s turned a corner in the past few months, which started with a rather fun global catch challenge event and more recently has turned into a well-planned staggered Gen 3 rollout.

But there’s one aspect of the game that remains bafflingly terrible, upsetting the most dedicated players in the game, and leaving everyone else out in the cold. As ever, the problem is EX raids, now out of “beta testing,” but nearly as terrible as they’ve ever been.

For almost six months now, EX raids have served one purpose: locking Mewtwo behind a gate. The idea was that Mewtwo would be a reward for the most dedicated raiders. Raid a lot, and you’ll get an EX raid invite and a shot to catch him.

The problem was…it didn’t work like that. Players would raid constantly and not get an invite. Players would get an invite, only to discover the time frame was exactly when they had to work or were traveling, or the location of the raid was somewhere incredibly bizarre, like inside an airport terminal.

Since crawling out of beta, changes have been made to the EX raid system, including the fact that parks/playgrounds/sponsored stops are more likely to hand out EX invites after raiding there. But the EX system remains frustrating and inconsistent, as passes are never a guarantee even with an obsessive amount of effort. Here’s one player who tried to trigger an EX raid using Niantic’s stated criteria: