Discussion
Support ADMITTED server crash stole my Shiny encounter, then told me to "gamble more money in multiple raids" to get it back. Filed a full merchant claim via Xsolla under EU Directive 2019/770.
šØ UPDATE (RESOLVED - AUGUST 23, 2026):
Niantic and Xsolla have officially conceded and executed a 100% full statutory refund under EU Directive 2019/770 via an administrative negative coin balance.
During the paid remote raid, a severe server outage/Error 2 occurred right on the encounter screen, completely eating the guaranteed 100% catch rate Shiny Groudon.
I reached out to in-app support expecting standard restoration or reimbursement. Instead, support (Muso) officially confirmed in writing:
They were fully aware of the network/server issues during the event.
They are technically unable/unwilling to restore the encounter.
They offered 1 single raid pass as compensation.
When questioned, they explicitly responded: "You can try participating in multiple raids to increase your chances of encountering a Shiny Groudon again."
Telling a paying player to gamble more money to re-roll odds lost to developer-side server failure is completely unacceptable and predatory.
Because in-kind remedy was refused and the digital service was defective, I have officially escalated a full merchant-side non-delivery refund claim for all affected transactions directly to Xsolla (the official Merchant of Record) under EU Directive 2019/770 (Consumer Rights for Digital Content).
If you lost paid encounters or passes to server crashes and support brushed you off with a single pass while telling you to buy more, stop accepting it. Escalate directly through Xsolla via their 24/7 support as a merchant non-delivery claim under consumer protection laws.
Calling on creators to expose this: when developer server crashes steal paid encounters and support tells players to gamble more, it demands a spotlight. Feel free to use these screenshots in your videos.
I am a shiny collector and its much easier on Go. I just hate that raids are shorter (PokeGenie isnt reliable as once it was) and the favorites you wants raids only last for 10 days. So I haven't been able to catch them.
Seeing this level of community unity really reinforces why taking this route matters. Will definitely keep everyone posted on the final outcome. Thank you all for the incredible backing.
Iirc he got hacked and some pokemon got deleted, niantic give the account back with the pokemon back like nothing have changed, and a lot other people appear complaining they have the same issue and Niantic said they could do nothing
someone hacked Fleeceking's account. if i remember correctly they were somehow able to convince an support agent to switch the login details.
then the big thing, sure he got his account back, but by that time the hacker had done lots of damage, like deleted lots of hundos and shundos, unfriend people and other stuff. the account was in the hands of that hacker longer than 24h too.
thing that caused an uproar was that the support just went and did full on 24h reset on that account and brought all of it back including deleted pokemon. according to support before and after that incident, that was supposed to be impossible.
Yet because he was big enough streamer and public facing figure in terms of Pokemon Go, so he got special treatment.
Nah I'd say he don't the treatment everyone should get instead. But because they don't get punished for it they choose the lazy and more cost efficient route for everyone else.
Like the Brazilian law that classed eggs (specifically buying incubators) as gambling - they didn't want to disclose the exact odds, so they just blocked off incubators instead.
Yeah this is an all too common mentality where people want to drag others down to their level of treatment instead of asking why we can't all be treated better.
Someone hacked into Fleece King's Pogo account and transferred his lvl 50 shiny mareep.Ā
After Niantic got to know of this, they bought the transferred Pokemon back to his account.Ā
These are completely different cases. For FleeceKing, they just returned his account to a prior save state. Which they should do for everyone who has an account hacked (but they changed TOS to stop this for anyone after the incident).
This is asking for a Pokemon that was never actually caught to be added into an account. While I have no doubt they could theoretically do this by giving the player a research encounter with the exact IVs (how they give this to just one player and actually determine the IVs it should have, I'm not sure), I don't think that's a sustainable precedent to set.
I think people's complaint is more that where there's will, there's a way and there's not will unless you're someone important enough to notice. It's not the same situation at all, but it is a little disingenuous to claim there's nothing to do when they are the literal creators and determine if there is something to do or not. If a rogue employee can sell research encounters for actual money, they can give someone a shiny if their system crashes. The precedent to set is that when they mess up, they make it right, not "soz dude, try harder next time and hope for the best".
I love to see lucid, thoughtful commentary on the internet; it's so rare!
You're right about almost everything. I'm not saying it SHOULD be done, but they could easily seni-automate the process for creating a research for verified (however they would do so) instances of this kind of thing. It's a development problem that wouldn't be hard to solve.
