Pokémon Go’s April update adds more Elite Raids, for better or for worse

The second month for Pokémon Go’s current season, Rising Heroes, has been announced by Niantic. There are a handful of upcoming events for players to look forward to, such as the return of the Spring into Spring, Sustainability Week, Community Day, and the new A Mystic Hero and Limited Research tickets. However, the month also brings another round of Elite Raids. Despite the rewards, we can only imagine players are not looking forward to engaging in these less-than-ideal battles.

The official Niantic team from the Pokémon Go Twitter page shared the April Content map. Unlike the previous blog posts the team has done, this is a simple, easy-to-view breakdown of all of April 2023’s events, Raid Hours, Pokémon Spotlight Hours, Research Breakthrough Pokémon, and the upcoming five-star and Mega raids.

Related: The next Pokémon Go Team Rocket Takeover features a shadow Regice encounter, and Meltan returns

The next set of Elite Raids is scheduled to launch on April 9. The Pokémon featured for these raids has not been announced, but because Regidrago was the previous battle, we can speculate that the next one will feature Regieleki, an Electric-type legendary Pokémon.

Elite Raids have had a massive controversy since they were first introduced in late 2022. When they first appeared, players reported having multiple problems with these encounters, where they were consistently kicked or could not establish a stable connection while participating in these battles. On top of that, not many of the Elite Raid Gyms appeared outside of major cities, cutting out a good majority of players who did not live in larger areas, plus players are unable to use Remote Raid Passes to jump into these battles from long-distance.

These problems only worsened last month when Regidrago was introduced, with multiple players having several issues or being unable to find reliable groups to complete these battles. This is coupled with the less-than-ideal stats and overall use of the featured Pokémon, Regidrago.

Although the upcoming Elite Raids are only a small part of Niantic’s next batch of content, we imagine many players are not looking forward to finding additional issues with more Elite Raids. Hopefully, Niantic will look into these issues and discover the source of these problems. We have a few weeks to wait and see what announcements Niantic has regarding the upcoming raids, and before then, players can look forward to the upcoming Spring into Spring event set to occur on April 4.