Niantic Campfire

So overall i like the app my only issue has been with hosting raids, I've hosted 4. 2 worked 2 did not work. My first try at the raid just when i got all the plays and was supposed to join the chat to invite everyone to the rsid I kept getting a error and couldn’t do it, second one went great got the players, got into the chat, it sent out a thing in chat for everyone one to click to get in the raid went great caught Moltres. Third raid did everything the second did but for some reason it told me to invite all the players to the raid manually, by the time i was able to i had to back out cause i didn’t get it done in time, fourth time worked. Overall i like the app but hopeful it will be like the second time around moving forward.

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

I love this app and I think people don’t use it enough. I had almost no one to play with in my local area other than a good friend. I found campfire and started a group for where we play. Since then it’s slowly gained more and more members now sitting at 600+ members! We’ve built an active community, super easy to get raids done now all you gotta do is ask for some help from people that are in the area! Amazing features where you can see gyms and eggs but I would say that it would be nice if there was an option to see pokestops too for people who are maybe trying to scope out a new place to play and looking for a good spot with lots of stops. Overall really good and you should download it.

App is glitchy and barely functional but I guess it does the job. There should be a feature added where you can filter through tier raids or search a specific raid boss by search bar instead of endlessly swiping through the map. That would be helpful for people who are hunting a specific boss. Also campfire requiring you to zoom in really close to see ongoing raids is ridiculous. At least make it where you can zoom out a bit more within a certain radius. Why can I only see raids 2-3 streets over? If I’m doing drive-by raids or raid hour I want a bigger radius.

Although difficult to navigate this app fills a void that players have been waiting years for. An actual way to communicate with other players. Or at least it did until recently. The general chat was a way to connect for raids and removing it makes Campfire that much less useful. And don’t bother with the team up button. Supposedly it randomly connects players with an open raid. I don’t want a random raid and if it’s a Pokémon I don’t want, there goes a $2 raid pass just for looking at it. I don’t know personally however, because after multiple attempts I’m still waiting… The raid map and chat feature are useful, if years too late. With raids being a money maker and one of the huge draws of the game, the recent Campfire nerf is confusing and unpopular to say the least.

UPDATE - It’s gotten worse. It now gets stuck at 4/6 players, then when it updates to 5/6 waiting for host 9/10 times it cancels. And when I host I don’t get notifications about it being full. And it doesn’t live update if I watch it either. I get notifications randomly, even when I have the app closed and not looking for a raid - got a few at 3 am. Just use Discord. At first it was great! Joined a few raids - linked with my PoGo account well. Then it was bug after bug - couldn’t access the map or list - couldn’t host - couldn’t search - stopped sending invites - constant crashes. Once bugs are fixed - it should be a 5 star though! Also need a reporting system for those who leave mid raid, or just setup raids to sit and do nothing. Only reporting options are for serious IRL issues.

This is a great app! Don’t get me wrong, this is a really good app. I’ve been using it for a few months and I’ve met really great people and even made some new Pokemon Go friends on here! But I’ve had a few deceptive moments on this app. Like a 16 year old like me that has no license to drive, I have to walk or bike to meet up with people to join raids. You gotta be careful who you meet up with because you never know what can happen. I’ve had some bad experiences on this app which I’m not going to say for obvious reasons. All I want to say is if you’re an underage player, please stay safe!

I like the idea of what the app is trying to be, but there are some major flaws. The most frustrating one is how difficult it is to find a specific type of raid on the map. It has to be a specific distance to see where and what the raids are, but it is way too zoomed in to even be optimal. An easy way to fix this would either be adding a filter. Being able to choose what difficulty of a raid you want and only see those selected ones would completely fix the issue right away. You could even go a step further and have a list pop up showing the raids from closest to furthest and being able to tap on it and it taking you to where it is on the map.

Super clunky user experience for Pokémon go. When you want to join first you have to wait to even be shown a raid. Then when you are sometimes it shows what Pokémon the raid is for and sometimes not. If you decide to join, then you have to wait more time for others to join. Once there are enough players then you have to hope the host is still paying attention and accepting people. Once that happens then you have to hope you actually get sent an invite to join the raid. Then when you are invited you hope that everyone else joins and or sometimes even though I was invited I can’t join. It’s a great concept, but right now it is just a bad user experience.

