Town gaming

I'm spending a few days in a town visiting relatives. It's an interesting experience. In ways it's harder to play here compared to my experience from a rural village -- virtually no resources at all only forces you to a minimum of playing in the first place, which while boring isn't difficult.

Now, however, I'm in a 30k population town, which is a far cry from the 650k population city I'm used to.

30k is enough to merit a decent number of gyms and stops, but the experience is extremely different. Spawn to stop/gym ratio is entirely different, which plays havoc with my poke-balls. Ie the number of poke-balls I have available is falling like a brick from an aeroplane.

Obviously the same would be true for potions and revives in the long run, but the friends system together with field researches make his less of a problem. Add that the locals playing here have nothing comparable to place into gyms or attack gyms with.

Bringing a healthy number of golden razzberries into this town further skews the balance, but in the end I'd run out of those as well as the low availability of level five raids prevents me from bulking up on resources.

All in all gym battling is a very different experience here from what I'm used to. To a certain degree you could argue that it's akin to playing a different game.

Well, that's all for this time.

On time and PvP

Seems a lot of players have problems with PvP. Problems with not being able to fire off charge attacks rather than making a great team.

Are you one of them?

Quick way to find out. Try out your party against one of the three team leaders. Get a feeling of how long it takes to power up your charge attack.

It should take about the same time in a real PvP duel against another player. If it doesn't something's wrong.

Now I'm sitting on a Samsung Galaxy S9, so what works for me might not work for you.

I open up google (or chrome) and search for the web-site 'time.is'. If my clock is off by more than one second I fix it. One single day is all it takes for my clock to get offset by a second.

My way of doing it might be overkill, but it's worked 100% of the times for me. I go to 'settings' and scroll down to 'general settings'. From there I pick 'date and time', turn off 'automatic time' and turn it on again. After that I restart the entire phone.

You could probably install one of of several apps that syncs your clock, but I just don't like installing an infinite amount of apps on my phone, so I use the primitive method above.

About myself

The last post I wrote on why I believe I have something to contribute to the community was written in December 2016 or so. The level 35 part carried a little more weight at that time.

Since then the game has veered into four directions, one of which is the common denominator for the other three -- grinding.

• Just shy of 130k mons caught
• 9k walked
• 110+ k spun stops
• below 1k total raids

I guess that still places me at the lower end of hard core players.

PvP

Total newb. Nuff said.

Boss raiding

Just for grinding. If you want to know the best method and circumstances for handling that boss with a minimum number of players, go ask someone else.

Gym battles

I belong to the heavy weights here. Boasting? Probably, but most likely also a reality.

While I can only muster a paltry 23 gold badges, that's not the way I game. I play the territorial game, and if I wanted to mass produce more badges I'd simply dump another $ 1k into the game and chew up every soloable raid within distance provided I didn't have gold on that gym. In other words, gym badges say very little about gym battling.

• 9.5k ace trainer (including a couple of dozen PvP trainer battles)
• 48k battles won
• 50k berries fed into gyms
• 38k hours in gyms

There are several players with higher numbers, but it still constitutes as heavy weight.

I very seldom do rural gyms. Being allowed to spend a full day in any defended gym is an exception. My most active gym tells a story in itself

• 6.8k victories
• 119 days defended
• 5.6k berries fed into the gym

Main combat area

My personal territory isn't a suburb. It's the main cluster of gyms in my 650k population city, and as such is heavily contested. That's also what makes it fun. It's five gyms in a cluster plus another two within one and two minute's walk from said cluster.

As I don't have infinite time to clear it out when needed, I want all seven gyms to be flipped within an hour when I go solo, they're fully populated but not defended. That's under ten minutes per gym, walking included, and I catch mons on the way.

Any one gym defended by no more than two berry feeders should be soloable. It's my responsibility to keep a line-up and the associated resources neded to enable that. I do.

It's my responsibility to be able to place the best possible, maxed out defender into a gym disregarding what it already contains. Barring a seventh maxed out blissey I fill that condition.

Five maxed out snorlax accompanied by four maxed out chansey handle the majority of the other cases, and I have access to another four top-class maxed out tertiary defenders against whom fighting attacks are ineffective as well as another dozen maxed out tertiary defenders to handle corner case scenarios.

How I play

Needless to say my attackers are all maxed out. I assemble an attacking team from two dozen attackers while walking to the next gym. I have yet to see a defensive line-up against which I can't:

• field two super effective attackers against each defender
• or
• down the crap in the gym before it inflicts meaningful damage on my attacker

It's my responsibility to know what defender goes into a gym and how to remove opposing defenders as efficiently as possible. I do.

To date I have never failed to bring down a gym solo when I set my mind to it. That includes burning down a gym defended by four players, admittedly four very drunk defenders, but they were still on-site.

I prefer the gym raiding style. That means two or more players acting in tandem. We're running a dedicated gym battle chat with some fifty members. Of those two dozen are extremely active. Occasionally we organise larger raids. The largest one saw 150 gyms flipped during a two hour assault and all those gyms defended for another two for shits and giggles.

All in all I'm a major PITA for valor and mystic whenever I take a personal interest in a gym. I'm a gym raider through and through, and that's pretty much it about myself.

On PvP, from a newbie

This has to be said from the start: I'm a poor PvP player, and I have always been regardless of what game I played. Pokemon GO at least alleviates my problem by using something akin to a turn based system, something that makes me look less bad and allows for pre-planning in a way that most live-action PvP-systems doesn't.

A few aspects of Pokemon GO PvP immediately stand out.

