More rumours

According to this article the coming Friday might see an update for the game of some kind.

The author makes the guess that it's either the long awaited gym revamp or another week of one specific type of pokemon flooding spawn points all over the world.

Let's see what happens.

Pain in the arse, the line-up

We can't get all snorlax and blissey in our defensive line-up, and most definitely not chansey since a chansey powered up beyond level 30 does a much better job as a blissey.

But sometimes you want to prevent people from having a free ride through the bottom of the gym. I'm thinking gyms in places where you can't really stop (unless you're deliberately walking up to the gym), but you can stay in the vincinity long enough to take a pot shot at the bottom most defender without incurring an error.

There are a few, normally outright awful, defenders that could do the job for you.

• Wobbuffet
• Wigglytuff
• Lanturn

Wobbuffet

Comes with atrocious attack and defence, but has substantially more hit points than a Snorlax. Its max CP at 1024 should place it safely below anything else you drop inside the gym.

Just make sure you don't get Splash as an attack

Wigglytuff

Basically a shoddy snorlax, but a Pound / Play Rough version should have better staying power than whatever it's protecting.

Max CP 1906 should place it below anything serious inside the gym.

Lanturn

Another shoddy version of an already existing defender, this time vaporeon.

A version with Charge Beam / Thunder Bolt partially makes up for the poor stats, and the 2077 max CP should see it placed in the bottom as well.

Lastly, none of the pokemon above makes the cut as defenders. They're just there to protect the gym while you're waiting for team mates to arrive with solid defenders. Especially if you built the gym on two of the shitty four in order to get an easy ride adding prestige.

Powering up an account

Summer's here again, and some of you might have friends who belatedly decided to jump on the bandwagon.

But starting now at level one, is it really feasible?

Well, some hardcore (but not insane) gaming should see a new account reach thirty in a month, without spending any money, even though I personally recommend an initial investment in the shop for 2500 coins, all spent on bag-upgrades. Those 600 extra slots are golden.

For this post I'll assume a new player paying for an upgrade from 350 to 950 bag slots. Atleast day one should be spent together with someone already playing at high level.


Day one:

• Create the account
• Get familiar with the interface
• Pick a starter pokemon and activate the buddy
• Move to a spawn cluster with a few pokestops
• Start throwing poke balls left and right
• Spin some stops
• Activate the permanent incubator
• Do save a few potential bubble strategy attackers and defenders and star them up
• Watch the account hit level five and pick a team
• Activate an incense
• Learn one or two routes between clusters
• Activate an incense
• Activate a blue incubator
• Hit level ten (two or three hours into the game) and take a break
• Chat about the game
• Try to push for level 15 and make sure to activate every incense and incubator gained from levelling up
• 100 000 xp in total

Why spend those rewards so early? Well, you want to get a new player into a game that has grinding built into it. It's better to hit level 20 as quickly as possible and rotate through all collected eggs as quickly as possible since the pokemon gained from hatching is determined when you receive the egg and not when you hatch it.

Have the new player become familiar with the appraise interface. End the day by transferring out every pokemon below 82% plus which aren't attractive for power-evolving later on, apart from storing extra cute ones or whatever seems fun to keep.

Don't spend any Lucky Eggs yet.

Week one:

• Daily grind as above
• Spend at least one break using a lure
• Spend one break power-evolving
• Hit a gym a day and collect from one gym daily (sure, if you can get more then why not)
• Learn basic bag management, but don't forget that your game is heavily weighted towards catching pokemon and almost no gym battling
• Spend another break power evolving when you've restocked on pokemon after the first one
• After a week you should hit level 23 with over a third of all experience gained coming from the two power-evolve sessions. Level 24 is doable depending on how well you do on the two power-evolve sessions and how far you fill up your pokedex
• Approximately half a million xp in total

The first week is sweet, because you receive quite a xp-bonus from adding new pokemon to the pokedex. Let's say you end up with 100 pokemon in the dex (probably too low a number, but still). That's 50 000 xp just from the bonus.

