There is not actually a Stardust Drought
This was going to be a response to a prior post, but it got too long.
Facts about the "Stardust Drought"
The only thing that changed was stardust stopped coming from gyms. Many players (myself included) never got more than 1000 a day from gyms. At most you got 5000, and I frequently got 0 (minority team problems) The reason that you (and I) have no stardust is that we finally have good things to spend dust on. Everyone is building diverse teams of attackers. before the rework, you built up a few defenders (Dragonite, Blissey, Snorlax, Tyranitar, etc.) and a few counters (Dragonite, Tyranitar, Machamp, etc.). Now you need good counters (and multiples) for every raid boss so that you can not only defeat them, but also get the damage bonus at the end. Prior to raids, was there any need to have 5 maxed out Golems? What about 5 super-psychics? Did you need a forest of Exeggutors at level 30+? Now we want all of those things. Everyone is reaching higher levels and hitting higher power up costs.These are the facts. To everyone who wants Niantic to gift us some stardust, you sound whiny and entitled. Go out and catch some more mons if you want to power things up. It's been this way since the beginning.
TL;DR The only reason there seems like there's a dust drought is because we are taking a wider variety of mons to higher levels than we were 2+ months ago. Quit complaining and catch some pidgeys!
Answers
They also reduced the number of coins from gyms, which in turn reduces the number of incubators you can purchase per day which in turn reduces the amount of stardust you can collect.
Which if you think about it is about a 10km egg per day not hatched. Between the gym dust gone and the incubator cost increase, thats over 7000 stardust a day, or 70 more catches.
Just because YOU weren't getting the gym bonus doesn't mean things didn't change for others.
Well it's a very "I've got mine" mentality. My guess is that for most people getting the gym bonus it was probably because of low traffic to the gym. Where as people blowing off the gym bonus probably had much higher traffic to their local spots.
So in cities, where a 1KM walk will bring you past 7 or so pokestops and 20+ spawn points it is easier to not run out or resources. In other areas, a 1KM walk might net you 1 pokestop and a couple spawn points. In these areas, the spawns haven't increased to offset the loss from higher gym rewards.
To paragraph one, yes very much so. Many players experienced very different dust gains before the change. Now that you cannot collect dust for just sitting in a gym everyone is poorer for dust but some never had that source to lose.
Low population players always had it rough. The lack of dust from gyms after the change took away the only advantage they had over more active places.
I have an easier access to balls, with some extra spinning spots being gold gyms. I can drive 1.5 mile roundtrip and hit 4 gyms and 6 regular pokestops. I went a long time not getting a lot of dust from gyms. I wasn't using the internet to learn about how to maximize prestiging. Finally, 2500 to 5000 from mid-March to June. I don't power things past level 30 anymore, probably still wouldn't with more dust
Good point about the incubators. That could a whole other point on my original post:
We are spending our coins on raid passes instead of incubators.
My bigger point is that the majority of players didn't receive the max gym bonus, and even if you did, 5000 dust is not that much. Also, I've been very active in the gym scene, but my town only had 4 gyms prior to the rework and I usually collected on 2 of those per day at most. Rarely 4, and 0 wasn't uncommon. Now I'm getting 50 coins a day because we have 9 gyms and team dynamics have shifted in my town. I feel like a king rolling in my coins!
I am in the same exact scenario as you, and i am agreeing with every single thing you're saying. These people think everyone collected the max coins and stardust every day..... You all are crazy. plus with the addition of remote feeding, you can now feed each pokemon i believe 10x at that stop. either 10 or 20 but if it is ten then lets do this. you get 200 stardust by feeding a single pokemon at a gym, multiple by 6 you're getting 1200 stardust per gym. I have fed a complete gym and if you now have 2 gyms.... pop in every 2 hours remotely and collect 2400 stardust..... i don't understand. People complained about too many Ninab berries.... Well use them..... you can get way more stardust through this method. Please let me know if anything i stated in this is wrong but i have not been stopped by feeding 2 complete gyms in a 10min period.....
