Gyms are live!

[ephemera]

Iiiiiiiiinteresting!

I like the new battle pre screen, and the animation of fights.

New battle scoring on the one hand slows things down (you eat away at the defenders will to fight rather than 1000 points per win) on the other hand I like how the "injured" pokemon gets weaker. Also having revive and health available inside the gym interface

Winning a gym = getting a badge, but just claiming a gym slot does not, and nor does spinning a gym picture, which is what the text suggests.

No sign of coins for having pokemon on a gym... <- artifacts of my posting about experiences in the first 30 mins or so of gyms being live.

How is everyone else getting on?

Comments

[jack]

Similar. As often, https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/ has some early experiences.

It sounds like, 1 coin per hour, which is probably effectively similar to the previous rate. But hard to get any reward from if pokemon are kicked out instantly, I hope the new mechanics lead to most gyms lasting a couple of days, rather than constantly churning, and then getting stuck at level 10 for weeks.

Other summaries:

* Sounds like all berries give you 20 stardust and chance of a candy.
* Being defeated drops defending pokemon cp by 20%. Not sure how it decays without fighting: I expect it to be exponential, dropping to half fairly quickly but taking forever to actually expire.
* Not sure about badges, I have... something, but I don't know if it's actually a badge or just showing me where my pokemon are.
* It took me five or six fights to defeat a single high cp rhydon with a vaporeon, but it got a lot easier after the first one or two, as I could defeat it before it used a special move.

Quite looking forward to playing with it. Collecting gym badges sounds interesting. And I really hope it translates into a steady trickle of coins rather than all or nothing. That's really hard to get right, but hopefully if the system works they can tweak it so the rewards are reasonable, rather than constantly overcorrecting.

It's a bit incidental, but I really like being able to spin gyms at all! I'm always really annoyed if I happen to have a gym, and can't get my daily reward, or can't farm it for a little while.

[jack]

And yeah, second gym, the one on the main road, captured by mystic almost immediately. And filled by a gang of six simultaneously.

Now I'm suspicious, I couldn't tell with the old gyms, but I didn't see anyone hanging about and they didn't take the other nearby gym; should I assume they were a bot? :(

And yes, looking again, it looks like the gym I defeated and placed first in, I got a bronze badge, and the other is still a white diamond. I'm not sure how this is going to work.

[evil_plotbunny]

I think the badges lagged behind the reopening of gyms. It took 5 spins for my first, but the others came immediately. Badges seem to have a bar underneath measuring something (possibly how long your pokemon has been in there), and the ones where you have a pokemon have a picture of pikachu. Tapping on it gives a spinning disk so there's more info there, that isn't loading.

Spinning in a friendly gym gives you xp.

I claimed the library gym immediately from my desk, the others in the area went to my team almost immediately so I haven't tried battling yet. i thought the red heart was for a gym you had a pokemon in, but it looks like it's gym claimed by your team.

I fully expect to lose all 4 gyms I have pokemon in over the weekend since I'll be away and it doesn't look like you can feed berries long distance (at least not yet).

[shirou]

I'm happy with the new gym system and am looking forward to raids, but I also have a couple gripes.

First, it will be hard to hold on to gyms for long, so 1 coin/hr is going to net me many fewer coins than the old system. Under the old system, I could take a few gyms in my neighborhood and collect, and it didn't matter if I got knocked out of all of them an hour later. Now that strategy isn't going to get me very far.

[edit: Now 1 coin per 10 minutes. Huge improvement!]

Second, after taking down a gym, the winner can put in a pokemon right away, but anybody else on the same team has to wait a few (ten?) minutes. That's annoying and discourages team play. My wife and I often play together, and now after taking down a gym, we'll have to sit there an extra ten minutes so we can both put our pokemon in the gym.

[catness]

Ok, there are good and bad things...