Week two:

• You'll receive another three lucky eggs. Spend them for around 300 000 xp gained from power-evolves
• Spend incense gained on routes between clusters and use up your lure modules during the breaks you don't spend power-evolving
• Use up every incubator you gain
• Buy 50 pokemon slots when you've collected 100 coins (there should be 100 left from your initial investment
• If you decided to pump in more money into the game from the start, then push your bag space to 1000 and spend the rest on pumping up pokemon storage capacity
• Evolve potential top class pokemon and make a prayer
• Decide which three pokemon are your best (I recommend one attacker and two defenders) and start spending stardust
• After level 25 add one pokemon to that list for each level you gain
• Your target level is 27
• Approximately one million xp in total

Weeks three and four:

• Evolve and transfer as you go, and keep this activity to pokemon you've learned are pretty crap anyway.
• You're losing out on power evolves, but the steady inflow of 500 xp per evolve is a greater gain in the long run
• Save the 12-candy-to-evolve -pokemon. You want them for the lucky eggs you receive once you hit 30
• Learn gym battling basics
• If you got lucky with bubble strategy pokemon early on, now's the time to try it out. If you 'sacrifice' yourself by dropping a prestige pokemon at the bottom of a gym you'll have an easier time being accepted into your local raid team
• Retune your bag -- you're likely to want more material for gym battling by now
• Push your best pokemon
• Your target level is 30
• Approximately two million xp in total
• Eight maxed out high quality pokemon for level 29

This is a lot of time spent on the game. I'm talking about maybe six hours a day for a month, but it's definitely doable.

A casual hardcore player should be able to do this at a leisure two months spent with Pokemon Go as the primary hobby, which means a raidready addition to the team by the end of July.

Pushing the first month to two million xp could be worth it. In the long run, however, I believe a million a month is more than enough. It's still a lot of time spent over a smart phone, but not enough to make you puke at the sight of it.

Promo codes activated

Even though limited to the US and the Android platform, the promo codes are now active. According to this article in PokemonGoHub it's Sprint that's giving away promo codes which can be reimbursed for Great Balls, Incence and Lucky Eggs. Getting a promo code requires a physical visit to a Sprint store.

In all likelyhood the event for these specific promo codes is already over as I write this, but the important thing is that Niantic has indeed activated the promo codes implementation.

After adventure's week

What should you look out for now when the event is over? Two things:

• Blissey
• Tyranitar

I'm just assuming that a disproportionate number of players spent the week with a chansey as buddy, and this should impact what we'll see inside gyms as players collect the stardust needed to beef them up.

A player walking a little extra should have gained anything from 30 to 80 chansey candy. Enough to push their best blissey to max, or perhaps their second best.

I'm living in a city where larvitar seldom visits the central parts, but even so I caught half a dozen of those as they popped on-screen from time to time.

Anyone making even a half hearted attempt at collecting them should have finished the week with three times as many, and those who made a serious effort should have caught between fifty and a hundred. That's 350 to 700 larvitar candy.

Within a few weeks you'll see the evolved version standing above dragonites in gyms.

Time to get them machamps ready, but beware the blisseys out there.

Hang 'em out to dry, known spoofers

I've compiled a very short list of currently active and verified spoofers. That list will be kept up to date.

Observe the 'currently active' part. If they last spoofed in November, have been nowhere to be seen and start popping up again at places where you are not physically playing at the moment of the event, then that doesn't count as a verification.

There are quite a few names that could be added to the list, but as long as active players expressly want to apply the benefit of the doubt those names stay out of the list.

Anti spoof / bot measures

So Niantic is slowly taking action that should mitigate the botting and spoofing problem. Initially it'll probably mostly help nerfing bots.

• Rare pokemon are invisible for flagged accounts
• Flagged accounts can't buy items in the shop

The first fix should make trackers highly unreliable, and for the same reason prevent automated farming as soon as a bot is detected. While it might seem insignificant it cracks down on the shadow market for accounts for sale.

