My simple way to improve the gym scene
Most common gym complaints:
1. They are stagnant, remaining unchanged for weeks at a time
2. There are the same 6 species in each gym around the world
I know that these are interrelated problems, but I have an interrelated solution. It wouldn't solve things perfectly, but it would be super easy for Niantic to implement and it would at least make a small difference. Here it is:
Implement a whole new set of Gym Battle medals. There would be a medal for each type like Electric Trainer, Water Trainer, Dragon Trainer, etc. Your goal would be to place a number of each type into gyms. You might need 50 or 100 for a gold medal in each type.
Now, to help prevent someone earning their "Water Trainer" medal by placing a Vaporeon in a gym day after day, there would also be another medal called something like Gym Diversity. To earn this medal, you would need to place something like 150-200 species of pokemon in gyms.
Now people would be encouraged (at least marginally) to place everything from Ekans to Onix in a gym in order to get their medals.
If these medals were put in place, would anyone be encouraged to go for them?
Answers
There would have to be an incentive to earning the medals. As the King said they barely benefit the player, only the catching medals have a slight influence on gameplay by increasing catching chances for those types.
There would need to be a gym boost or visible boon to gaining such medals for diversity to be introduced
First, my gym complains would rather be:
1- Dodging bug.
2- Lags, frezzes etc and all the consequences.
3- The two above combinated with the Time Up thing while fighting high CP Blisseys.
About your idea I don't find this incentive enough to change the current state of the gyms. An useless medal won't change my mind while deciding wich mons to leave on a gym.
I don't think people need "incentive" to add weaker pokemon to a gym. We need a change in gym mechanics so that more pokemon are good at defending and a change in gym placement so that people actually care about good defenders and not about the CP. Thats all the incentive players need, but it's not easy to achieve. It probably won't ever happen, but let's hope for the best
First, Niantic needs to stop the gps spoofers, the gym scanners, the multi-account shavers, and other cheaters.
Second, they could also limit the maximum number of gyms that a single account can be in at a given time. Maybe around 12 - 13. Since you can only collect on 10 a day, there is no reason to allow anyone to be in more than 10 plus a small insurance allotment.
Third, allow a maximum of 2 of any species of mon in a particular gym.
Fourth, (and this one will cause an uproar) each morning at 3 AM local time, in each time zone, have RNG clean house on 5% of the gyms in that time zone. The gyms are totally emptied and grey at 3:01AM.
Theres zero reason to limit pokemon by species in a Gym. Truth is some pokemon are simply stronger than others.
Heck theres 50+ species I don't even check the IVs on, I could have transfered dozens of perfect pokemon and not care in the least because the Pokemon is so bad.
Personally, Double the Reward on Gyms + Keep the Same Max. Then set the Max number of pokemon in gyms to *2 the amount you can collect. (So 10 in my scenerio)
This would free up lots of space. The double reward would also incentivize people to spend the 20 minutes knocking down a 10 tower, just to pop a pokemon in right before cash out.
I can't tell if limiting is the right answer, but a way to avoid "blissey towers" would be welcome. Not only pretty hard to beat if you're alone, but also boring as fuck...
For those that complain about lack of variation, I was thinking about giving each gym a tier. Like, GYM1 would only be allowed low tier mons, GYM2 would accept everything, and so on, making it similar to the competitive pokemon scene in the main games. Not sure how viable it is, though.
Also, I always keep the very high IV ones. You never know when Niantic will change something...
There needs to be some useful benefit from fighting beside the hope of collecting coins. I don't think medals are the way to go. It needs to be something along the lines of move refills, TMs, IV buffs, more exp, evolve items, legendaries, etc. That would encourage battle even if there is no hope of holding the gym long enough to collect coins.
