I am pretty bummed about the new update.
When the game first came out I gave up on gyms pretty quickly because they traded teams so often and it seemed pointless to take them if you couldn't keep them.
A month ago I realized it was actually possible to get in a gym and hold it for a few days or even a week. It made the game so much fun again. I had something to work towards. I could help build up gyms and actually collect more than 10 coins per day.
I agree with them making gyms easier to take down. The reason I never took down level 10 gyms was because it took too long. It was easily an hour
to lower them down all the way. So making more prestige lost per Pokemon is great. Gyms will turnover more often and there will be competition again.
However, making it twice as slow to gain prestige in your own gyms is a terrible idea. It will make the process much more tedious, and with the increased turnover, much less beneficial. I feel like the game will go right back to the beginning when I didn't think attacking gyms is worth it.
Not only that, but the issues they are trying to fix are going to get worse. I never have considered using bubblestrat because I had fun powering up a gym with my own pokemon. Now that it is even harder to power up a gym bubblestrat becomes more attractive because it is the most efficient way to level up a gym.
Am I the only one who thinks they swung the pendulum too far the other way?
There are too many stagnant gyms that don't change for over a month. It needed a change.
I was hoping gyms would be harder to take down and almost impossible to get to level 10. It should be like "Damn! There's a level 10 gym!" Not just expect them all to be level 10 like it is now.
Bubblestrats should be killed and 10 gyms should be rare and next to impossible to take down. At least niantic is trying..some.
I agree it went too far.
I also agree with red that the gyms were stagnant. I think the attacking buff was enough though. Training up 8000 prestige to add a pokemon took long enough the way it was. 12-14 battles with lower level pokemon... it was tedious. I'd rather negate the nerf and buff (i.e. back to only 1 pokemon, but old values). Doubling the time needed to train (and the resources) just really makes it a tough thing to do - especially now that taking down gyms is twice as fast (especially higher level gyms where you may not have gotten the full clear, since the bonus matters a lot less).
I really thought the current system was temporary. It's incredibly basic and encourages people not to use variety. I thought it would be replaced by something completely different. I guess it's here to stay.
Maybe we will get bags to sort our Pokemon someday to make prestiging a little easier at least..
Totally agree.
Maybe I'm fine with easier attacking.
But I really hope they restore the old prestige training system.
The combination is just terrible.
I mean, this was the most fun part for me: spotting a worthwile own gym and working myself into it in a reasonable amount of time. And it was rewarding in the sense that there was a chance to remain there for some days.
In winter, I for sure won't stand there for 30 minutes or longer to make 8000 exp under the new system. Especially when it won't last.
In the end all gyms will be max. level 3, switching teams several times a day.
I agree it is a terrible change.
Making it easier to take down a gym is one thing, but making it so hard to boost one up was a terrible idea. It isn't worth the effort, especially for those last 2 slots.
Defenders were already pretty pointless. It doesn't matter how good of a defender you have, it can be taken down. And now it is just that much easier.
Kind of pointless now to spend time trying to get the best defenders possible when they really have no real impact on gym defense other than to make the attacker spend an extra minute or two.
I hate most of this update. The pokestop change makes it impossible for kids to play Pokeomongo from a car. I live with an 11 year old and a 6 year old and they would always play with their parent's phones when they were commuting. Now they can't play at all. They were already struggling to have enough poke balls, but now they will have no poke balls at all as they can't hit any poke stops.
Sad.
The pokestop change is awesome. The whole point of the game was to get people out and moving. Sitting idly in a car and spinning pokestops defeats that purpose. Perhaps the kids should be taken to parks, or any large public gathering place where they are lots of pokestops, so they can actually walk and collect supplies while being "active"? With the 25 mph speed limit, bikes should be ok as well.
You obviously don't have kids or don't know what a kid's life is like at this point. First of all kids don't have their own phones, so they have to use their parent's phones when their parents aren't using them (i.e. when their parents are driving the car). Kids have to do homework. They aren't allowed to go to parks unsupervised which means they can't just be taken to parks as you say as parents have to make dinner, do dishes, wash clothes, go grocery shopping, help their kids with homework. Most of the kids time to play was in the car on their way to school, running errands, etc. Kids don't have unlimited time. They can't go out at night. They aren't in control of their time. But almost all of them spend time in cars with their parents. That was when they got to play mostly.
