Feature Spotlight: Raid Trains

Well, boys and girls, it's time to unveil a super-secret brand-new feature for Meowth 3.0! I'm really excited about this one but hoo boy did it take some doing. I'm pretty tired and it's about time to leave my day job for the weekend so I'm gonna try to get through this one really quickly.

Raid Trains

When I first thought about making Meowth almost two years ago, when raids had been in the game for mere weeks, I noticed that a lot of players tended to jump from raid to raid in sequence, picking up new players here and there as they went. I've heard a few different names for this phenomenon but the one that always stuck with me was "raid train." My first thought when writing Meowth was to have a channel for each of these groups as they went from place to place. But at the time I couldn't figure out how to make that work because I barely knew how to do anything back then. I was and still am really happy with what I ended up with in having a temporary channel for each reported raid. But it nagged at me that it forced users to hop from channel to channel. The massive reorganization that I did for 3.0 allowed the "raid train" channel idea to come back, and I think this has the potential to streamline raid coordination in a really significant way. So let's dive in and talk about how a raid train works in Meowth 3.0.

Let's say you are wanting to do a few raids in a row and have plenty reported raids to choose from. When you type !train, Meowth will show you a list of all the raids that have been reported, and ask you to use a reaction to choose your starting raid. Meowth will create a channel for the raid train and allow people to join your train officially via reactions or a !join command in the train channel. While a raid is selected, the train channel behaves exactly like a temporary raid channel for the current raid, with some additions. First, Meowth will send the list of reported raids for users to vote on while the current raid is in progress. Second, newly reported raids get their own message sent to the train channel, and users can vote to go to new raids next from those as well. When you are finished with the current raid (whether you actually do the raid or decide to go to a different one instead) you can type !next and Meowth will determine which raid is next by counting the reaction votes for each raid. Whichever raid has the most votes will be next, and Meowth will clean up its messages relating to the old raid and set up the train channel for the next one.

One thing to note here is that every Discord user still handles their own RSVPs for each raid during the train. Also, if there are any other channels dedicated to the same raid (whether a raid channel or a train channel) all RSVPs will be sent to all the channels so that everyone knows who's coming to the raid. So joining the train does not free you from updating your status. I imagine the typical use case will be one Discord user per car updating RSVPs for whoever is in that car, but you could also designate one person to handle RSVPs for everyone by including the whole train in that user's total.

The last thing I'll mention is that every time a user leaves a train either by sending !leave to the train channel or by using the reaction in the report channel, Meowth checks to see if there is anyone left in the train. If there is no one left in the train, Meowth will automatically end the train and delete the channel. I will probably add some sort of check for inactivity soon just in case people forget to leave their trains.

There is also some really cool quality of life features in this that I'm really happy about. If your server utilizes the gym database, Meowth will include the travel times between gyms that it knows about when asking you to select the next raid. This only works if the current raid is at a known gym. So this should help you figure out which raid you want to do based on which gym is closest and when the raids are expiring (all of which is information Meowth helpfully includes when asking you to vote on the next raid).

There's still quite a bit of refining that needs to be done on this one, but it's Friday and I managed to get it functional so I wanted to let you guys know about it! Go test it out on our support server!