Now Gothenburg works like a city. While the population in what kind of feels like part of the city, including bordering towns, is limited to some 600 000 inhabitants, it's still the second city of Sweden and geographically located in a way that makes it a regional centre to a much larger degree than the population warrants.
Travelling abroad I've come to accept that my home town behaves like a million inhabitant city in nations where those aren't all that uncommon.
For PoGo it means that the city core is packed with pokestops and gyms, especially with the latter after the gym rework.
It's also a city heavily dominated by valor and mystic players in terms of absolute player base.
Still, we managed to build a healthy raid core, including semi casuals, of about 40 players, and made a gym presence in the centre that most definitely didn't correspond to our absolute numbers. Add two large areas brutally dominated by instinct.
Overall, however, numbers take their toll, and given a much larger area we were down to the 25% or lower part of the gyms that corresponded to our player base.
During the initial gym boss raid -hype we effectively got eradicated from the city core.
The strength with a healthy raid core is that it's easy to coordinate game play. The weakness with a healthy raid core is that it's easy to coordinate game play.
They're doing raid bosses en masse rather than using their time for taking gyms. Which just goes to show how quickly a shifting meta game will impact the surrounding parts of the game as well.
Now I'm seeing in the chat how part of that raid core are slowly withdrawing from the raid boss madness, and, not very surprisingly, now I can see on a gym tracking tool (gymhuntr more specifically), how 'order is restored' in one of the two areas where we held a total domination before.
It corresponds to the players who no longer rush like mad to the next gym raid boss.
Notably, I'm the first to admit that had I'd been in Gothernburg rather in Japan these last two weeks, I'd be running from raid to raid myself rather than spending time trying to build territory in gyms that are much more elusive now than before.
And, come to think about it, we really need to come up with another term for 'raids' now that the game officially incorporated the word with a different meaning than the one we used.
So, what use could you possibly have from this post?
Well, two things happened at more or less the same time, not just one:
- The gym rework
- Summer
When you read about great changes in the game you basically only read about how the new gym mechanics, including raid bosses, totally changed the game.
Moreover, you're fed with information that unilaterally states that changed game mechanics alone brought great changes to the game.
Nothing could be more wrong.
While the changes do indeed influence the game, don't forget that the mere existence of raid boss fights change how players spend their Pokemon Go time compared to before.
Also, don't forget that summer, with all that it entails with better weather, vacations and school breaks, brings out a fair number of players. I wouldn't say new players, but rather those who tried the game out last summer and left it when weather grew cold last autumn.
The sheer volume of active players has increased drastically the last month. Most of us high level ones would refer to them as casuals, but casuals at levels 25 to 30 impact gyms to a degree they wouldn't have been able to do with the previous game mechanics.
See, one change that does indeed come from the gym rework itself, but one that wouldn't have had such an impact but for summer.
Come September I expect a large part of the current player base to withdraw into the shadows again. I wouldn't be surprised to see gyms mostly reverting to how they looked before the rework.
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