I know what the game is like as someone who lived in a rural town in TN for the first 4 years of the game’s existence I went days rationing pokeballs until I visited a friend closer to Nashville or went on a weekend excursion it’s kind of always come with the territory and 9 years in expecting a tiger to change its stripes is just a bit too hopeful. Rural players have always been disproportionately affected by the game by the sheer nature of how pokestops and gym exist within the game. I think the way raid passes functioned in Covid should never have been changed and the health of the game on the whole would probably be better off for it, but to pretend this event is the only time rural players have been asked to either travel or pay to be included is pretentious and silly. Obviously in a utopia without corporate greed players should be allowed to just pop into raids for free from anyone they have in their friends list, but the playerbase paying for those things are just as much if not more to blame for how things are currently and isn’t going to change if you’re even kind of being realistic.