Niantic Campfire 12+

First off it’s great this app finally exists however they really should do a better job with it. The UI navigation at the bottom is incredibly difficult to use. In the preset messages in the raid “chat” lobby they have the “sending invites” directly next to “sorry I’m leaving” and I hit that once and everyone left my raid. I get notifications all the time of people posting things in the feed, but when I click on them, they never show up. I’ve hosted raids on this app and sometimes the right time will completely time out. It only gives you one minute to accept, which is a little ridiculous because if you’re bored and fighting a grunt, you have to exit out of that. I do like how it automatically accepts friend request for raids. I just wish they did a revise of the whole app.

So I’ve used campfire for a while in hopes it helps with the problem with raiding in Pokemon go, especially in light of Niantic’s infamous decision with remote raids. I have a lucky egg going after finishing one gym and it show there’s another close by that’s said to be hosting a raid. So I’ve drove on over with nearly 4 minutes left in my lucky egg thinking I’ll make it and complete the raid with additional XP. Turns out to my surprised, the location is on private property of sort and going in would be trespassing. But the salt to the wound, no gym with no raid at all. So I’ve wasted time, gas, and my lucky egg for nothing. The closest other gym was over 12 minutes away and I couldn’t be able to pause my lucky egg timer in time. So yeah don’t trust this garbage app completely as it will lie to you, waste your time gas and everything in between, and you could potentially trespass in private property all for a gym that doesn’t exist. Niantic if you’re listening, fix your garbage excuse of a community app, you own it to yourselves after milking your playerbase of its money and location data

Don’t get me wrong campfire is a great idea. Issue is it came out 7 years after launch so we all formed our own communities or use other raid hosting apps. Meaning that the community is still dispersed over multiple apps and you typically still need to have messenger, discord, poke genie and campfire to raid in your surrounding areas.

My other critique is as an App campfire is clunky and isn’t very helpful. For example I get a ton of app notifications from my friends, I click on them, brings me to update the app, after updating I open the app then can’t find the messages lol. It’s just like if you want to make this a social app make the feed a bit easier, and if you want the raid community back give some incentive so we are using 4-5 mostly 3rd party apps to coordinate in game raids. 2 stars as I know they can and will do better but for now it’s just kind of annoying lol