Inside PokémonMaxRaids, the kindest community on the internet

A little while ago, I suddenly found myself caring about Max Raid Battles in Pokémon Sword and Shield. Pokémon has a knack for this: you play, you finish the story and the afters, and for a while that’s it. But then a long weekend appears. A bit of time in lieu needs using up. You catch yourself thinking, actually, Why not finish the Pokédex? Why not get into competitive training? I’ll do it – . And down the rabbit hole you go.

The problem is, raids are important for doing those things in Sword and Shield – and raiding is not enormously fun. For one, much the same as the raids of Pokémon Go, when it comes to actually finding a proper group and coordinating a session, most of the work is left to communities outside of the game itself, the slack picked up by fans on Twitter, or reddit, or Discord. More than that, however, raids are time-consuming – when you’re in the raid itself, but more so when you’re actually trying to find something specific. (As I found out the hard way, amateurishly working through the ‘dex).

In other words then, raids might be a neat idea, designed in that typically Pokémon way to get fans playing together – but in that other typically Pokémon way, they’re no fun without the community’s help.

Enter: r/PokemonMaxRaids. At around 11,600 members, MaxRaids is on the smaller side by Pokémon subreddit standards – the main Sword and Shield one has 381,000, for instance – and on the surface it’s a fairly quiet place, too. New posts come at a rate of maybe one a day, mostly as brief, curiously jargon-heavy notes about a new raid being hosted, and on the surface, that’s about it. It’s a strange place. But there are clues, little and not-so-little breadcrumbs – a list of rules here, a 6000 word FAQ here, a Google Doc that leads to another guide-within-a-guide – and following them will lead you to the most incredible reward. The real community: a bustling, deeply inventive Discord server, designed not only to crack those built-in problems to raiding but make even the most impossibly small encounters possible.

But it’s also something else: a tolerant, respectful, deeply generous community that’s become, by gaming’s standards and those of the wider online world, borderline utopic.

PokemonMaxRaids, or just MaxRaids, began in 2019, with one of the founding moderators, Kirzi, nabbing the subreddit name within minutes of the feature’s early June reveal. The expectation, Kirzi tells me via Discord message, alongside a fellow founding mod and good friend, Salti, was that it would remain relatively low-key, like r/FestivalPlaza and r/friendsafari, other subreddits for similarly niche Pokémon features that they’d managed in the past. For a short while it did: the sub was dormant until the games launched later in November, and things didn’t take off until a few months later in February 2020.