The second fix should make it harder to sell lure-bot -accounts. Basically a fire and forget account for sale at relatively low level with a few lures. Populating gyms with these accounts for a week in order to buy an eight-pack lures will pretty much become pointless.

All in all a good start and welcome news.

Looking ahead, summer speculations

The adventurers' week is coming to a close, as is the month of May. So, what does the coming summer have in store for us? Summer is, after all, the obvious season for playing Pokemon Go.

Niantic has announced some kind of major gym revamp as the second out of four major changes to the game during 2017. The first was the release of generation 2. In order to have room for another three early summer looks like a good time to implement said revamp.

Recently we got the cryptiv message that summer will be legendary. If nothing else it's an indication that legendary pokemon might be on their way.

There is data in the code referring to 'raid'. What 'raid' means is unclear, but the word definitely implies something done in a group.

Associated with the information about raids goes an implicit implementation of push data. The information available explicitly states something about raids in your vincinity, but more interesting in the long term is the word 'vincinity'. It opens up future implementations of things happening near you, but outside the small space within which you can catch pokemon.

In any way, enjoy the warmth and start walking.

Drop and walk, the line-up

Sometimes we just want to drop something into a recently captured gym and walk on. I'm primarily thinking of the three first open spots in a gym.

If it's a gym you couldn't care less about it's probably a bad idea dropping your best defender inside. Still, if you drop anything at all you should still give it a thought.

• Bragging rights, exceptionally rare pokemon
• Bragging rights, an IV 100 maxed out 'fun' pokemon
• PITA, it's going to hurt attacking this gym
• PITA, it's going to take time attacking this gym
• Builder, prestige pokemon

Let's focus on PITA and Builder

It's going to hurt, Minimum CP, Name, Attacks:

• CP 2800, Dragonite, Dragon Tail / Outrage
• CP 2900, Tyranitar, Iron Tail / Crunch
• CP 2700, Gyarados, Dragon Tail / Outrage
• CP 2700, Vaporeon Water Gun / Aqua Tail
• CP 2800, Rhydon  Mud Slap / Stone Edge
• CP 2500, Snorlax, Zen Headbutt / Body Slam
• CP 2400, Blissey, Zen Headbutt / Dazzling Gleam
• CP 2400, Exeggutor, Confusion / Seed Bomb

It's going to take time:

• CP 1000, Chansey
• CP 2400, Blissey
• CP 2700, Snorlax

Builder:

• CP 2600 or lower Gyarados with Bite / Twister
• CP 2700 or lower Dragonite with Steel Wing / Hyper Beam
• CP 2600 or lower Rhydon with Rock Smash / Megahorn
• CP 2800 or lower Tyranitar with Bite / Fireblast
• CP 2600 or lower Flareon with Ember / Heatwave
• CP 40 Gastly with Astonish (or any other dedicated Bubble Strat defender)

When you feel fairly confident the gym's going down soon just aim at PITA. If you believe your team mates might arrive and build the gym drop a Builder.

The reason for the low CP of the builders is that you really don't plan to be left inside the gym. You deliberately place a crap defender inside with low enough CP that it'll occupy the bottom most place until it's booted out of the gym.

With the exception of chansey and vaporeon you should be able to catch the pokemon listed above in the wild. You probably already have some of them, which was taken into account for making this list.

The chansey is listed in case you already did build a bouncer with the express purpose of defending just about everything else, and the vaporeon is there to show that you can use them ocasioally while you're actively powering one up.

We dodge for nobody, the line-up

Paraphrasing Spaceballs there's a variant for how to attack gyms, and prestige friendly ones for that matter.

This is how I play. It's extremely time-efficient, but it also goes berserk on your bag.

I spin some 150 to 200 pokestops daily, and I guess that's needed for my slightly suicidal approach. If you belong to the players with easy access to a very large number of pokestops in a small area (or short time anyway), then this might be something for you.

Don't dodge. As in don't dodge anything, apart from the occasional Hyper Beam or Solar Beam. Watch your body-bag fill up at a depressing rate and just keep pushing. You're wading in revives and potions anyway, so getting your beat up pokemon ready to fight is preferable to discarding all those revives and potions.