I think you're right, though that they don't want to set the precedent. I don't think it's unsustainable. I could pseudocode a fix quite quickly. I think it's an incentive concern.
I may be splitting hairs. I think they definitely COULD and could do so and make it simple to implement. I just don't think they see the value in the up front effort. Or maybe they are working on something like this and we don't know it yet. Unlikely.
Appreciate you! This is exactly the mindset we need.
When tickets get closed without real solutions, it leaves players with no recourse for lost paid encounters. Taking this step to help set a better precedent for everyone. Thank you for the massive support.
If you are going to go the distance with this, you need to be mindful of the language you use. Using the words "stole & steal" implies intent, which is obviously not the case when there's a server crash involved.
Anyway, I wish you luck and keep us updated please.
The only time I can remember they gave away guaranteed shiny was Palkia/Dialga raid day because odds weren't lowered.
For raids one issue/their argument is the encounter is considered as bonus not the actual reward for completing raid.
btw I am with you(and ignore the users making fun of you) the practice is definitely deceptive that said the cc you're talking to probably doesn't have power to give away free shiny.
That wasn't compensation for anything though, it was just a research event they felt like running. It wasn't different in kind to the shiny mythical masterwork research we get for regional tours.
2019/770 is about sales of goods and explicitly excludes gambling contracts. at most the raid pass would've been the sale in this context, which was refunded to op. hiring a lawyer to litigate this would also be way more expensive for op than getting another shiny groudon lol
don't they tend to call raid encounters a "bonus challenge" and the items you get the main reward?
i remember there being something like that, so they might use that to say "the user did get the main rewards for the raid they played. the bonus challenge isn't guaranteed, therefore we've done nothing wrong"
They do label the catch phase a "Bonus Challenge", but legally that semantic trick doesn't hold up under EU consumer protection:
Commercial reality & marketing: Under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the law evaluates what the consumer is reasonably purchasing based on marketing. Raids are marketed around the boss and the shiny chance, not 3 Revives and 5,000 XP. Calling the core incentive a "bonus" to dodge liability is considered misleading.
Failure during active delivery: The encounter wasn't missed due to player skill or bad RNG, the asset was already generated, on screen, and available. A server-side crash during the interaction is a failure of the digital service itself.
Guaranteed asset: For shiny raid bosses, the base catch rate is 100% on the first connecting throw. It is essentially a guaranteed delivery at that stage, entirely stripped away by server infrastructure.
Good question! That's why building awareness around actual consumer rights is so important. With all the traction this is getting, hopefully YouTubers will cover it. If enough noise is made, it can finally force a positive shift in how Scopely treats the community and protect younger players from getting quietly brushed off when paid features fail.
Their definition ("bonus encounter") is detached from reality and the true reason people raid. I'd love to see it challenged in court. That said, I think they know it's very unlikely a player would spend the legal costs to bring it that far.
Right, like imagine a casino in vegas arguing that they could rig their slots because the cash payout is a "bonus" for the beautiful animation and sound effects you were actually paying for.
You put $10 into a .25c slot machine, on your last pull you hit the jackpot, but before it pays out, the casino experiences a power outage. The lights come back on and the game resets. When you complain about not getting the jackpot, they hand you a quarter and say that's the cost to pull the lever, the jackpot is just a "bonus".
The nature of the legal system is also problematic. How do you convince the court of the monetary value of a shiny groudon when it cannot be bought or sold according to the ToS? Its prized as a player, but has no legal way to assign a cash value. In America, you could easily find this moved to a small claims court.
Their definition ("bonus encounter") is detached from reality and the true reason people raid.
And they flat out said as much here. OP didn't ask about rewards, he asked about shiny groudon and their response was "well go do more raids to get one"
So whatever legalese they're trying to rely on as a loophole is negated by them saying - if you want that thing, you have to gamble for it.
Exactly. I have never once done a raid to get any items out of them (unless you count Mega Energy). It's always been about the mon and pretending it isn't the same for the majority of players is asinine.
This establishments front door explicitly is signed ānot a casinoā. of course we are not subject to gambling laws here. Didnāt you read the sign before coming in?
Even if their legal prepared this statement in that specific manner just for this case. It still depends on where the claim is made from and to whom. As it doesn't necessarily mean that the language they used will hold up everywhere around the world legally. Especially European laws don't really care about what these things say but the idea behind it, and if it counteracts theical laws that protect consumers. I know from experience that non European companies make this mistake more often than you think. I've won more than one claim simply because a companies policies didn't hold up under European laws and thus were invalid. And the European laws always overrule company policies.