The change is stupid. I'm an adult and I can't walk to any pokestops. There are 2 in walking range of me, like the edge, where I'd have to walk on narrow roads, with fast cars, no sidewalks, and winter is about to hit so the roads will be narrower from snow, it'll be colder out, and drivers will have slippery roads. I don't want to try to go into town, find a place to park, pay for parking, and walk around in the cold of some crappy city just so I can get my pokeballs. This change is only viable if you live in anew urban environment, if you live rural, then it sucks to be you.
And to counter your statement, the game was meant to be fun, if I can't have fun playing it, then I don't give a shit if it's making me active, I'll stop.
Taking off more prestige while attacking is fine, but we should have to work for it at least. I thought for a while that attacking enemy gyms should follow a similar prestige scaling as team training with lower CP pokemon and the full clear bonus should be tiered a little.
Under this system, to get the full bonus, attacking players need to either use pokemon at half CP, or fight with a team and use just a little lower.
Well I first had this idea when we only got a straight -500 per pokemon, so at that point it would have been all a bonus for using lower CP. You wouldn't get less than 500 prestige like when training with a higher CP. And against gyms filled with just very high CP pokemon, especially Dragonites, most players would then get at least a little bit of an extra bonus.
Being locked out of most/all gyms in my area (min 2200-2400 here), I like the change, and so far, all the gyms are still lvl 7-10 so not much has changed yet.
Generally, I think for folks who were lvl 27+ and in a lot of gyms, this will be a negative for them. For others, who are happy to just get 1-3 coins a day, this is a plus probably since they can actually do a few battles vs. passing.
I really feel they need to just bring back the 1 trainer mon type so unskilled players stuck with trying to prestige against a 2300+ Snorlax won't be able to...
Another thing people have to consider is after putting 10 mons in a gym, there was actually a "free" 20k in prestige off the bat so only 30k had to be "earned".
Also, as someone who dodges all the time, it's not hard to get 1000 prestige each fight in training, but on attacking, you only get 500 prestige per win prior which made taking gyms down actually harder if you don't have high lvl mons...and took way too long/resource intensive.
Give it a week and see if everything sits at lvl 3, but from where I sit, I still see multiple level 10s with no one attacking them.
TrainerTips last video just took down a lvl 9 and it took close to an hour still so it's not twice as fast or as quick as 30 minutes. Maybe someone can do it quicker and share a vid...
I tried to K.O a level 10 gym yesterday and I think 30' is totally possible but not always as that easy. In some first rounds you can gain 8000-9000 prestiges (my best is -9000) after beating 6-7 def mons by your 6 attacking mons so it will be likely: 52000 -> 43000 -> 34000 -> 22000 ->14000 -> 7000 -> 3000 -> 0 or ~ 7-8 rounds in 30' including selecting attacking team, battling, reviving and repeat.
I will try to K.O another one now and will update this post soon.
I don't like it, training friendly gyms is by far the most tedious thing to do in the game. There's no xp in it, it still took a fair amount of time even after the 6 Pokémon update. You could still take down a level 5 opponent gym faster than you could level up a friendly. It's certainly in their best interest to make pokecoins harder to come by in game... I really didn't see what the problem was, soloing a level 10 gym to the ground wasn't that hard to begin with, was just a matter of time, and it was still less than the combined time people spent getting it to 10, even if bubbling.
The problem is that, although the time to take down a level ten gym was probably shorter than the time to put one up, the rewards for doing it were usually far, far less. To train up a gym of your team would take less time and resources than taking down another team's gym, and you have a more stable gym afterwards. If you took down an opponents' gym and place your Pokemon in, you have an unstable gym and little rewards for your efforts. Therefore, all the gyms leveled up and people stopped bothering to take them down.
I suppose the good thing is that lvl 10 gyms should probably actually "be" rare. The change probably doesn't fix the overall problem with how gyms work to begin with, but seeing a level 10 gym everywhere was pretty stupid IMO.
Maybe it's my area and a total lack of dedicated players (at least 1 from each team), but the high level gym I can see from my house is still high level now and no one is attacking it. We do have 1 completely hard-core player who seems to play all day and prestige his gyms back to 10 and this change makes it harder for him to do that, but I think that's due to lack of skill (he doesn't seem to dodge so ends up using high lvl mons and would only get 100-200 prestige now)...
I'll probably go and tear the whole gym down later today and see how high it gets built up if at all...
The problem was also rewards for taking down lvl 10 gyms were pathetic compared to to raising it up. As mentioned by someone else, the rewards for prestiging an established "strong" gym to level 10 was probably the best they can offer in the game (coins=real money even though it was only 10 cents)...
Taking it down left you 1 spot and in 10 minutes, you'd lose the gym anyways so you wasted an hour and a half, 20-40 less potions/revives and nothing to show for it.
