Why did players have to power up Pokemon for gym placement in the old system?
Sorry if this is a dumb question. I live in a very high turnover area even in the old system. Gyms rarely made it past level 5, most were level 3. The one and only time my Pokemon stayed in a gym for more than 21 hours, the gym was 30-40 km from my home, in a town with much lower player population. But even then, it only stayed for about 30 hours.
In areas with stagnant level 10 towers, why was powering up Pokemon for gym placement important? These are the 2 possible reasons I have thought of:
1: People attack the gym and kick out the first 1-3 Pokemon, often Blisseys, then decide that it's a waste of time and give up, or have something else to attend to and have to stop.
2: Placing their Pokemon above Blisseys and Snorlaxes gives them additional layers of protection, and more trouble for the attackers to reach them and defeat them as they have to go through the Blisseys first.
I have always thought it was the second reason. But a determined attacker will take down the entire gym, and it doesn't matter if their Pokemon are above or below the Blisseys, they will go down anyway. An attacker who doesn't want to waste time on the Blisseys won't kick out just the pokemon below the Blisseys and leave.
Answers
Shaving was a big problem in this system. People would find level 10 gyms in their own colour, use a second account to kick out 1 pokemon, and then train it back up to place a pokemon with their main account. So the higher your placement, the longer it would take before it was your turn to be shaved. The main reason people where doing this was because it would take a long time to take down a level 10 gym, and even if you did, you only had a level 1 gym which could be down within hours. But a level 10 gym could be yours for weeks or even months. And gyms in your own colour which where level 5-9 where very rare.
1) Shaving.
2) Shavers.
3) (Censored) players switching to secondary accounts to knock off the lower CP defenders to put their own Pokémon on the gym.
4) People getting bored after beating the same Defender 4 times and giving up.
5) The habit where players could knock off the lower CP Pokémon intentionally to benefit themselves or their friends in allowing them to place another Pokémon on the gym.
6) Shavers.
7) Shaving.
The new system is far worse.
A few simple tweaks would have helped the old system:
-require prestige on a level 10 to be taken down to 40,000 points instead of 49,000 to take out bottom guy.
-implement the “one of each type” rule that’s in place now.
-increase type advantage over STAB (like they did)
Also, training friendly gyms was nice because you didn’t have to look for enemy gyms to be able to take mons out on a test drive. You could set up battles against your own mons to try out different matchups.
And don’t even get me started on how coins are earned in the new system.
Ironically, I've seen a few level 7-8 Instinct gyms stay with many empty slots for hours (with only 1-2 Pokemon inside), and the slots stay empty for hours until the gym gets taken down. Everyone just saw a high level Instinct gym and left it alone, when in fact there was only 1 Snorlax in it, no other defenders!
I think you need to beat the snorlax many times to tear down a lvl 8 gym if it's the only Mon in it, still very time consuming and not easy. The weird thing it is more time consuming to build it up. So my guess it is done by some bot so people chose to leave it alone. You cannot defeat a bot, why wasting time tearing it down.
Not everyone could get passed all Blisseys.
I often trained a gym up again after attackers removed everything below my Blisseys...and then got stuck.
People trained up mons so they were not at the bottom (shavers) or to build a gym that would be a deterent.
Sometimes all you needed to do was make your gm stronger than the one next to it...so they would attack that one insread of yours.
