A representative from Niantic has explained why Pokemon Go‘s Raid Bosses sometime gain HP in the middle of battle. Players have long noticed that Raid Bosses will occasionally shrug off attacks and spontaneously regain HP. While this phenomenon is also present during Gym Battles, the HP jumps are a lot more problematic during Raid Bosses due to higher stakes involved.
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In a recent Reddit thread complaining about the HP gains, Niantic’s community liaison took some time to explain why this glitch occurs. ” When the app is unable to communicate with the game servers (due to network errors, poor cell coverage, etc), the client has a prediction algorithm that best attempts to guess what the server would send if it were able to communicate,” the representative wrote. “This system allows the battle to continue for a short period when you intermittently lose connection.”
When raid bosses “gain HP,” it’s actually because the algorithm incorrectly predicted how much HP the raid boss lost during the period of time where the game wasn’t connected to the server. Once the app reconnects to the server, it readjusts the HP, resulting in the gain in HP.
Although Niantic has identified the issue, there’s no immediate fix coming for this frustrating bug. “Unfortunately, it’s one of those things where it takes a lot of infrastructure work to resolve,” the representative wrote.
The same algorithm is also responsible for the “dodge bug,” the bug that causes players to temporarily take damage even though they’ve dodged an attack. The dodge bug is especially problematic during Raid Bosses as players can get caught in an infinite loop of fainting and unfainting without doing any other attacks.
Although there’s no solution coming soon, Pokemon Go has at least identified the problem. Maybe Niantic will eventually fix this frustrating bug, or at least tweak the algorithm to make it more accurate.