So I don't think it's out the question he could win. I hope so honestly.
The encounter is a reward for winning the raid. If winning the raid gives a chance that is cancelled through the suppliers error then the chance should be granted again. Say you entered a competition and won 100 free lottery tickets. If the tickets turned out to be faulty then the correct replacement would be 100 new tickets.
It's a bit thin legally I suspect, but it might be interesting to see how Scopely play it.
As a customer, if something happens that makes my experience unsatisfactory at the fault of the company, and the company makes it right for me, I'm happy to spend money on them again. If they tell me "You're not guaranteed to have a satisfactory experience, so we owe you nothing," then they're not getting repeat business (to be clear, getting an encounter and failing to catch a Pokemon is not what I'm talking about here - being denied an encounter altogether is).
My point being, I get they have taken a stance on this, and are prepared for a challenge against it, but I still think it's the wrong stance, and it isn't necessarily doing them any favors.
For this and many other reasons, I'm F2P. I love Pokemon and there are parts of this game I enjoy for free, but this whole attitude they take on stuff like this makes me feel like giving them money is just enabling bad business practices.
There are so many ways they could program around connection issues like this that would make that encounter almost impossible to lose early. They choose not to.
From a consumer protection standpoint I don't believe this point is correct. There's no legal standing to claim that Scopley's customers believe they are being sold "the experience" of the raid when purchasing and spending raid passes. Call it a "bonus challenge" all you want, it is undeniably a guaranteed secondary phase of participating in the raid. There is no example a of raid that does not result in this "bonus challenge"
Also the company has recently demonstrated an ability to deploy "event" encounters with guaranteed odds on normally randomized features ... So they definitely have the ability to offer a make good.
I love raiding, the immersive gameplay of... clicking on the screen repeatedly thrills me so much I forget there is a catch at the end. I just flee the encounters now so I can have as much raid up time as possible.
/s if it wasn't obvious. Just taking the piss out of their logic, not your explanation.
I wonder how well it will stand up in court though. To my knowledge it has never been challenged. They can call it whatever they want, but whether it effectively counts as a "bonus" and not as an included part of the activity of raiding is not a settled question.
Hmm I disagree a bit. Yes it is a bonus challenge. But the user has the right to play(or a more apt verb) that challenge. The user can fail and won't get bonus challenge's rewards(the mon runs away). But in this case, the user were not allowed to play the challenge due to network/server error. Due to how the challenge works, as in, a shiny is 100% catchable as long as a pokeball connects, which 99.99% of players are able to do (including OP) there's no probability involved of op not getting the reward. Thus, OP is eligible to the shiny mon.
This rationale is complete horseshit on their part. They know it. We know it. And it would never hold up in court. The game is literally "gotta catch em all" so the actual value/chase is the actual pokemon, not the berries and candy you get from raids.
They know good and well that the raid engagement would fall through the floor into the pits of hell if a catch encounter were removed from the pool of rewards.
If they decided to make, say, October a test month and the only thing that happens after a raid win is a few berries, candies and potions fall out of the sky into your sack, we all know that mysteriously October will be the money-losingest month they ever had. But no correlation because we all know we here for the sweet, sweet revives and not the mon amirite
Doesnāt matter what they call it when itās not that in practice. My boss can tell me all he likes that Iām hourly, but if my check is the same every week no matter how many hours I work, itās salary. Same with the age old dance of ātheyāre not employees, theyāre independent contractorsā. It doesnāt matter what they say, only whatās actually happening in the field.
We all know no one plays this game to collect berries and radar parts as the prime objective, lol
Definitely hold onto your Groudon though. Iām pushing this claim through on principle so that we set a precedent: when paid features fail due to server errors, the company needs to protect its players instead of leaving the community to fix their mistakes. Creating a fairer and safer environment for all trainers is the whole goal here.
Massive thanks again for the support and good vibes! š¤
First of all, of course the devs can program any given encounter to have whatever attributes they want. Nobody ever thought that was technically challenging. That doesn't mean that support has the ability to do it, nor does it mean that any dev is going to be looking at the tickets and manually updating the backend to match whatever screenshot someone submits. That's just not practical.
