Gym rework, guesstimates about the process

So this is just me making a few guesses. I have absolutely nothing to base them on, apart from experience from the IT industry and several occasions of how to plan events with a decent number of participants (a bit over 1000 people).


Fire and Ice event

A week when the player base is occupied with collecting pokemon and XP is a sweet time to launch the (partially) updated client needed for the new gym system.

Basically it'll have the new features disabled as default, but the client probably comes with a backdoor for enabling it. It should allow for testing the gym rework on gyms that you and I, as normal players, never see.

Niantic will also find out if there are any strange side effects.


Two to five days after the event

Gyms go down, maybe as early as one day after the event. I guess two, because Niantic promised some kind of advance warning to players with pokemon assigned to gyms.

Assigned pokemon are returned to their trainers as the gyms go defunct.


Five to eight days after the event

The new (and finalised) client is pushed to the player base. When the update is forced gyms come back alive again.


Nine to fourteen days after the event

Niantic aren't known for placing any weight on regression tests. Stuff that worked earlier have broken following client patches before. I fully expect a hotfix to be pushed to the player base during this period due to some horrendously stupid mistake that was allowed to ship with the gym rework.

Before such a hotfix players will try, and succeed, to break the new gym system. At least partially. Depending on the type of bugs found and abused a second hotfix might be needed. That one could very well be limited to changes server side.


Mid July

Remember 'this summer will be legendary'?

Mid July is the absoutely latest Niantic can push any legendary events onto the game, unless they plan to dump it all into the game in one big bomb. However, if they want to squeeze out the most of the legendaries, they'll release them one at a time in order to keep their players glued to their phones throughout the summer, and 'throughout the summer' really can't start any later than mid July.


So, in short, I expect the new gym system to be live and broken during the shift from June to July. A week later I expect it to be less broken.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the client patch that enables the gym rework already contains the code needed for handling legendary pokemon. If so, then some reverse engineering from the people out there should reveal it really quickly.