Yep. I'll join your whine fest: I'm level 30 and have pretty much stopped playing gyms. It's not fun, most of my attackers(which, like everyone, I spent a lot of time,stardust,candy to level up) are useless. I mean, why bother using my best pokemon to take down a gym when the XP gains are miniscule? I take down a gym faster with low CP transfer fodder and get more personal XP to boot.
Also, prestiging a gym is now pointless and just....not fun. Total waste of time and revives/potions. In fact I usually don't bother putting a good defender in anymore either because even a perfectly stacked level 9 or 10 gym can be taken down by any level 15 trainer with 6 eevee evolutions.
Our group has all but disbanded-and we used to get together at least 3 nights a week to sweep our town's 10 or so gyms. It took effort and coordination and it was fun. Now? Meh. We're looking at a field of level 4 gyms that don't even require 2 players to dismantle.
I do understand that there was gym stagnation, we had it in our town but a lot of the fun was being vigilantes-for lack of a better word- and toppling those level 10 gyms full of 3000 cp dragonite. We HAD to meet up and play as a group or that gym wasn't falling lol.
The game is just boring now. Who cares that there are more spawns? We're penalized for using high CP mons to attack or prestige gyms and even the best defenders are stupidly easy to beat by pretty much any trainer who happens by. I don't need candy or stardust for leveling as leveling now equals no XP at gyms. My strategy is to find the lowest possible mon to attack with so I can get more XP. The problem with that is that they get killed and require more revives and potions. But because I can't hit stops from the car anymore I'm super low on supplies.
Sooooo yeah.
TL;DR
The game is super boring since the last 'update'. I seldom play.
Does anyone find the game nearly unplayable anymore?
With now pokestops almost always yielding 3 items (4 if you are lucky), it is nearly impossible to accumulate pokeballs. Sure, there are around 6 Pokémon crowded around every stop now, but you don't get enough balls to catch them, and if you even catch one or two, you are right back where you started. I can only think the clamp on pokeballs and large increase of diverse spawns was to nearly force people to buy pokeballs. It doesn't hugely impact me at level 31 as I don't need or desire to catch everything, but for my level 25 son, he has no reason to even turn on the game in our neighborhood. Unless you are hunting around a large amount of pokestops, any balls you managed to acquire are gone within minutes.
And the gym scene now... ugh... talk about complete apathy! Anything higher than a level 3 gym is rare as no one is inspired to level them up. My son and I used to go every Saturday to take down as many high towers as we could, it was fun and challenging (well as challenging as it was) usually 2 or 3 before he would run out of consumables, resulting in a couple hours of gameplay, now it's just plow through every level 3 gym in town at about 4 minutes a piece, "gee that was fun dad!".
I really hate to be overly pessimistic, I've enjoyed the game, spent a lot of time and effort to advance, so really don't want to stop playing, but they have pretty much sucked the last bit of life out of it, at least for me and my family.
Answers
I live across the street from a pokestop and can usually spin it from my living room. Even I can't keep up with enough pokeballs as I'm running low on all balls. I used to keep on average about 80-100 of each type of ball and was pretty successful doing that (even before the event that gave double at pokestops).
Now it is impossible as I struggle just to have enough balls to catch some regular pokemon. Yes it is nice that there are more pokemon spawns but I'm also finding they jump out of balls a lot more frequently. Even crappy 136cp pidgeys are now jumping out of great-toss curve balls. I think I had to use 4-5 balls on a crappy pidgey. That is 2-3 pokestops of balls for 1 pidgey!
Same thing happened this morning on a 71cp Venonat. It jumped out of a great-toss curveball.
Something has to change. I don't even bother catching rats or even pikachu now unless the CP is out the roof as I know they will jump out of the pokeball and have to use 4-5 balls.
