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.

The fire and ice week is almost here

So, what to do?


Grabbing XP

If you're interested in that extra XP, leave that PoGo Plus at home You want to catch manually to get the bonuses.

The XP bonuses are keyed to first throws, curve balls and placing a nice, great or excellent ball.

If you've rebuilt the pidgey storage you depleted during the last XP-event, well, at least Lucky Eggs are half price. While you won't get more XP for mass evolving you'll do so for cheaper.


Extra XP is fine and everything, but I'm after the mons!

I've been looking for lapras, but I don't see it mentioned. Still hoping since it's an ice-type after all. Apart from lapras there really isn't anything fun in the ice departement.

Charizard for those of you who are still lacking a good one for bragging rights. Typhlosion for the same reason. Houndoom might get the candy reserve for pushing one a bit.

For the collector I guess there's always ninetails.

Did I forget flareon? No, I didn't. Eevee isn't a fire type pokemon, and I doubt the streets will become flooded by eevee evolves.

If you're unlucky you'll get swamped by slugma again.


What to aim for?

I'd go for charmander, cyndaquil, houndour, and if they do spawn more often, lapras.

Maybe vulpix if I didn't already have enough candy to push my best ninetails should such a day ever arrive.

More news, event and gyms

The fire and ice event is verified. June 13 to June 20.

The gym revamp is finally coming. It's not set in time, but 'soon after' the fire and ice event.

Gyms will become disabled for an unknown amount of time prior when the new system goes live, and all trainers will get their assigned pokemon returned. Some kind of warning beforehand will be issued as well.

Throughout the summer some kind of events will occur at Unibail-Rodamco shopping centres in Europe.

Adding a pokemon mid-prestige

So you and your friends are adding prestige to a gym. It's going up pretty fast and then suddenly the gym is counter attacked.

You basically have four options, and some of them can be combined:

• Burn through the opposition
• Start populating the gym mid-prestige
• Hover around a level break (30 or 40 K prestige)
• Give up

The first option is best used when you notice that the prestige lost can't be compared to the prestige gained.

The second is there for two reasons. One is that you gain 2K prestige when you assign a pokemon to the gym, and the second is to force an error on the attacker.

The third option is mainly a combined burst just as the gym falls below a break point to push i a level and quickly assign a pokemon to the gym.

The fourth, well, you can't win all battles.

The most interesting one is how to assign a pokemon in order to force an error on the attacker. Basically the game gives you the gym line-up when you enter combat. If the next opponent changes during mid-fight, then you're likely to get an error. That error usually prevents you from fighting in the gym for a few minutes. That time should be more than enough to push the gym and populate it.

Hence you should slot in pokemon where they're likely to create this error. Just remember to communicate between raid members. You're just as likely to enforce this error on one of your own, so make certain team members have finished fighting, or are fighting a pokemon where they won't be subjected to the error.

Even more rumours, fire and ice event

According to this, and a few other, articles, there's another week long event coming up.

This time it's fire and ice type pokemon that's going to invade the spawn points.

If the leaked information is correct the event should occur June 13 to June 20. If so it'll most likely start at 10 pm CET.

Rather than a flat 100% xp-increase the experience point bonus seems to be keyed to catching pokemon with xp-bonuses for first ball, nice catch, etc increased as well as an increased XP-reward for hatching eggs. Lucky eggs should come at half the standard price.

Once again, this is not confirmed.

Finish the job, why you shouldn't stop halfway

Obviously we sometimes run out of time when we're attacking a gym and have to leave it. Well, it's bad but that can't be helped.

I've also heard the argument that someone else can clean out the last five or six levels in a gym because the hard job is already done.


Sooo, what to make out of the last argument.

It's true that burning a gym down from 52K to 19K represents the bulk of the job, but what's left inside the gym is usually the real defenders standing below the utter crap at the top, mostly consisting of the shitty four.

So people tire of not getting two or three cheap kills and leave the gym. And that's pretty bad.


Let's have a look at it from the other side.

Let's say I'm walking around town with a playing friend. Between us we have access to one prestige account for bubbling (content in link partially obsolete). It's pushing the rules, and it'll vanish when bubbling simply isn't worth it in terms of prestige, but it's the standard setup in raiding teams.

If we tear down a rival gym we pass by we'll either drop and walk or drop a prestiger inside and push it to 20, assign two defenders and walk away. In either case it's easy prey for rival players.

Now let's se what happens when we walk into a level five friendly gym. It sports a blissey, a vaporeon, another blissey, a dragonite and one tyranitar. I assume you can guess the order, and it explains why someone left it standing.

Another rival player (rival to us at least) probably found it at 15K prestige and applied my theory about when to stop attacking if short on time, so the gym is now at 13K prestige.

Blissey is admittedly a major pain to prestige against, but this friendly gym is golden for two raiding players. Pushing seven thousand prestige against this kind of opposition isn't happening though, so we'll settle for three.

At 16K prestige a prestige defender goes inside and the gym pops to 18K. Two quick fights and the gym stands at 20K, at which time another defender goes inside, most likely a vaporeon or snorlax if it's our local raiders we're talking about. Let's say another vaporeon that drops between the two blisseys already inside the gym.

22K.

Eight quick prestige battles later the other player will drop a snorlax inside and we walk away.

The gym now has the following composition: 32K, prestige pokemon, blissey, vaporeon, vaporeon, blissey, snorlax, dragonite and tyranitar.

It's likely to be pushed down to 29K quickly to remove the prestige pokemon, or if another two friendly players arrive it'll hit the full 52K prestige.


So, if you have the time, better finish the job.