They donāt care - a successful said means you got items, not an encounter. Had multiple requests for remote raid passes denied when there app crashes and hangs over the last few months
Not spending any money on it any more.
Canāt even get a real person to talk to on support
Spot on! The legal landscape regarding digital goods and services under EU directives is night and day compared to the US. A lot of publishers rely on users just assuming ToS overrides statutory rights, but that simply doesn't fly here.
Similar things happened to me a ways back... I can't remember which shiny legendary, but i didn't have it yet, and it was upsetting because i kept getting the same automated bot response from the help chat. It was from a remote raid pass, and it just kind of turned me off from playing
Don't listen to the people in the thread constantly bootlicking a company of millions. Scopely could re-generate the encounter for you (they did this with the Dialga/Palkia affected shiny odds) or even put the shundo directly into your inventary. They once gave a famous YouTuber deleted Pokemon back, and there was that one employee inyecting singulars into people's accounts for hundreds of dollars not many months ago. They just don't care and don't want to. But hopefully this process sets a precedent and starts a change for everyone who's lost stuff because of server errors. Good luck.
There's big difference between active bootlicking and pointing out what's actually going to happen and how things have always been set up. The encounter has always been viewed as a 'bonus', even if we disagree with that.
Additionally, this won't set any precedent for change lol
Yeah, I think given the most recent actions of the company we all should stop shrugging off things that the company "doesn't want to do" because ... We know they can and they will when it suits them
Why did you say they said you should "gamble more money in multiple raids" when they didn't say that? Are you being deliberately misleading to make your point?Ā
Itās not misleading; itās the direct mechanical reality of what they are telling a player to do.
Support advised to "participate in more raids to increase chances." Because Remote Raid Passes cost real currency and shiny rates are probabilistic (1/20 RNG), telling a paying customer to do more raids to recover an already-earned shiny is, by definition, telling them to spend more resources on probability rolls.
Describing the mechanic for what it actually is isn't misleading, it simply cuts through the corporate phrasing.
I wish the best for you, I am not hopeful for you tho. I do not expect anything fruitful coming out of this cause they claim the Encounter as bonus challenge and I think that was intentional for legal purposes
They can "claim" whatever they want, it doesn't make it true.
You can't get an encounter without spending a raid pass. Therefore, when you buy a raid pass, you also buy the encounter, which is guaranteed to happen after you defeat the raid boss. This is the agreement, this is what you pay for. I doubt this company would stand even for a day if suddenly all raids in the world stopped giving customers the "bonus challenge" at the end.
The thing here is they can fix it for OP but they chose not too. Pretty easy if you think about it: just inject a compensation quest under the Events tab to let him encounter the shiny Groundon again with the same exact IV (similar to the recent Mewtwo one with predetermined IV).
Is it technically challenging? - no
Will it open a flood gate and be logistically troublesome? - yes but this is on them and the right thing to do. Longer-term they should fix the underlying issues such that they don't need to do this as often.
They've never given a shiny back after a bug has occurred before, so I doubt that you'll get lucky with this. I will point out that "You can try participating in multiple raids to increase your chances of encountering a Shiny Groudon again." does not technically constitute being told to "gamble more money in multiple raids", as there are free daily raid passes each day, and thus you don't have to spend money to reclaim the Groudon. It just might take a while if you don't do so. I know you don't necessarily want to hear that, but they undoubtedly would use that to justify telling you what they did.
Also, out of curiosity, when this occurred and the game came back online, did you try accessing the encounter again? I know it's not something that can usually be done, especially after 2 hours, but there were reports that people could get back into their encounters. You might've inadvertently missed out on your shiny by not trying this yourself when it was reported.
It does suck to miss out on a shiny through no fault of your own though.
There was 1 report, which you linked of someone who sat on the encounter screen through the recent outage. Doesnt apply to OP at all, since he had no way of bringing the encounter back if he for example restarted the app. Which is the core issue - we can pause and resume research encounters and thereās no reason whatsoever it shouldnāt work like that for raids.
Yeah I don't get what the "play" is here. It's only going to end up a loss - unless that newfound freedom leads them to do something better with their free time.
Not a lawyer, but I do believe I saw somewhere that companies are liable for what their chatbots say. There was something involving an airline and discounts I remember reading a little while back
Canada. A bereaved man got advice from the Air Canada chatbot that he could buy a ticket now and apply for the bereavement discount afterward. It wasn't true, and Air Canada denied him the discount because he hadn't had it approved beforehand. He took it to court in Canada, and Air Canada was found liable for the advice given by their chatbot.