This app is a great way to connect with your local community, and is great for community days and big events aswell! I like the map that can show you raids, and it’s awesome that they updated it to show you routes too! One thing though, the raiding group section doesn’t work though, whenever I try to host a raid or join one it just never works and I have to go to pokeraid or something to raid and invite people. Overall helped me find a great community around me and my future community days will be great! 🌟4.5/5

The use of this app may just be the turning point for the game. The ability to connect with nearby trainers, be a part of a club, and more needs invested into more. Plus remove all those other games and focus on making this for Pokémon Go (: Anyways I would like to see more unique features and in game features to connect these two games. Such as group badges on profile, additional items for raiding with campfire, & group levels. I think it’ll help grow communities

Hi, I put 3 stars because I’m getting annoyed that whenever I go from Pokémon Go app, and click to check out Campfire app it sends me directly to Apple app, but on my sons phone sends directly from Pokémon Go app straight to Campfire app!!! Is there a way for me to switch it out where I’m just going from 1 app to the other??? Also. When I try to share a photo it does the same thing and never allows me to share the photo!! Please help with this! I’m new to this game and I’m really enjoying it, except for the issues I mentioned above! Thank you;)

Since the launch of Campfire it’s been a buggy up and down experience. It’s main purpose is served when you need to track down raids. Other than that, the UI is undoubtedly similar to Discord. The community I’m involved with has used Discord for years, and sees no reason to move to campfire other than the ambassador promo codes. The codes are clearly a desperate attempt to get people on their app but it’s too much of a hassle. Even if we decided to move over to campfire we would keep our planning on Discord. It’s just better. Now while campfire is very similar to Discord they’ve made their own changes which do not make the “Groups” customizable. It’s just sad that they have very little originality.

User interface is confusing to navigate and could use a more simplified method of switching between games and chats. From my observation established users are signing up but not engaging very much and sticking with whatever former method they have been using such as messenger and Telegram. This is leaving the newer users and players who are giving this app a shot with unremarkable results. The developers could benefit from considering user feedback and needs to implement features which make this app more useful for it’s players.

I’m getting so frustrated with how Niantic has chose to run their “party” systems in game. First it takes on average 5 minutes to find a mandatory group of 5 more people. Only for 3 of the people not to join, making you try and find a new group. The new group joins, and right before the timer hits 0 and starts the raid, the majority of the group leaves and the games horrible refresh system doesn’t tell you that people have left in time. Therefore it throws you into the raid, complete unprepared and not enough people to complete the raid. Which also results in you wasting a raid pass you spent your hard earned dollars on! So much fun!!!!

If you want to be left by yourself to fight a raid, or finally get a group to fight only to get kicked out because of an “error” then this is great. But if you are actually trying to win raids and catch ‘em all, this app has so many glitches. You’re better off finding a park with other players to play in person than use this. During Pokémon go fest it glitched and I was left to fight raids completely alone 6 times. Twice after that, it glitched gave me an error message and would not allow me to enter the raid. I have wasted too many remote raid passes and max revives because of this.

Today was Mega Garchomp day and not once during the 3 hour event was i able to host a raid. You have a limited number of remote raids which worked just fine today, but when i try to use the limitless amount of in person raid invites it never worked. Not a single person was ever found to join my raid group. Towards the end of the day it didn't even give me the option to host period as it said i had to be on top of a gym which i was. I could’ve gotten so much more out of today but nope. And i wont even bother mentioning the semi regular connection failures when trying to join a remote raid on any other day. FIX YOUR APPS NIANTIC!

Y’all forgot to add navigation buttons to get back to either the previous screen or the home screen when you’re looking at a group. I gotta close the app then reopen it to get back home. Glaring oversight if you ask me. Additionally, it’d be nice to have a button to check our notifications. I’ve had a notif badge on the app icon for ages and I have no idea what the notifs are from. Otherwise, I dig this app’s potential. I’ve been waiting since 2016 for something like this. 🙃

So yesterday was lucario raid day I had no remote raid passes so I physically went to a raid up close and I opened my campfire to host and it said there was a bunch of people online but nobody join and it said people were in the queue to joins random raid and it took forever for people to load in a raid even tho I was hosting one so i simply got no one to join my raid with no people to battle and because of that I got to battle 4-5 times and got no shinys except for that pinecone witch im grateful for 🙏

Trying to host raids on this app is terrible, even after long wait times to get trainers in, rarely does everyone join, and on the rare chance that everyone joins, when the raid lobby counter gets to 1 second, someone always leaves. I’ve had 7 people ready to go in a lobby, on the last second I even saw that all 7 were still in, but when I loaded into the battle, there were only 4 people with me, meaning 3 people left in the last second. This app is full of trolls, and people that don’t know how to use it at all, and this ruins the raiding experience and literally wastes peoples money.

