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.

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...

Restoring bugs

As in Niantic actually restored a bug after having fixed it.

Welcome back to 24 hour partial lock-out from gyms you have boss raided. This time it's even worse than before. About every second terminated battle results in you having to revive two pokemon, out of which one hasn't even seen combat.

There is now a level zero

I've posted earlier artiles about close to criminal ineptitude from Niantic's side.

So here's another one.

The interface for handling friends. Right now it highlights one of the problems inherent with abusing agile software development. I'm talking MVP here, and I don't mean most valuable player. MVP stands for minimum viable product.

Problem being when this gets abused. Because whenever this happens there's no difference between MVP and cripple ware.

Which is exactly what we have been given by Niantic.

It's an MVP because we use it as it's the only way to access the friends features. It's also most definitely cripple ware that should never have gone live.

Let's run through a couple of the most glaring idiocies:


Niantic sells this game with the built in camera functionality as an argument. It's beyond me what alterative reality they live in when I can't use that functionality to QR-scan a new friend instead of typing in 12 digits.

Ever tried to send a gift with a lot of friends late in the day? Just mark up the friends who have yet to receive a gift from you. Oh, but you can't.

In fact you can't sort your friends at all.

In fact the list autoresorts after you open a gift forcing you to swipe and swipe and swipe until you can access that friend again.


In any reasonably competent company releasing features in this state is a perfectly valid reason to fire the staff. It's not like they add any value to the company anyway...

I don't remember lugia being this easy

Usually the kind of thought expressed in the title is a matter of our minds playing tricks on us. In this case, however, you're absolutely correct.

The lugia boss raid is a perfect example of what happens when a game evolves.

A number of things did indeed happen since you fought lugia last summer.

To begin with, you have collected a lot of stardust and converted them into more powerful pokemon overall. You might even have levelled up from levels where your pokemons couldn't reach their full potential.

More importantly, since electric type attacks were attractive back then due to the number of gyarados and vaporeon in the gyms, the arrival of zapdos was a great event. Overnight we received a huge boost over jolteon, and three months later raikou entered the scene. You're likely to have invested stardust into those pokemon.

EX raids had us scrambling for larvitar candy to turn into tyranitar, something further boosted by tyranitar boss raids. In the background players either pumped up a gengar or an alakazam to use as the starter mon for the promised EX raids. Then when those raids finally materialised boss raiders got their hands on mewtwo which is doing a much better job than alakazam.


All in all it means you're likely to be able to retire your golems from raid duty. And even if you don't, whenever the weather is partly cloudy they pack more of a punch.

You and your fellow boss raiders hit lugia a lot harder than you did the first time around.

The near future

So this post will be all about guesstimates.


Today is likely the last day of the event. It's possible that the rewards will linger on for a short period since players would have been more than just merely grumpy had we hit three billion mons caught with ten minutes left to find and catch the regional reward.

Well, it's Niantic we're talking about. Making players grumpy hasn't deterred them before.


With November heading towards a close we'll see raikou drop out from raids soon. Starting December 1 we should see a new legendary or a rehash of the old ones.


Niantic stated four big updates during this year. Three of them have occured, and the only remaining one is generation three arriving for real. I expect that to happen within the week.


EX raids should be available for more players pretty soon. I'm not saying they'll be widely available, but at least the atrocious distribution should vanish.

While most of us will wait for our first mewtwo raid a select number of players, possibly highly localised, should receive invites for ho oh ex raids. Maybe not within the week, but probably before 2018 hits us.

Two item per stop idiocy finished

After two weeks with resources from pokestops cut by a third it's back to normal again. As of now the affected minority of players is no longer discriminated.

Notably Niantic hasn't admitted that anything happened in the first place, so rather obviously they didn't confirm it has been fixed.

Counting on a large community of players to be incapable of noticing patterns, however, is a very dangerous thing to do for a company that relies on a single product for its survival.

With their latest stunt more or less any remnant of trust in Niantic customer transparency has gone out the window. It'll take a very long time, if ever, to regain that kind of lost goodwill.

To make things worse Niantic timed this idiocy with the release of a rip-off game. That market competitor couldn't possibly have created a better marketing event themselves.

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level, part three

Eh...

As in, really? Are you for real?


Hello,
We'd love to hear what you think of our customer service. Please take a moment to answer one simple question by clicking either link below:

How would you rate the support you received?

