Many in the Pokemon Go web community have speculated for a long time when Gen 3 will be dropping. I don’t usually like to publicly speculate on this sort of thing online but I think there is now enough evidence to reasonably anticipate that Gen 3 pokemon will be released at the next nest rotation on the night of the 18th/19th (I have included my reasoning for this estimate below the main content of this post) and as this may affect my previously posted raid schedule that I should address it.

There is a strong possibility that the introduction of Gen 3 will see a rotation of raid bosses to accommodate some new Gen 3 Pokemon this may also be the final week to get some of the current raid bosses. I am already leading a raid gathering on Monday and Wednesday evening for Tier 4 pokemon next week in South East London but if there is demand for more gatherings in case this is the final week I am open to running more gatherings either on Tuesday evening or during the day Mon-Wed either in Central London or South East for anyone wanting to get a few more of certain bosses before they go. If you are interested in my putting on further gatherings either in Central or SE next week please leave a comment below or PM me to say so. Even if you aren’t interested in any of these bosses it would be worth keeping in mind that once the GAME_MASTER file is updated for Gen 3 that some current Pokemon may lose access to certain moves so if you’re planning on TM’ing something you may be better using sooner than waiting and finding out the move you wanted has become legacy.

Reasons for Gen 3 estimate:

Exhibit A: At the start of the month the Pokemon Trainer Club newsletter referred to “catching new Pokémon to fill out our Pokédex” this month in time for a Halloween event. If we assume that the release of Gen 3 will coincide with a nest rotation so places will have some nests of Gen 3 pokemon then the next rotation on the 19th is the only nest rotation left to release Gen 3 for them to be in game in time for Halloween. https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-news/beware-pokemons-spooky-halloween-roundup/

Exhibit B: Yesterday Pokemon Go Hub reported that in a magazine interview in Taiwan, John Hanke confirms the next big content update will be the introduction of Gen 3 before the end of the year. https://pokemongohub.net/post/breaking-news/john-hanke-interview-gen-iii-coming-soon-new-battle-mode-planned-2018-new-social-features-development/

Exhibit C: The last two client-side update schedules. Both this week and last week Niantic have released an update very early in the week and then attempted to see whether they can have had all phones force updated by Thursday. I believe these were test runs to see how quickly they can release a new update and force it on all devices to test whether they can release the final update needed for gen 3 (with sound files etc) at the start of the week and have it installed on all phones in time for a nest rotation in the same week.