To the whiners whining about the whiners...
A lot of you are just silly. You completely miss the main point as to while people are complaining. You think it has to do with competition from casual players, but it has NOTHING to do with competition from casual players. You act as if this game was hard in the first place, and that my maxed out Tyranitar some how makes me better. Let me explain how easy this game is for any casual player...
My wife is very casual, she is level 25. I had 2 rules for her...1. Catch every Eevee, 2. Don't spend an Eevee candy.
I took the liberty of handling her Eevee situation, and after those last few events, this is the team I was able to build...
lvl 25 Vaporeon wg/hp
lvl 25 Vaporeon wg/at
lvl 25 Jolteon ts/tb
lvl 25 Flareon fs/ff
lvl 25 Espeon es/fs
lvl 25 Umbeon s/fp
Lvl 20 Tangela vw/SoB
3 1800-1900 cp Eggys (2 bs/SoB, 1 es/SeB)
2 level 25 Usarings c/cc
level 25 Rhydon ms/eq
1 level 20ish Arcanine b/c
1 level 20ish Houndoom ff/fp
2 level 20 Lapras (1 wild caugh, 1 egg hatch)
This team is little more than the Eevee name trick and casually catching pokemon during events. Most of these pokemon are not "wonders." I was soloing level 10 gyms with ease with this team. Think about it...this team has higher cp pokemon than your prestigers are, which had no problem taking out pokemon twice their cp. AND defender's cp is adjusted for your level.
This game was never hard. The only mildly difficult defender is Blissey, which was countered easily enough by the Usarings.
You think I am worried that this new system some how levels the playing field? It was level. The only real difference was the time people were willing to put in.
The issue I have is about ME. What am I working towards? What are the goals for ME? You think I need a ton of Tyranitars? For what? I could care less about the stupid things. What are you guys trying to accomplish now?
The last thing I am worried about is competition from players that were too stupid not to use the Eevee name trick or use 6 Vaporeons to blow through gyms. The issue is they made it more mindless than it already was...
Answers
Agreed, before now the game was not hard at all and was in a good state. Taking a gym down was rough to defeat a full gym and gaining max prestige depending how your lineup of mons were but even then if you were dedicated you would make it a goal to take that gym down by any means necessary and would get the job done. Not that it's any different now but now I have no motive battling multiple gyms to put mons in when all I have to do is put 1 or 2 mons in a gym to collect my 50 coins for the day. Niantic are at a crossroad right now, they can either keep going down this road or go down the right one only time will tell.
In a way, the update has helped to clarify some interim goals for me. When I started the game, my goal was to catch 81 specific mons (87 including six additional Unown variants).
Not having any clue how legendaries would be released, or how Unown would be made more common, I put my pre-update efforts into amassing gym coins (assuming they would come in handy somehow, someday) and that process involved thought-out gym finding, defender powering, territory defending, prestiging, etc. Of course, these goals were all derivative goals of my original one when I picked up the game. They turned out to be fun - especially the competitive game theory aspects of them - but now I figure I'll just sit on my coin pile and keep my original goals in mind as I wait for whatever happens next.
For now I'm betting that I'll want up to 6 rock-rock Golem, 6 ground-ground Rhydon, and 6 dark-dark Tyranitar to help me get most of the legendaries from raids (with some odd collection of 6 Exeggutor or Jolteon for Suicune).
So, getting those mons ready is my goal now. I'll probably keep taking over the gym on my standard dog walk route so that I can eventually get 3 bonus items from it regularly, but otherwise I'm not grinding or nest farming, I'm not powering anything up, I'm steering clear of gyms except to do one raid per day, and I'm not spending any coins unless I see a Tyranitar raid that looks promising... which might not happen for me until they implement some kind of in-game raid coordination tool.