Good, I'm satisfied

Bad, I'm unsatisfied

From a strictly semantic point of view I'm actually unable to respond. An automated canned reply doesn't constitute support, and hence I'm not qualified to rate the support I never received...

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level, part two

There is now a level zero...

Let's have a look at their support function:

Your request (25958693) has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email.

Blake (Pokémon GO) Oct 18, 4:28 AM IST Hello Trainer, Thanks for writing in. At times you may notice changes to existing features as well as the addition of new features. Please note that the items received at PokéStops may vary. We appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback. We'll be sure to pass it along to the team. Best Regards, Blake Niantic Support

Stenduring Oct 18, 1:42 AM IST Getting a baseline of two items from stops rather than the normal three. Also translates into ten stop streaks awarding four rather than six items. Gyms work as normal.

Whenever you're drowning in support requests concerning the same problem that you currently don't know how to handle, then returning a canned reply as your first contact with the customer is perfectly understandable.

However, no sane company creates an illusion of an escalation process and then blithely proceeds to send out canned replies. That's basically stating that 'sorry, but we can't find our arses in the dark, so you shouldn't expect us to actually read your support requests in the first place'.

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level

Pokemon Go displays not a few bugs. That is to be expected. Software tends to do that. However, in this case we're talking incompetence on an epic scale.

Epic scale here defined as the level at which a company normally would have valid reason to fire the culprits. At least if we were talking a decent company with at least a remnant of a quality policy.


Since the inception of boss raids the gym battling part of the game has been riddled by errors. Network error 2 and error 29. They disable you from succesfully attacking a gym, and the former is keyed to the fact that you won the last boss raid taking place at the gym.

We're not exactly talking rocket science when it comes to locating the bug. The same code that prevents you from joining a boss raid you have already won also prevents you from attacking the gym.

Niantic, however, have failed to do so since July.


Any software producer worth their salt tests their code before releasing it to the public. Any good software producer applies regression testing. It's just common sense. Basically it means that you make certain that what already worked before still works after you have made changes to the code. Changes normally meaning making the next release available to the public.

Let's have a look:

• Boss raid lobby allowed you to see everyone inside -- now broken
• Entering a gym didn't hang the game -- now broken
• Spinning a pokestop gave you a baseline of three items -- now (partially) broken
• Network error 2 left your failed attack with undamaged attackers -- now broken

When you hype up a new feature 'within the next few weeks', and have your customers spend extra money to take part of said feature, it usually a good habit to make the distinction between 'few weeks' and 'few months'. We're still waiting for Mewtwo.

When you utterly fail to create an event you're really not supposed to announce new events that have to be postponed just prior to the announced date. It does make you look like you're utterly unqualified to do events in the first place.

When applying balance tweaks to a game it's possible to apply changes that affect the game with less than a factor two to ten. Whenever you double or half an effect it's no longer called tweaking. We're not even going into cutting an effect by ten.

To summarize:

Niantic has access to a sales departement that works wonders. Some of that personel apparently do commersial programming as a hobby.

It shows.

XP gain, stardust drain

As some of you are bound to have noticed the current fad with huting down legendary raids is a brutal hit to our stardust income.

I'm no better off. Running from raid to raid and spending time waiting for people to group up. In the end very few pokemon get caught per hour played, and dust has dropped from some 25K a day to a mere 10 to 15K.


There really is very little to do about it, and I just wanted to make people aware of it. Especially since the last XP and stardust bonanza hid the underlying dilemma very well.

Some of you might have the problem hidden by the continued inflow of XP. Every time you knock a legendary down another 10K XP flows in, and that has you getting that much closer to next level. Which would be all good but for the problems keeping your line-up maxed out.


Well, I'm off getting more XP and less stardust. There's another bird waiting for me out there.

New game client, meta game changing addition

A new version of the app was just released. While other sites happily chat away about legendary raids I've tried out the really game changing aspect.

You can feed your assigned pokemon from a distance.

At the moment I'm sitting in a garden some ten kilometres south of where I usually play, so there are a few gyms in the city and one which I can barely reach from the game. By reaching I mean have a look at it -- it's still a good ten minutes walk away from me.

That gym, which would be way too far away from where I live in the city to be considered a 'home gym', eats my berries and adds CP to the defending pokemon inside.

All the pokemon inside.