I think everyone got spoiled when they had the double item drops. It was insanely easy to fill up your item bag when minimum was 6 drops. The increased spawns did allow us to catch more, but I think that is a good thing honestly. I can catch 10 near my house now in a small loop and use up 100 items if I did that a few times...Just more grinding to get the balls back since they probably drop the same number of items. If you are not in a rural area, it'll just take a few loops to get all the pokeballs back since balls drop the most.
As for the gyms, I think people who never liked to see rival team lvl 10 gyms are making a special effort currently to keep they knocked down constantly...It is a bit easier and less grindy for sure.
Remember, even before, all you needed was 1 person of decent level (say, 25+) and no gym can be left standing...Defending is harder so that probably has some to do with it, but without people willing to build up to 10 again, it's pretty quick to take down most gyms since being a lvl 10 itself was the biggest deterrent (time). I doubt lvl 7+ gyms are being brought down by lvl 15s since they simply don't have that many mons to do it.
It'll take more coordination (need more people (like 9)) to bring a gym to level 10 and be strong quickly to hope others walk pass.
Looking at the prestige numbers and the bonus 2k for dropping a mon, it shouldn't be very hard to get to level 7 quickly IMO. Ultimately, you get 3 free spots when you take a gym. Prestige 2k (4 battles), get 4 spots now, it's still only another 2k for each additional spot...
The problem comes at lvl 7. The 8k to 30k (lvl 8 gym) is where people have to now fight 16 battles (vs 8). Much easier in a group still and still done I've seen, but have to be pretty dedicated folks willing to rebuild if someone were to attack it (especially with the recent double item drops).
In my area it's not so much people are trying to keep them knocked down, it seems more that people don't see any reason to level them up or knock them down. I think I've leveled up maybe two friendly gyms since the update, and generally just stick a mon in a friendly gym I pass by with open spaces or spend the 5 minutes it takes to knock down an opposition one. There really is no challenge and gyms can now hardly even be considered "gameplay", it was even borderline before.
As for the pokestop yield, it has most certainly been decreased, I have not received more than 4 items (other than first stop of day, 10th, or day 7 rewards), and almost always just 3. People may not be feeling the effects of this as they packed their bags during the event, but I assure you they will! Unfortunately, I was going to take my son to stock ours on the last Friday night of the event, but it ended earlier than anticipated, so we felt the brunt right out of the gate.
Does anyone find the game nearly unplayable
anymore?With now pokestops almost always yielding
3 items (4 if you are lucky), it is nearly
impossible to accumulate pokeballs. Sure,
there are around 6 Pokémon crowded around
every stop now, but you don't get enough balls
to catch them, and if you even catch one or
two, you are right back where you started.
Does anyone find the game of life unplayable anymore?
With my job almost always yielding 20.000$ per month, it is nearly impossible to accumulate some money. Sure, there are stores around, with loads of different goods, but you don't get enough money to by them all.
Any advice?
You should think about it a little differently. Now there are too pokemons, and you are not happy with that.... Am I right? How to balance the pokemon and the pokeballs optimally? There is no way, as the players are different. There will exist always such complain, either over the balls or over the mons......
PS. My balls run out too.... to be honest, also a little bit "unhappy".
Now please don't catch them all, but only what is good for you.... :)
That's true. For this reason, as I said, there is few balls left in my bag. But the good thing is that, when I am driving the car, there is much less chance to make a mistake. At last I am agree with this change.
By the way, not all the change is what I want. There is less motivation to build up a gym for example.
The game want you to go around... and pick up some balls... :)
I had a huge stack of Pokeballs in my 1000 item bag when the double stop/spawn ended, a lot of the red ones are gone now. Although the fact that stops barely give anything above 3 is a problem, it's not what pisses me off. Niantic played with the spawn points and pretty much ruined all of our beaches by replacing belsprout, Oddish, Machop, Clefairy and almost any other Pokemon with Magnemite and Voltorb. These pests account for almost all of the spawns now, and the rest are common water types (with the occasional Dratini or Squirtle). The player population there pretty much died out because of this and now I have nowhere to find those said Pokemon anymore.
