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.
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