ya raids are busted. Before the dlc came out I was having no problems getting in but with the influx of players because of the dlc it has become nearly impossible to get in.

Interesting, I found it to be the opposite for me. It's incredibly tedious for me in Shield, but in Violet since I can send my pokemon out with R and just keep attacking wild pokemon without entering battle, it made grinding a lot easier for me. As a bonus, you get to farm pokemon materials for TMs.

I will say that raiding in Violet got worse after the DLC came out. There was definitely too many people hosting 1-3 star raids when they're easy to do solo, but I admit I was definitely one of those people too when I first started playing.

Raids in SwSh are a joke so it's definitely a lot easier to get candies to level Pokémon there. 4 and 5 star raids in SV are challenging to where you're not guaranteed to beat it, meanwhile.

Of course, not every Pokémon is in SwSh, there are notable holes, so there's still merit to grinding SV raids. The problem is you are expected to have trained your Pokémon in terms of EVs... and the multiplayer has a lot of technical and design problems on top of that.

I've done enpugh raids in SV that I can 1 to 100 any pokemon on an instant thanks to all the exp candies I have. High level raids drop them a lot, and some events can get you up to 999 Large candies.

@nocturne213@lemm.ee Maybe try again (at least until you can refresh)? The game doesn't try to connect to the exact same raid, just one with the same Pokémon, tera-type and number of stars.

But yeah, the board doesn't work well, it's generally more convenient to do the ones in your save (you shouldn't have raids lower than 3 stars if you completed the game though)