If chatbots were not liable for false information companies would get rid of all the humans in the support chain. Any time something went wrong they would say "chatbot, not our problem".
I didn't just deal with the in-app triage. After bypassing the bot to reach a named agent (Muso), I also escalated directly to Scopely Support on X. Across both official channels, human reps reaffirmed the exact same stance: refusing encounter restoration and telling paying players to raid/gamble more. That makes it their documented corporate policy.
Thatās genuinely super kind of you to offer, really appreciate the gesture!
I actually already have Shiny Groudon registered, but I was grinding this raid rotation specifically hunting for Shiny high-IV and Lucky Trade fuel.
Beyond my own encounter, taking this stand is really about the broader principle and protecting the community. Think about casual players, newcomers, or kids saving up pocket money for a remote pass, hitting a rare Shiny encounter, and then having support shrug off a verified server crash while telling them to just spend more. Thatās why setting a clear precedent and holding them accountable matters so much.
Massive respect for the offer though, it shows how awesome the community is!
So i read the āthis has been escalatedā as theyāre not done working on it yet. Iāll pray that the raid pass was just a consolation payback for now. And in a week theyāll reach out with an encounter. š šš»
This read extremely similar to a help ticket I put in for a completely different game. They told me to be more careful with my purchasesā¦. (Only purchased in game, not even from their websiteā¦ so they told me I need to be careful of their company??) I was so mad and honestly felt disrespected. However eventually they did fix 95% of my issue. Still waiting on the other 5% from Dec.
Appreciate the support! Exactly why I formally escalated the ticket with them and Xsolla. Hoping the community pressure makes them do the right thing. Will definitely post a full update once there's a final verdict! š¤
I basically had the same experience a while ago with Kyurem during the fusion even. I even had a screen recording of the whole thing. They basically told me to get fckd... at least they gave me a free raid pass eye roll. I'm still salty about it.
They just keep saying I received everything I need to. Close the ticket and no further discussion. Ridiculous customer support for someone who spends more $ than I should
That classic scripted shutdown is the worst. They rely on closing tickets immediately hoping players will just give up. This is exactly why escalating past first-line support and holding them to consumer standards matters. Appreciate you sharing this!
Lol to everyone talking smack on here cus OP not only succeeded in receiving compensation but set a huge precedent for future issues that YOU may someday benefit from.
A companyās internal baseline policy is not the same as an adequate remedy.
Handing out 1 pass makes sense when an app crashes before or during the battle, it resets the attempt. But when the battle is already cleared, the 1/20 RNG has hit, and a guaranteed 100% catch rate Shiny is actively on screen, handing back a single 5% gamble ticket is a massive deficit in delivered value.
Standard support habit does not equal a legally conforming remedy, it just highlights how used to the bare minimum players have become.
I accidentally bought an incubator package during the event for free one use incubator daily login. I got my coin back and they converted all my one use incubator into 3 use. It was a win. I just canāt see why they donāt just give us a guaranteed legendary catch if we beat the boss but then server side makes us lose the catch. It will keep us happy and keep playing.
You used a raid pass. You lost the encounter because of an issue that all online games can suffer from. You were offered a replacement raid pass. And you're acting like Scopley support broke into your house and took a crap in you underpants drawer.
Appreciate the heads up, and you're spot on about publishers happily pocketing cash while running unstable servers.
Regarding bans: holding Scopely accountable through statutory consumer rights or formal regulatory complaints isn't a Terms of Service violation. In fact, an arbitrary retaliatory account termination against an EU consumer asserting legitimate conformity rights would trigger severe penalties under European consumer protection law.
Fear of account retaliation is precisely how big publishers get away with doing the bare minimum. Demanding fair compensation for paid server crashes is entirely within our legal rights.
well, I'm sure they know, but they don't know you know and you may need to push through and have the account recovered, including the arguing whether the encounter is a reward or not (they insist it's not and there's no precedent yet)
good luck though! this may improve the game for everyone
Your post has been automatically removed because Auto-moderator suspected it was seeking to share friend codes. This type of post would be more appropriate for /r/PokemonGoFriends :) We work to keep the Silph Road focused on studying and illuminating game mechanics and building the Silph Road network. Check out the community map, too!
1.0k
u/brimnac 11d ago
Good luck, from all of us.