So, now we've set the conditions.


This gives us reason to take a slightly different approach to our preferred line-up.

For all attackers:

• Attack 15. Defence and Stamina doesn't matter

Dragonite:

• Dragon Tail / Outrage
• Hurricane and Hyper Beam are also servicable as charge attack. Observe that Hyper Beam does almost the same damage as Hurricane over time

Machamp:

• Counter / Dynamic Punch
• Close Combat also servicable as charge attack

Vaporeon:

• Water Gun / Hydro Pump

Exeggutor:

• Bullet Seed / Solar Beam

Jolteon:

• Thunder Shock / Discharge
• All other combinations servicable

Victreebel

• Razor Leaf / Leaf Blade
• Solar Beam almost as good as Leaf Blade as charge attack

Lapras:

• Frost Breath / Ice Beam
• Blizzard also servicable as charge attack

Flareon:

• Fire Spin / Overheat

That's about it. You probably want to double up on Jolteon and Lapras. When Tyranitar starts showing up in bulk a second Machamp seems to be a good idea.

Check your buddy

You may have to restart the game in order to have your buddy benefit from the decreased distances needed to receive candy during the adventurer event.

If your buddy shows a negative number walked, or if it shows the standard distance needed to receive a candy, restart your game.

More fun, literally

According to this article from PokemonG o Huba substantial number of new gyms and pokestops have been added.

From out local network (Sweden) it seems that new stops and gyms primarily happened in low density areas, but it's a little bit early to tell. Especially a new stop is easy to miss.

Yet another event

This time it's an unnamed one. Let's call it adventurer's week or something.

It begins at May 18 (yes that's day after tomorrow) 1 pm pacific time and ends 1 pm May 25 pacific time. Add nine hours and that's 10 pm for those living in Sweden.

Rock type pokemon will spawn more frequently. It remains to be seen if the omission of larvitar was deliberate, or if they'll spawn more often as well.

Pokeballs are 50% off in the shop. Good news for PoGo plus users with cash to spend.

There's a new hat to be found for your avatar. Hopefully not as atrocious as the magikarp one.


And now for the clash.

Pokestops will yield more items. If it's the same double amount as during the week in November when this last happened, then you can spend your days at multiple lured pokestops and never empty your bag.

But.

Buddy distances are cut to a quarter, just like in November. Yep, that's 1.25 kilometres for your snorlax and chansey candy.

So, walk or sit?

Bag management, moving between clusters

Pokemon aren't evenly distributed.

Well, doh!

You probably know of at least one large cluster where you live. By large I mean something that pops a few dozen pokemon within a ten minute walk, or what should normally have been a ten minute walk.

When you have located a few such clusters it's time to check your map. For playing pokemon the shortest route between clusters isn't always the best.

Which route yields the maximum number of pokestops without becoming too much of a detour?

Learning those routes is a great way to catch upwards to a hundred pokemon while keeping your bag almost intact.

Wishful thinking about gyms

I used to do quite a lot of game design as a hobby of mine.

PoGo is reminiscent of old collectible card games. Main difference being where you collected cards and played a game, in PoGo you can only collect cards, because the gyms hardly deserve to be called a game.

Let's leave the obvious fix aside. We won't see trainer duels for some time yet. Instead we'll have a look at the atrociously implemented gyms.


The CP idiocy

Only a moron would sort defenders by CP. Which says everything about the staff at Niantic.

Anyone with at least a partially functioning brain would have gone for LIFO as the quick and dirty solution. The player that tears down a gym and pops the first mon into it goes on top. That way there's very little benefit in pushing the last 8K prestige from 42 to 50, because you'll end up at the bottom.

This is good game design, because it adds balance into the very game mechanics. Gyms want to get smaller, and the personal cost benefit ratio decerases as gym levels increase. It also promotes true cooperation because only a team can have members, well, take one for the team and place last.

From LIFO you could go into more advanced solutions requiring a little book keeping. Like where the one who has added most prestige to the gym (during it's current iteration of the same colour) goes on top.