This app is amazing! I’m convinced people don’t know how to use it! You can create meet ups, “light flares” aka ping players when you’re at a raid, share shadow raids (which will allow players to click the shared raid and see exactly where on the map it is), it allows you to add people by user name, you can private message people on your friends list. I could go on and on! It’s such a useful app!

The raiding is a little tricky to navigate by that I should say bad . For 1 if you use the random join up feature it takes for ever to get in and there is 2 queues it’s just really awful but if he hears the groups with rays, people will tell you their codes and you can read that way so so great because you can see the entire maps and where what’s located Besides that though the app is really hard to navigate.

The app functions well enough to do as it says it can do. I don’t like the fact that you have to find people locally when you find a group???? The reason I can’t raid is because there is no one locally to raid. Also there are some bugs when typing for me, it will randomly disappear. Honestly I think this app is sorta underrated, but there could be improvement.

I think this is a good especially for me as there isn’t to many local raids i can join so remote raiding is my main use of this..with that being said i wish this app can somehow allow the person to pick which type of raid Pokémon they want to go after i.e. select which Pokémon the person wants to raid for instead of being randomly selected into one where i might now want that certain Pokémon

Literally cannot join any groups as soon I try just bugs out saying cannot join group at this time and then at that point it just glitches the screen to where I can’t do anything?? And I’ll be honest I do not think even without these mishaps anything would change. I remember talking to the group in my area saying if they wanted to do anything for a community day or global go fest or a shadow legendary raid and no one ever responded. I think discord and facebook groups work better. Failure of an app that could’ve had so many possibilities.

For the last month now the app’s “team up” function, which is the root function of the whole thing, has not been working. Not only for me but for other pogo players as well. I will give a 5 star rating once it’s fixed. Even the “customer service” is a joke because the only responses you get from niantic on this is from automated chat bots. Maybe only a 4 star rating when it’s fixed. Depends on if the players that make this app go round can get people to respond rather than the “cost effective” solution of chat bots.

It’s a great idea for an app. It’s not executed as well as it should be. Finding people to raid with is cool but it’s only locally unless you find friends elsewhere and ask them to send you invites to raids. But that’s if they’re playing and if they get your message even. It’s a great idea but needs to be cleaned up. More organization in the app, better chat and group chat usage and would be nice to expand playability when raiding.

Living out in the middle of nowhere having one pokéstop and one gym make playing the game harder especially for raids but being able to join people near or far make this app so good if only they didn’t limit you to only 5 remote raids a day. I guess hosting a raid is the only way you could play with other people after you hit the limit.

The app provides chat room for any specific raid which could let people gather at a target time and also provide small groups so that we could share more info with each other. Furthermore, it migrates with the map great which allows me directly drive to that gym! Save a lot of time!

Finding where raids are and where to meet others is great however hosting a raid has been severely difficult. My friends have no issues with this, however each time I attempt to host a raid it fails finding no trainers to help me. I’ve even attempted to wait a full 50 minutes to no avail so if it’s possible please fix this issue ASAP so we can all enjoy the game and app together.

Niantic is so lucky they got to develop Pokémon go. Seeing how they treat their players is absolutely appalling. The shop offerings make it seem like they’re allergic to making profits. Not to mention the countless problems that never get fixed. But oh if there’s a bug that benefits the players they will have all hands on deck and get it fixed immediately. I tell my wife they make sure we can’t have too much fun. It’s insane. This company is a train wreck and owes all of their success to the Pokémon IP. This campfire app is another dumpster fire by niantic.

But Niantic is a racist and sexist company that spends $250,000 a year on a DIE employee that hates me for being a Latino male that doesn’t think men are women. Slow creeping decay in this company has led to campfire being low quality as well as a massive increase of defects in Pokémon go. Don’t spend money here. They hate you if you are straight, or white, or straight, or believe in American values. Their own new DIE hire refers to straight people, Christians, families, as human trash. More so if you are white. I’ll never spend a money on any product Niantic is even remotely related to. Signed a Latino.

Zooming out is not an option, you have to be looking so close for a raid to actually show up in the UI (User Interface). This is an issue for rural players like myself because our gyms are very separated, it takes a lot of energy and zooming in and out to find the raid I want to go to. I know it’s not hard to implement the dynamic view at a more zoomed out aspect ratio. Y’all entirely redesigned the app, but it doesn't matter because I can’t find a single Deino raid. Add a search function and a wider lens to view raids, then you have an app worth promoting.