Now, as I had an excessive amount of berries I tried feeding the gyms in the city. While I can't beef up the mons inside I still receive all the othe benefits from feeding a gym.

I can see how some players might feel that this is broken, but if you don't play the game in the middle of nowhere, excessive amounts of berries will become a thing of the past.

At least some 1000 to 2000 extra stardust daily from riding your coach seems perfectly viable as you dump your berries inside gyms before you go to sleep. It's mostly a matter of how many stops and gyms you spin on a daily basis -- a certain percentage of the catch will be berries.


Now for the meta game changing part. If your ability to effectively reach gyms
overlap with other players of your team, especially other players you actively cooperate with, then holding territory is back in the game.

When the gym's going down you can alternate feeding the mons inside

This also means that your best defenders are definitely back in business. Those gyms you want to hold should be populated by the six strongest defending pokemon you can muster up. After all you want to feed attackers with a feeling of futility as the defenders come back at full strength every second fight.

You still only need three or four pokemon at high traffic gyms to secure the fifty daily coins, so don't worry overly much about getting pokemon locked inside.


This change also works perfectly fine for hampering spoofers. By selectively feeding defenders from home you now have an opportunity to see the spoofers getting booted out from the gym, and the best of all is that rival players are doing the job.

Obviously you'll be doing the same job when you walk into enemy territory, but that's another story.

Evening event July 22, welcome to moronopia

Now it's well known that the people at Niantic lack the basic ability to read the clock, so the times given here might be an hour off since we have this thing with daylight saving time.

Coincidentally the US has been dabbling with it for almost a hundred years, and we have high hopes the San Fransisco people will be able to grasp the concept in time for the centennial next year.

There are three 30 minute challenge windows starting at 18:00, 19:00 and 22:00 hours CET. Adding one hour for daylight saving time that would be 19:00, 20:00 and 23:00 hours. However, it's unlikely they've announced events at CDT, but rather at CDT + 1, which means the 11:00, 12:00 and 14:00 hours given for the local event would actually occur at the same hours CDT + 1, which pretty much is what people in that park would expect.

Now, we're talking Niantic programmers. Programming time is harder than it seems for some people, and the Niantic people have failed horribly at it since the inception of the game.

So...

The challenge events could actually occur at CDT time, meaning that they'll kick in exactly one hour after when they're announced to start.


In any case, if the first local challenge event doesn't kick in at 11:00 CDT + 1 the news will spread like wild fire, and the rest of us are likely to know within a minute or two. So worst case we'll simply have to wait for another hour.


If, and it's a big if, the challenge events start at 19:00, 20:00 and 23:00 hours CET + 1 (which means when our clocks and phones actually say it's 7, 8 and 11 pm), the first two should go off without a hitch. For the third one the people at Niantic will see a huge drop as it's a bit too late for most of the player base in the European Union.


Then there's the mystery challenge. 1 am July 23 CET, which might very well be 2 am in reality for reasons given above. No matter what, this one is a problem. The mystery challenge event is one hour long, and during that time at night basically the entire playerbase from the EU is gone.


Add that the entire event is placed during screwed up hours for everyone from Australia to Tokyo and we can see how Niantic basically fucked 80% of their global playerbase over.

Sweet way to run an on-line game.

Gym defence, flawed meta game reasoning

Reading on-line I see a lot of posts with the strangest reasoning.

Basically the line of (non)logic runs as follows:

• 3000 CP defenders are useless
• Gyms are too easy to attack
• I'll assign pidgeys to gyms because they work just as well as anything else

By assigning nerfed versions (as in not powered up) of high quality defenders the player makes certain that each such assigned pokemon is easier to attack compared to the shelved, maxed out ones.

By assigning utter crap to defend gyms the same player then proceeds to make the entire gym easier to attack.

Finishing the moronic route by complaining about how easy gyms have become to attack is a display of cluelessness on an epic scale.

There are three top class defenders with a maximum CP below 3000. Chansey, Lapras and Steelix. Either keep them for when a gym won't allow you to assign one of your other top class defenders, or assign them to remote gyms you just want to keep indefinitely.

There are a number of second tier defenders with max CP below 3000. I recommend using these as fillers in high traffic gyms where there's no open spot for one of your grade A defenders.

