g-max event raids should be like catch rate 20, yeah?
so I think it's probably more people noting their bad luck more than their good
Normally I would agree that this is the most likely case, and while still within the realm of possibility, after the ease with which I was catching G-max Pikachu and Eevee, and given that I don't see any similar complaints on Serebii's Twitter for Eevee at least, I suspect something is amiss with Meowth. Even in multiplayer raids I had a very high success rate with repeat balls, and have ~10+ G-max Pikachu & Eevee each, including 2 shinies each*. Out of all the raids I did maybe only a couple ran using repeat balls? In contrast, I have gone at least 7 online Meowth in a row in which repeat balls have failed. The only successful catch I have had is with a dusk ball. All of those Meowth raids have been online. I've seen the hypothesis floated that repeat balls are not getting the 3.5 multiplier for G-max Meowth, and while it bears more testing I am starting to suspect that may be true.
Since most of my first set of raids were online, which supposedly gives abysmal catch rates, I decided to test the offline rates a bit. I just beat the same 5* Meowth offline 8 times in a row. On the first 4 attempts I used repeat balls and caught it 0 times. On the next 4 attempts I used dusk balls and caught it 3 times (nighttime in game).
While I suspect this is too small of a sample to be statistically significant, if I run into any shiny G-max Meowth I will be using a dusk ball or ultra ball instead of a repeat ball to be safe...
*This alone makes me question whether G-max Pikachu and Eevee have catch rate 3 in online raids, or at least whether we have an accurate catch rate formula for max raids. Based on a gen 7 catch rate calculator, a catch rate 3 mon at level 60 supposedly gives a 9% chance to be caught by a repeat ball when registered in pokedex (3 level 60s, 1 level 40, same 9% chance apparently). At a 9% success chance, 4 successes out of 4 is a 0.006561% chance. That's about a 1/15000 chance. This doesn't count all of the other G-maxes I successfully caught from online raids, since I didn't keep track of which were online or not, nor how many I battled in total. Is there something I'm misunderstanding about how the catch rates work?