I have not complained about dust on here or anything, but I think one simple change could really help to increase stardust without taking away the need to catch pokemon. Just make the amount of dust you get from catching a pokemon equal to the amount of xp you get from catching it. You just threw a curveball excellent throw on the first try and got 300xp? Now you also get 300 dust. I think that would leave the grind, but make more dust available to players and it seems like it would be a simple change.
Awwwww, the Blissey stackers can't collect 5K free dust a day from their stagnant gyms!!!!
There's no dust shortage. There's those who have made the game one dimensional because all they want to do is raids.
I've spent 1.1M in dust since raids started, and I have 1.26 M in my stash building toward 2M for Gen 3.
To elaborate on point 1: I'm Valor in a heavily Mystic area. Mystic had all the local gyms locked up tight. They were swimming in stardust, making their grip on the gyms even tighter by maxing out more/better defenders. Meanwhile, I was spending half an hour a day to tear down one level 10 gym, which got me 500 stardust (would have been better off catching 5 pokemon). If I tried for a second gym, frequently the first would turn blue again before I could turn the second one red. It was very much a system that promoted "rich get richer and poor get poorer" in unbalanced areas. So a lot of us didn't have an endless geyser of stardust to be shut off in the first place.
I understand that, the old reward system promoted stagnation. It sucked in many areas. However, they could have changed the reward system to promote greater turnover rather than scraping it completely.
The rewards could have been redistributed to say: 50% for attacking and 50% for defending. Even if you only got 50% of the reward, it wouldn't completely exclude you from from any bonus and it would dampen the "rich get richer" issue you mentioned.
The changes dis-proportionally affected some people more than others. Just because "you" weren't affected doesn't mean things haven't become much worse for others. While I agree that complaining about it without any proposed solutions won't change anything, it has to be known that an issue exists so that it can be addressed. There probably is a way to fix the issue that even people not affected by the issue can get behind. If we keep burying our heads in the sand we'll just have a different "rich get richer" situation.
Lowering standards does not necessarily = more stardust. Arguably, lower standards costs more dust (now that we've learned about breakpoints). My 82% Lv 32 Dragonite has a lower CP than my Lv 31 98% Dragonite for 12,000 less stardust and it'll hit breakpoints a much lower levels than the 82% version for addition savings.
For most mons I look for 89%+ Lv 30 mons and it saves dust AND gets me quality products too.
Actually for me, this drought creates some fun for me. I am level 38 now and since i don't need to be higher level to power up my mons, i am not that anxious to level up. So i create this daily challenge: power up two or three times per day. It adds some fun to my daily play like longer walking distance to hatch a egg, trying to find evolved pokemons to catch etc.
It isn't a drought...but there has been a massive shift.
The stardust to XP ratio has changed massively.
We now get a lot more XP without stardust, which results in people with higher levels gained later in the games existence, having far less stardust to power up mons.
XP is thrown at us, so people are getting to higher levels without the stardust rewards.
It isn't that there is a 'shortage', it is that we level a lot faster than we can collect dust.
For catching that pidgey you refer to, now can give over 200xp...but averages around 150ish (depending if you curve/great/first ball)
This action gives 100 stardust for possibly double that in XP. When the game started we got xp and dust at a near 1:1 ratio from catches.
We used to get dust without much XP - the gyms gave very little XP, but handed dust - so we could get the dust at lower levels.
Now players raid, get 10k XP, a mon that needs powering up - maybe even candy to help out - but no stardust.
We have more candidates than ever...and get dust at a greatly reduced rate compared to what we used to get.
Then we add the fact that people are spending money that was used for dust generating incubators, on raids that give us an upgrade candidate, and a decent XP drop - and it is clear which resource is the limiting factor.
I get the point you are trying to make, but OP you are very wrong when you say it 'has been this way since the beginning' - it hasn't at all
TL/DR The XP to dust ratio has been significantly modified over time.
The team I had at lvl30, is massively superior to the team any player can possibly have at lvl30 now.
Stardust strategy is the last thing in this game that separates the really good players from the very best players. I'm not saying i'm among the best (I use stardust on Jynx), but I completely disagree with the notion that Niantic should be giving us more stardust. Use it wisely or how you want to use it. It's like buying tons of crap with a credit card and asking (whining) for the government to bail you out. NO.