Cooldown for prestige

More basic stuff: How the bleeding hell could they forget to implement 'battle winners have priority' for adding prestige to a gym.

Currently the gym opens up a new spot when you see 'Victory' on the screen, which means you're screwed if someone wants to steal the spot.

You still have to leave combat, wait for the 'You lose / You win' message, watch the gym get more prestige, click out of the gym and click back in. By the time you're done the thief has assigned a pokemon to the gym AND finished smoking a cigarette while grinning at you.



How to add diversity

Gym's are part of a monotone grinding experience, cause that's what Niantic knows. They're good at implementing grinding, but are clueless when it comes to creating games.

Just the way pokemon and attacks are of different types, with corresponding matching benefits and penalties, gyms should be.

Let's look at a hypothetical psychic / grass gym.

• grass and / or psychic pokemon take 80% damage (attacker and defender)
• grass and / psychic attacks deal 125% damage
• ground, rock, water, fighting and poison pokemon take 125% damage (attacker and defender) for each matching type.

We can stop there. Dropping a vaporeon inside would effectively cut it's HP by 50 or more, thus for all practical purposes turning it into a dragonite but doing far less damage.

Using a dragonite in an ice type gym would see it take 169% increased damage.

This simple change would totally rewrite the map on good gym defenders and attackers, and we'd end up with a game where we'd actually benefit from careful planning where to place our stardust.

How not to add diversity

There are some extreme morons who should be kept away from anything resembling game design. They believe faulty design can be saved by imposing artificial limitations. In the CCG world it's usually done by placing a limit on how many copies of the same card you're allowed to have in your deck.

Hard caps are the hallmarks of an incompetent designer.

It's lazy and a clear sign the game designer is better off getting paid for asking you if you want fries with it.

Unsurprisingly this seems to the direction PoGo is going in.

Maintenance costs

This is good game design to prevent individual players from becoming too dominant. Basically you have to pay some kind of upkeep cost for every gym you have a pokemon assigned to in order to avoid some kind of penalty.

It looks like PoGo is going in this direction, which is would be good news.

Poorly implemented it'll force a player to physically revisit every gym, which permanently hands PoGo victory to GPS-spoofers. Remote gyms are only remote for players who actually walk there.

Command limitations

This is better game design to prevent individual players from becoming too dominant. Basically you say that an individual trainer can't interact with more than a given number of gyms without getting sloppy.

In-game this would translate into having a ceiling on how many gyms you can have pokemon assigned to and still get the full benefit from all of them. For each gym you assign a pokemon to after that ceiling you'll suffer from some kind of penalty. Most likely in the form of a minor nerf to each and every pokemon you have assigned to gyms, or even better, also a nerf to your ability when it comes to attacking a gym.

Soft caps are the hallmarks of someone skilled at designing games.

How to kill bubble strat

While I definitely make the most of bubble strat myself there's no denying it's detrimental for the game.

Niantic chose the technical approach to handle the problem, which in the end turned out not working at all. This, once again, proves that Niantic are made up of programmers who have little or no knowledge about gamers and games.


Permanently hammering bubble strat into the ground is laughably easy, and it's done by using the gaming approach.

• Pick a cutoff point
• Apply inverted diminishing returns from there

Pick a cutoff point

Decide at what level (level of the pokemon, not the player) a pokemon is a fully grown defender. Probably 20 or 30, and preferably 30.

Apply diminishing returns

For each level below the cutoff subtract a penalty. That is, only defenders at or above the cutoff can reward the friendly player the full 500 - 1000 prestige for attacking with a lower CP pokemon.

For every level below the cutoff simply subtract a percentage of the 400 - 900 (you always receive 100 prestige) from the reward. Ideally a level one pokemon would reward you with a maximum of zero extra prestige.

Problem solved

Despite costing zero potions and revives almost every player using the bubble strat today would drop it in an instant if the prestige added to the gym capped somewhere at 100 - 150 prestige, which would happen as the defending pokemon is level one or level two.

