Pokemon Go must fix “frustrating” Raid fix ahead of Fashion Week 2025

A brand new event has been revealed for Pokemon Go, this time focusing on Fashion Week and the beautiful Pokemon already present in the game. However, it’s sparked one major frustration, and it needs to change.

Pokemon Go events are a wonderful place to bag yourself a new ‘Mon, grab that Shiny you’ve been looking for, or guarantee that you’ll meet a party of players as you head to the featured raid. The latter is one of the main focuses of Fashion Week, with fans able to grab Shinx, Minccino, Butterfree, and Dragonite all in unique costumes.

However, raids are always a contentious element of Pokemon Go, and these exclusive spawns just cement how impossible the game’s current raid rotation really is for both rural and urban players – and it needs to change.

Fashion Week proves Pokemon Go needs to fix raid rotation

Essentially, raid rotations are the feature that…rotates the raids. It chooses whether to put a one, two, three, four, or five-star raid in your nearest gym while also juggling between the themed raids and shadow raids.

So, if an event is happening, Pokemon Go’s raid rotation will choose between the above selections and offer up an ideally fair battle.

However, this hasn’t been the case recently, with various players finding they’re unable to catch these event-raid Pokemon thanks to the “frustrating” way the raid rotation works.

Niantic

“I’ve had multiple people tell me they didn’t get Christmas Dedenne because they never saw a single raid in their area of him,” shared one user on social media, going on to say: “I’ve seen people say they only got one singular raid for other exclusive Pokemon and that was it. Why? Because the raid rotations do not prioritize these new Pokemon and you have to hope that the gyms by you spawn them.”

Others are quick to back up these points, lamenting that rural players are the biggest sufferers: “The variation of raids in 1 day for 1 gym isn’t enough, sometimes you get a bunch of legendary eggs, sometimes you get 0 legendary eggs. This can result in rural players without many gyms completely missing out on any chance to get a particular Pokemon if it’s only in raids for a limited time.”

Interestingly, this is also a problem for urban players, as explained by one player who shared that they’re “in a city and have 7 gyms in close proximity. Over the holidays the 1* and 3* egg spawns were atrocious, and I was checking these gyms often every day.”

How can Niantic fix the problem?

The Pokemon Company

Raid rotation is a tricky thing for Niantic to get right, but the lack of diversity in the eggs means those upcoming costumed Pokemon are going to be increasingly rare to find, even if it’s part of the game’s main event.

What Pokemon needs to do is create an even cycle of raids during an event. If, like in Fashion Week, there are event Pokemon in one and three-star raids, then the game needs to guarantee these will appear at least once a day, preferably after work hours in that timezone.

Placing a guaranteed one and three-star raid a day will both keep players able to catch these event Pokemon, and have them coming back regularly to catch the rest. There’s just the issue of ensuring there aren’t too many repeats so players can get both ‘Mons from the three-star raids.

Of course, there’s plenty Niantic could do to improve this system, but it’s clear the rotation needs to change, or there’s a high chance players will begin majorly missing out on the features the upcoming events have to bring.