Being able to find which gyms have eggs or bosses to fight is so very useful. I've also used the chat feature to rendezvous with other players to take down a boss. it mostly works well. Sometimes I have to restart the app to see the menu.

Man this helped my journey to becoming a Pokémon shadow master so much. Met a great group of trainers consistently meeting up sometimes different faces for sure of all different backgrounds. Recommended if you want to save a couple bucks on raid passes too. The ambassadors of Saint Louis are cool about rewards for checking in

It’s telling me to link my account to it, But I can’t link my Apple to go. Every time I try it says something around the lines of ‘you cannot link Apple to Pokémon go’ or something like that. And if I can’t link it then I can’t use campfire even tho it’s in my news. So if you can tell me why it’s not working then hopefully I can download it but for now it’s just staying deleted.

All I want to do on Christmas is find some Pikachu raids, but this app is impossible to use. It only displays the pokemon if the gym is visible on the map. And only then if you don’t zoom out too far. Why can’t I just search for a specific pokemon and have the app show me the locations within a certain radius? Why do I have to keep scrolling around the map hoping to MAYBE find what I’m looking for? This isn’t one of those seek and find puzzles. This is extremely not user friendly.

The raid processes in Campfire are extremely frustrating. There is no way to communicate with raid groups if a Campfire name doesn’t match with the in game name, there is no guarantee or consequence if a person in the lobby does or does not accept the friend request or the raid invite, and the entire process feels very half baked. I’ve hosted three raids in Campfire, and of the three I’ve only had one where everyone in the group joined the lobby and everyone’s name matched their in game name. There are much better remote raid apps out there.

Why can’t our friends invite their friends, it make it so much harder to party or to find ppl, yet only host can invite. Sometime you can invite friends to a raid and sometimes it doesn’t give you the option. My friends and love ones want to join me while they are far away and I can’t invite half the time or selected raid only. It should always give me the option and MORE TIME. Please fix this Invited Friends should let them invite because it’s hard to find ppl.

I love this app. It made Pokémon go raids so much easier for me. I just got monster hunter now and it’s a good game. Something to add to campfire to make it easier for people who don’t go places often in monster hunter now is to make it so you can invite people to a battle from campfire. If you do that I’ll surely make my rating a five.

The app is inferior to nearly every other raid group finding app out there. The map is nice to locate raids as I no longer have to drive around to find raids but it’s clogged up by people posting stuff on it so it’s hard to see the actual raids sometimes. Overall it’s the quality that most have come to expect from Niantic as its par for the course!

I love using Campfire! Saves me so much time and gas as most Pokémon Go gyms are not in easy walking distance from home. I can locate raids and plan trips to do multiple raids in a single trip. Can also communicate with other trainers about when to meet to do raids that require more participants. Nice job Niantic.

I do not know how you get an app so wrong that it makes people want to never touch the game again, but they found a way. Remote raids do not work, joining is completely broken, and there isn't even a functional chat system, just pre-made messages that don't communicate anything specific enough to get help from others. Came back to enjoy a community day with others after not playing for a long time, and it was such a mess that I uninstalled the game.

This app helped me get into raiding, it’s alright not great but they did update the ui so they are trying. They need to add something like pokegenie where you can host queue a specific raid and join any raid you want form anywhere you just have to choose an active raid pokemon in a list to join ! That would be 5 stars!!!

More times than not this app is glitched out. Right now it shows no active raid or gyms or anything it literally just looks like google maps. On top of that when you use the small amount of 5 remote raids passes it will randomly take away the ability to host a raid despite the fact that your not using remote raid passes anymore. These are just the issues I run into the most. This app needs massive improvement before it could even be considered decent.

Only current complaint I have is getting other locals to check the group info on the app. I’m always having to tell them I posted the raid and event info on campfire days ago I find the layout and functionality of campfire very useful.

could be better. wish it was just limited to a certain range of players to join raids. also wish you could select which raids you want to pop up. i dont feel like wasting time sitting in que just to decline a 3 star raid other then that it’s a pretty basic app in finding raids.

The latest we update with raid queues is a step in the right direction but the match making system needs improvements. The matchmaking process isn’t clear on what is happening. Over the past couple days I’ve only been able to host/join a raid on about 20% of my attempts

Sick of the forced player pool only to have people back out the second before the raid start. I like the old version before you forced this “hosting or looking for raid” buttons. I liked when we could communicate with each other to see who was serious about joining and adding more than your 5 limit which did absolutely nothing but make raids more difficult. Way to drop the ball. I rather use another crappy side app then this mess