• Attack effectivness trumps STAB, especially with the new 1.6 damage multiplier, both as a bonus and a penalty
• A duel very much becomes a game of rock paper scissors
• Disregarding typing just isn't done in PvP -- you lose rather than taking longer to win
• Some attacks are simply better than others. I'd argue that this is more true for PvP than for gym-battles
• PvP combat is different from gym combat

There are a number of aspects where the differences aren't as pronounced as well.

• A squishy remains a squishy
• If shopping for a second charge attack is pointless that remains true no matter if you're planning to use the pokemon for PvP or gym combat
• Having premade teams speeds up your gaming, more so for PvP than for gym combat

And lastly there's one aspect you need to handle. There's an error where if your device-clock differs from true time then you're basically unable to play PvP.

If your charge attacks take significantly longer to activate in PvP compared to when you fight the three trainers then you suffer from this.

• Go to the website time.is; if your clock is off by a second or more fix the problem
• On my Galaxy S9 I turn off automatic time, turn it back on and restart the phone. There's probably stupid overhead in what I'm doing, but it works perfectly
• It takes my phone less than a full day to offset time, so I just go through the actions above whenever I'm about to duel

I'll return with posts about PvP from time to time as I learn more. However, my views will always be those of an amateur.

How to misinterpret toxicity and entitlement

I've found a fairly interesting article at PokemonGO Hub.

Nothing much to add to the article. Click open the comments and suddenly you're surrounded by the kind of players who are incapable of making the distinction between toxic behaviour and playing the game.

It all comes from a sad feeling of entitlement. I can't be arsed to put in as much effort (time and money) as another player, but I should still get the same in-game benefits as that player.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but you're not. There are three opposing teams. Those three teams are supposed to be rivals, even though there are cooperative aspects of the game -- boss raids foremost of them.

I'm waiting for the next inane flame war where people posit the idea that players should lose and win every second PvP-match because it's more fair that way...

Gym territory and reputation part six

So, I promised a piece about side effects.

The most obvious ones follow the saying that misery loves company.

You're likely to attract a whole lot of enemy fire. People simply dislike to see status quo changed in a negative way.

However, you're also likely to see occasional help from team mates who normally wouldn't play at those gyms.


A third side effect occurs if the gyms become heavily contested. Multiplayer boss raids will become easier to run at the gyms due to the increased attention those gym occupy in people's minds.


The fourth is simply a matter of reputation. Contested gyms do get a reputation, and some of that reputation will cling to the players most active in infamous gyms -- and that was the main point from the very beginning, wasn't it?

Gym territory and reputation part five

So you've decided on maintaining a gym territory. This translates into maintaining a bad reputation.

For this you need:

• Persistence
• Visibility
• Friends
• Maintainability

Persistence

The previous posts covered this. You attack enemy gyms and defend your own. You do this even when it's boring like hell, or just give up on those gyms.

Visibility

You need to be out there. If you've decided on a temporal aspect for your territory (in my personal case evenings and nights), you'll naturally be attacking enemy gyms. However, don't forget to get out there from time to time and defend them on-site.

If the gyms you're targetting is close to where you are, be it living, education or work, use that opportunity whenever possible to go on-site and refill a partially attacked gym. By partially I'm referring to a gym that lost a couple of defenders but were succesfully berried for ten minutes. This is especially important when one of the ousted defenders belonged to you. No one likes to see a defending player returning to a berried gym.

From time to time you ought to get to gyms outside of the conditions you've set up for your territory. Be it boss raids or tearing down a gym outside of temporal conditions is you've set those up.

If at all possible try to set the gyms up for your team prior to boss raids. This is especially true if the gyms are considered central for wherever you're playing.

Friends

Maintaining gym territory simply isn't done by a single player. Sure, you might run six accounts pouring cash into each of them, but if you do then you don't need to read this post in the first place.

Three players should be considered a minimum for maintaining territory. Half a dozen is, obviously, preferred. The territory I'm part of keeping up is primarily handled by four players.

Your group of friends should keep up a live means of communicating. A chat is perfect, but don't forget to meet in real life. This is especially true for attacking gyms when they're controlled by enemy teams. Two or three players tear down a gym in no time at all to a fantastically reduced cost in time and resources.

Make your friends into friends in the game as well. Up to ten percent added damage to a berried blissey does wonders for demotivating a defending player.

Players being physically close to the territory are best for being secondary attackers. By that I mean that players needing to spend time to get to the gyms should start attacks and report this over whatever communication channel you use. It's a matter of a few minutes for the secondary attacker to join.

Make sure you've more or less agreed on the conditions set up for the territory.

Maintainability

Potions, revives, berries and time are the deciding factors for handling gyms. Add attackers and defenders into the equation.

You need to dare emptying your bag of items you don't use to capacity. You also need to spin stops and gyms like mad to keep up your item-income. If you're serious about gyms this probably translates into discarding pokeballs in favour of space for potions, revives and berries.

You want to open 20 or as close to 20 gifts every day. They're an important source for max revives and max potions.

Make realistic conditions for the territory. More often than not this translates into adding temporal conditions. If your territory includes a university with lots of active enemy players you're unlikely to be able to hold the gyms during daytime, and conversely if you're a student there as well as your friendly players then make certain daytime is part of your territory.

Don't try to keep a territory larger than the number of maxed out blissey, chansey and snorlax you can place into them. You might get away with two grade A defenders in a gym or two, but your goal should be to have all three in a gym.

Next post on some interesting side effects.