Basically you'd see new strategies based either around the cutoff point or high CP squishies, which incidentally coincides with how the game was supposed to be played to begin with.

The level 40 squad

Didn't come to visit in the first place.

For some peculiar reason I've been dragged into some kind of high level network, which is kind of funny since I avoid getting too much XP.


These are people who are brutally effective at amassing XP, especially the level 40 ones.

Some seem to be really good at attacking gyms and adding prestige to friendly ones.

But...


... I get the feeling they're rather poor raiders.


While most of the tips and tricks on this blog is aimed at increasing individual performance, that part takes a backseat when it comes to raiding.


Really, it does.


If you have the organisational skills and charisma needed to get a dozen players to get outdoors day after day after day, then you'd probably do perfectly fine by just evolving the highest CP mons you caught and throwing around power ups at random.

Half a dozen players hulking into a gym will tear it down in minutes no matter what crap each player uses for a lineup. And if five or six gyms in an area gets pumped up to 10 and filled with mons, multiple times per day if needed, it doesn't matter at all what kind of crap goes into those gyms. Players from rival teams will just look at them with disgust and give up.


That's raiding. It's a social skill, not a technical one.


The level 40 squad caught pokemon, spun stops, made the elevator-ride in a gym, popped the lucky eggs and hatched a horde of eggs -- alone. Cause ganging up on a gym means a loss in terms of getting XP.

Ganging up on gyms. That's raiding. Doing it over and over and over again, that's being a raider.

That's my game.

The near future

Judging from this article the game is going to change within the near future. I'll leave the definition of 'near' for you.

The most interesting part is that something is happening to how gym works, and given that Niantic earlier said that a gym revamp is the second great change to the game, the first being generation 2 pokemon added, it would seem that we'll see some major changes before summer is upon us.

Add some unclear info on raids, whatever that will be, and a minor anti-cheat-fix.

Yes, minor. While spoofers can no longer zip across the globe to collect a pokemon, if they hang around a large city that's really not a major setback. They'll still cross rivers and climb mountains at the speed of a moving car without being detected.


A change to gym battles, however, might be golden for the game. It might also firmly push the gyms into the control of spoofers. If the detail about feeding pokemon means you have to physically get to the gym where your pokemon is assigned and feed it, then spoofers basically won the game since for them remote gyms aren't, well, remote.

Impressions from the grass event

In short, if your local biome didn't support grass type pokemon, you most likely didn't notice anything but the six hour lures.

This means a repeat of the water festival where only areas that already had a healthy number of water pokemon got substantially more of those.

Sure, there was a marginal increase in grass type pokemon in the city, but the invasion hit remote areas where they could be found before.

All in all it means the event was basically a dud. If you weren't all that interested, because you already had what you needed, then you got swamped by grass type pokemon, and if you really looked forward to the event due to personal lack of them, then you were out of luck.

I can only hope Niantic eventually learns that they should cater to the biomes lacking a specific type of pokemon during these kind of events, or they'll just upset their users.

Possible softban fix concerning max caught pokemon per time unit

We're getting indications that the latest idiocy might have been fixed.

Observe that this is unconfirmed. As in not official at all.

Rather than the 500 max pokemon in a day that limit should now be 3000 per week, after which the 500 daily gets imposed.

The only source I have is this post, and once again I want to point out that this is not in any way confirmed,

When moronicity strikes back

The weekend event turned out to include six hour lures as well. So all is fine and well.

Almost.

Very recently Niantic took action against bots in a not so very well designed way.

Fast forward to today. Twenty degrees celcius, a Saturday in the sun, and Pokemon Go players gathering in parks with high pokestop density.

It took until late afternoon before the first complaints about softbans were heard, and those complaints are from players who belong to a community where this kind of information is passed along.

Families and other casual players don't. After a sunny day with lures everywhere they suddenly run into the game suddenly ceasing to function.

This is when moronicity strikes back.

Niantic produces games. It's depressingly obvious that they don't understand how gamers work.

Short weekend event

It would seem we're about to see more grass type pokemon than usual the coming weekend according to Niantic.