If there are open spots for one of your best defenders in a high traffic gym, then assign it there. A 3200+ snorlax or 3100+ blissey is better than their sub 3000 CP versions.

A high traffic gym will either get attacked before motivation degradation becomes a problem, in which case your maxed out defender hurts the attacker more, or it will be fully populated with all assigned defenders sufficiently fed with berries, in which case motivation degradation ceases to be an issue.

In short, your best defenders from before the gym rework remain your best defenders today. Arguably with the exception of vaporeon who got badly hurt by the power shift when it comes to grass versus water.

Oh, and if you insist on plugging shit into gyms, at least have the decency to stop complaining that the gyms inexplicably are easier to attack now -- your pidgey doesn't help your argument.

Gyms, an observation

I'm a bit unclear if this observation of mine really has any value or not, but here goes.

Gyms seem to be filled to max rather than being torn down while there's still only a single pokemon assigned to it. By this I mean that when you burn down a rival gym and drop a defender inside, more often than not, that gym will be filled to capacity.

This is the exact opposite to how gyms behaved before the rework. A disco usually got wiped out more or less immediately, which was the reason you brought your raid-team together and pumped a gym to max, filled it as well as you could, and called out on communication channels that there were free spots available for friendly players.

It seems counter productive to allow a rival team to fill the gym, but I can see a coupld of reasons for doing so.

Observe that filled gyms do get wiped out, usually within a day, and very often just prior to a level 4 raid.


I get more badge XP for tearing down a full gym.

I'm busy boss-raiding, so I can't spare the time for a gym with one or two defenders on my way to the boss-raid.

The first defender assigned was a respectable blissey, and they're still a PITA to burn down, so I thought: BLAEH, and walked on.

There's very little old school gym-raiding going on, so I'm simply not interested in gym fighting any longer.

Difference between smallish Japansese towns and home

One thing is for certain. There are a lot of sponsored stops and gyms in Japan. Now I've only had the opportunity to try my luck at smallish towns/cities (everything is relative I guess), with some 40K to 200K inhabitants.

The difference from Sweden, where I'm used to play, is simply astounding. To begin with we have very few sponsored stops. As in I've spent the better part of a year getting to level 39 in a 600K inhabitant city area without ever seeing one.

We're talking the blatantly sponsored ones here. It's quite possible that there's a different business model where sponsored stops look like normal ones, you know with a photo of a location and all that.

The result is that back home I expect to see a high density of stops/gyms in central areas, including centres of satellite towns, which peters out into nothingness the further away you come from the business to consumer infrastructure.

It also means that while the density is high, you'd very seldom expect to reach more than two resources from one location. Walk another twenty metres and there's another stop/gym and then fifty metres to the next two.

It's hugely efficient for the old school way of hatching eggs while throwing balls at spawns without really running out of them. Using slow moving trams for refilling your bag is also a dream. 150 items of the type you prefer (which means well over 250 in total) in less than half an hour is a given.


Here in Japan (the tiny part of Japan that I visited) resources come in clusters, mostly tied to small parks and shopping malls. Reaching four or five of them from one position is perfectly possible.

Problem being that when you leave them you immediately run into a deserted nothingness despite going past bars, restaurants, coffee shops and a variety of shops in what passes for town centres.

Then the next cluster.

You could very well see absolutely nothing but the occasional spawn for several hundred metres in between.

Also, in the middle of nowhere, if there's a 'shop' belonging to one of the big chains that bought sponsored stops (think 7eleven, McDonalds, and so on), well you'll find a lonely stop there for cetrain.

Players here should love gym version 2. The PoGo landscape didn't promote moving around in the first place, and now you can hunt down the nicer contents from 10 kilometre eggs from inside a shopping mall or a park.


I won't say that it's better back home, but it's definitely what I'm used to. I'd go bonkers if I couldn't reliably spin two dozen stops and throw balls at some thirty of forty mons on my way from one raid to another. Because that's what I grew used to from gym raiding during the previous gym system.

A good raid back then invariably resulted in the relative loss of over a hundred balls and at least 12K stardust gained (and used). Not to mention a minimum of 5 kilometres added to the incubators.


So, what would be your preference?

Shifting meta game, local to Gothenburg and instinct

It's been fairly interesting sitting by the sidelines following what's happening back home over the community tools we've brought to work the last year.

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.

Problems with the gym battle system

The current system has a number of problems associated with it. I won't even go into technical issues as those are problems which will go away eventually.