Good:

* more gyms and more Pokestops, as gyms double as Pokestops, and some old Pokestops double as gyms
* new use for berries + bag upgrades = never run out of bag space again!
* gym diversity, more viable defenders, no more Blissey towers
* taking down a gym gets easier per each round with the defenders' motivation drop, so it feels more rewarding
* using potions without leaving the gym is a nice touch
* collecting gym badges could be cool if you travel a lot
* gym badges provide useful stats (or at least, supposed to)
* feeding berries provides motivation for visiting your gyms frequently, so more physical activity :)
* new graphics = shiny!

Bad:

* earning coins is a lot more difficult and unpredictable; minimal income is not guaranteed anymore
* [edit] earning stardust is also harder and slower, not that powering up makes any sense anymore :(
* 3000+ CP defenders are severely nerfed: according to Reddit they lose 10% CP per hour, while <3000CP lose 1% CP per hour! (My poor Snorlax and Blissey...)
* taking down a gym requires more time - even with 1 defender, it's 4-5 rounds
* too hard to find a friendly gym with an empty space to place your Pokemon. (It hurts to see one of my fav. gyms full with no place for me, previously I would've had no problem to prestige it up, it never went above 8 anyway... Time to make friends with the other teams for mutual shaving? Nah)
* gym lag is horrible now :/ No death loop so far but the HP bar constantly jumps up and down, so I don't know where I stand anymore... or everything freezes for half-minute and then there's a network error! (at least it doesn't throw me out of the gym). Also, after switching to another attacker, it swaps to the previous one for a few seconds.
* collecting gym badges will get old really fast, especially if you don't travel a lot
* the only working stat on gym badges is the Pokemon health, the rest seems to be generated randomly. (Most of my "Time defended" shows 0, even though the 'mons are still there; and one shows 17340d 11h. lol)

Still no raids nearby :(

Well... let's see how it develops. Maybe Niantic will listen to complaints and implement a better way to handle the coins and CP, and optimize the servers. We can only hope.

[kirin]

Yeah, you get a gym badge for *any* first interaction with a new gym (attack, deploy, spin), they just weren't operational until a few hours after gyms went live. I'm pretty sure the bar below a gym badge is its "XP" to next badge level. Attacking a gym gets a lot of badge-XP, spinning and feeding berries give very small amounts. I think defending gives a decent amount but it's only tallied when the pokemon returns, and I didn't get any for a Pokemon I put on right after gyms opened probably due to roll-out issues. I'm sure it will all settle out soon.

My current concern is with Raids. They recently opened up to players Lv 31 and up, which includes me, but what worries me is Raid notifications. Apparently nearby raid notifications go out up to an hour or two before the raid starts, which is good since you don't have to drop everything immediately to go get it. But I've heard people say that "nearby" raids seem to only be actual in-sight from your current location, which really sucks if true. I have half a dozen gyms I can get to from my house reasonably quickly by walking/biking/driving, but zero are actually on-screen from home. So unless the notification range expands I'll basically never know raids are happening unless I get extremely lucky and stumble into one when I'm out walking anyway. :/

[ephemera]

I'm pretty sure the bar below a gym badge is its "XP" to next badge level. - that makes sense - I hadn't really registered the coloured border on some gym badges until you said that, but - sense, it is making.

I have a similar concern with Raids - there are a couple of gyms I can see from work, but I can't exactly drop everything and walk out of work to go play a phone game, and most of my playing time is on my way from place to place, so what are the odds I'll be walking past a gym where a raid is happening within the window, and then be able to stay there / come back? I'm figuring basically zero...

Still - I think the coin payouts might be working in my favour - less predictable, and less tidy, but overall, I think I earned more coins in 24 hours today than I would have done on the same gym take on the old system. OTOH, I think things are churning faster than usual, so - results may not be typical, I guess.

[upanddisappear]

I got two badges yesterday for spinning!

I'd have more if I'd been walking, I was just doing errands and I've been having gps issues in the mall.