How to invite more than 5 friends to a Pokemon GO raid

Pokemon GO trainers are generally limited to inviting five friends maximum when they wish to participate in a raid lobby. However, higher-tier raid bosses like those in Mega and Elite Raids may require players to invite even more trainers to defeat them quickly. There are plenty of third-party applications that can assist trainers to link up with each other and join raids. However, it appears that a recent Pokemon GO update may have added a new way to invite more friends.

A post via the game's Help Center indicates that trainers will now be able to invite multiple players after a cooldown as long as there is still time remaining on the raid lobby timer.

The Pokemon GO community group The Silph Road confirmed as much on Reddit, which should be great news for trainers.

Use Pokemon GO's updated mechanics to invite more than five players to raids

Pokemon GO's v265 update appears to have revamped the way raid invites operate (Image via Niantic)

After their first five friend invites, players can invite five additional friends when a 30-second cooldown has expired. Though some fans initially thought this was a bug in the raid invite system, it appears this change was intentional on Niantic's part since they mentioned the cooldown in their Help Center.

Pokemon GO Redditors at The Silph Road confirm the raid cooldown implementation (Image via Reddit)

At the Pokemon GO Help Center, a quote posted by The Silph Road's Redditors very much reflects the change that appeared to fly under the radar for many fans. As long as trainers are quick, they can invite batches of five friends every 30 seconds until the raid lobby timer expires.

To quote Niantic:

"Keep in mind that there is a limit to how many Trainers can join a Raid Battle remotely, and this limit applies to invited friends as well. While you can only invite up to 5 friends at a time, after a short cooldown period you can invite more friends to the same lobby if you’d like."

Here's how you can invite more than five friends in raids:

Join a public or private raid lobby using a standard raid pass or a Remote Raid Pass.
Select the invite friends option on the right side of the raid lobby screen.
Send an invite to five of your friends. Confirm your invites.
Keep an eye on the raid lobby timer and wait for 30 seconds to elapse.
After 30 seconds have passed, open the invite menu again and send more friend invites. This can be repeated as often or as long as there is still time left in the lobby.

In the past, players had to utilize a trick with raid lobbies where they exited and re-entered the lobbies to send more invites to friends. However, the implemented cooldown feature now allows players to send multiple sets of player invites in increments of five. This information should prove incredibly useful for gym raiders for the foreseeable future.

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