Gym raids

The low level tier raids are going to die in silence unless something is done to how a player access them.

My suggestion is nerfing the rewards for level 1 and 2 raids and make them more accessible.

Level 1 raids should be free for all. It's the perfect entry level way for new and lower level players to experience raids. Preferably you can't get TMs and rare candy from those, or at least make those drop extremely seldom.

Level 2 raids should be associated with a separate, stackable raid pass. Say a drop rate of one per ten gyms spun or something like that. TMs and rare candy should have a distinctly lower drop rate than today.

Level three and four raids could possibly be left as they are. Maybe a separate raid pass for level 3 following the same limitations as today. In that case lower the drop rate for TMs and rare candy.

TMs drop too often as it is. Since they basically remove the need to accept a lower IV pokemon with good moves they should be few and far between. A drop ratio similar to evolve items for those who raid once or twice a day would suffice perfectly.

If they really have to be accessible, then implement a streak system for raids and guarantee one every seven days.


Gym battles

The magic 3000 CP limit simply doesn't make sense at all. Basically it's the one percent degradation per pokemon below 3000 CP that doesn't make any sense.

Reduce a fixed percentage of the current CP per time unit instead. If 10% per hour is too harsh, then 5%. This would still penalise extreme CP pokemon since the drop is largest in the beginning, which corresponds to the nerfed increase in CP for levels 30.5 to 39.

When your pokemon has got its CP cut in half it will also drop half as much per time unit.

Obviously this needs to come with a fixed minimum loss to ensure that the defending pokemon eventually drops to zero motivation.


Everyone (to a maximum of six players) who participated in taking over a gym should be able to assign a defender without resorting to syncronising that action. Fine, if you can't decide within a minute you're stuck for another ten.


The combination of dropping the time for the defender bonus from one coin per hour to one coin per ten minutes and at the same time cutting the maximum reward in half is inane.

While it sucks to be me with 50 coins max a day I can live with that. Obviously I'd prefer to see the old 100 coins back. What really sucks, however, is the 10 minutes per coin. At a rate of half an hour per coin you'd need to stick a pokemon in there for a stiff day to receive the full bonus. That's more than enough. Actually the initial one coin per hour was perfectly sufficient.

As it is now there's no incentive to actively participate in gym battles and help team mates and yourself to keep the assigned pokemon inside a gym.


The 20 gym hard cap is idiotic. If anything it helps spoofers since legitimate players can't afford to lock down remote gyms. With 20 pokemon locked inside you're not participating at all.

I'm aware that the current numbers speak of a different story, but as it is no one keeps a lot of gyms since there's no point in doing so at all.

Come autumn and you'll see a landscape of desolate gyms with only the occasional spoofer and local player assigned. Whoever came up with the idea to increase the number of gyms by 30% and implement a hard cap needs to have their brain examined.


The dust reward associated with gyms is a joke. Even if Niantic wanted to cut the maximum reward in half, 125 fed pokemon on a daily basis is not going to happen.


Rant out.

Fire and Ice event, first impressions

Well, it's been live for a day now.

Triple XP for everything keyed to catching a pokemon. That's a base 300 XP for the mon itself.

Five times the XP for hatching an egg.


We're being flooded by cyndaquil and houndour. Ponita and growlithe swarm the streets as well, together with shellders, seels and swinubs. Lapras seem to spawn at an increased rate as well, but they're far from everywhere.

Strangely enough I haven't been invaded by neither slugma nor jynx.


The cost in pokeballs is brutal, which is to be expected when you're seeing two starters everywhere, but in the long run, bloody hell the XP keep pouring in.

The way I'm normally playing I'd expect around 50K XP from a day during which I can play a substanitial amount of time. That usually means walking around 20 kilometres.

Let's look at the eggs only. One ten kilometre and four five kilometre ones for some kind of low average since I tend to collect enough coins to get myself two incubators every three days. That's 15K XP during this event, from hatching eggs.

Add a low average of 400 XP per pokemon caught and my usual 200 mons caught should yield another 80K. Spin the 200 stops as usual and we have another 10K.

105K XP before I start hacking away at the gyms, and we're still looking at rather defensive numbers.


Players at the 30 to 32 level range should expect to gain a level without even trying. Add a few select lucky eggs and you're pushing two.

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.