Punishing, or punitive, raids

Hand in hand with creating territory and maintaining it comes the punitive raid.

Unless you're actively expanding your territory I advice you to leave a few nearby rival gyms be. They're useful when someone gets funny ideas about the territory you've carved out.

There are basically three kinds of punitive raids:

• Wiping out an offending gym
• Full retaliation
• Manhunt

The first kind i what is sounds like. You got rivals 'visiting' your gyms so you level theirs. It sends the signal: "We strongly advice against any repetition of that attempt." Don't forget to assign pokemon to it so that it's clear who came for a visit.

The second kind is what our raid teams ususally stick to. We've found out that players are far too lacking in preception to undersstand a moderate warning. Tear the rival gym down, build it to 10 and populate it. Preferably done to every rival gym in your vincinity belonging to the offending team.

A manhunt is when you locate as many gyms as possible where a specific player has assigned pokemon. You can either wipe those gyms out or go for full retaliation. It would depend on the severity of the infraction. For aggressive spoofers I recommend the full deal. You don't want them anywhere close anyway.

Punitive raids could result in territory expansion, but it's not the main reason. If the prior owners of the gym take it back, provided you populated it, just leave it unless they come for a visit again.

Promo codes

The game now supports promo codes, at least for players using an Android device.

While the source of thse codes remain uncertain, my personal guess is that they will be tied to the corporate partnerships Niantic has opened up with a few large companies. Think their latest deal with Mc Donalds in Japan where 2500 pokestops and gyms will be tied to the franchise. Spin that stop, or buy a meal, and you'll receive a one-time only code.

Observe that this is just me making a guess.

With that code you'll be able to receive something small from the Pokemon Go ingame shop. A lure, a lucky egg, maybe some coins or a cosmetic change to your avatar. Things like that.

The interface for promo codes can be found by opening the shop and scrolling to the very bottom.

Don't forget, Android devices only. Most probably a result of Apple wanting a share of all transactions done from Apple devices.

Gym battles, creating territory

What if you live in a place where your team effectively lacks a gym presence?

To begin with, if you can't locate half a dozen players you're screwed. They don't all have to be high level, but three of you should be. Still, try keeping everyone above level 27.

So, how to proceed?

First of all you need to do some scouting in force. Try out a few areas and tear a gym down. How quickly does it get rebuilt, if at all?

Elimitate areas where the response is immediate.

Next step is to bubble a gym to 10 and place a really good defender inside. So one prestige pokemon and one maxed out blissey or snorlax.

Then a short checklist:

• Is the gym torn down quickly
• Does it keep being torn down if you keep at it for a week
• If not, do players from your team spontaneously assign pokemon to it

No matter if you see extra players from your team or not inside that gym, provided it stays up, you've just created a foothold.

This is when you go aggressive. Repeat the process with another two gyms, and have the players you're in contact with assign pokemon to them actively. If at all possible, make them team up with you and help tearing those two added gyms down.

You'll probably lose at least one of the three gyms immediately. Try expanding in the other direction, and stay at it for a week or two.

It could fail, and then it's up to you if you give up or not, but you could just as well end up with two stable gyms. If so, push for another two in order to gain a third. You always have to push at least one more gym than the ones you plan to hold.

Three stable gyms counts as territory.

Any gym that normally stays up for three days or more is stable.

This isn't mere theory crafting. This is experience. I've seen two attempts crash and burn, but three other areas where we previously had zero stable gyms by now sport two (ok, less than territory), six and eight stable gyms respectively.

The gym-pair is associated with one gym we push to 10 daily or every second day.

The six gym territory sees another three repeatedly pushed to 10, but those usually only last for a day or so.

The eight gym one might have become a ten gym one. We don't know, but the local raidgroup usually push another three. A punishment raid surprisingly resulted in three out of four pushed gyms staying up for three days thus far.

Creating territory has the added benefit of increasing morale in your team. In our case the eight gym territory gave birth to a relatively nearby seven gym one. I can only assume local players there thought: "If they can do it, why not we?"