Gym territory and reputation part two

So I wrote that apart from persistence you need time, money and a bloody awful reputation.

It takes time to build and maintain that bloody awful reputation, and making use of all that time takes a lot of persistence.

Obviously you'll need top notch defenders to place into the gyms you're trying to hold, but in all honesty that probably only amounts to half a dozen superb defenders. You'll go a long way with three maxed blissey, two snorlax and one chansey.

If the cluster you try to hold is larger than half a dozen gyms, well then the number of premium defenders needed increases.


Anyway, money. Why money?

While you can tear down gyms in a sustainable way by spinning lots and lots of stops and gyms the daily free raid pass simply won't suffice for your defensive needs. An average of two or three raids per day is probably needed to supply you with the bare minimum requirement in terms of golden razz berries, and this is assuming you basically don't use them for catching pokemon at all.

Look forward to popping a dozen to twenty berries into gyms on a daily basis while you build that bloody awful reputation.


Next time I'll write a short post on how you start building that reputation.

Gym territory and reputation

Just because I love to necro my dead blog.

This post is about why you should play the player rather than playing the game. The context is gym battling.

The best gym defender is not blissey.

While a maxed out high IV blissey, supported by similar chansey, snorlax, and machamp-hating tertiaty defenders sandwiched between them, are indeed fantastic defenders they still take a back seat position compared to a bloody awful reputation.

I'm assuming you want to establish or maintain some kind of hegenomy over a limited number of gyms. I'm also assuming that you are more than one player, or, all gods forbid, running multiple accounts (and yes, I dislike that but it's not a personal deal breaker).

You'll need

• persistence
• persistence
• persistence
• time
• money
• a bloody awful reputation

That's it. And that's a lot.

To give me a reason to kick this blog alive again I'll stop here and expand on this theory in a few posts the coming week.

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...

Community day, June 16, a tip

In all likelyhood you've already been flooded by tips for the upcoming three hour larvitar bonanza.

So here's another one. Or rather two.

I hope you've taken note of the word 'community'. Do get them chat channels ready if you haven't already done so. Reporting high IV catches vastly increases the chance you get one yourself.


And for the second one.


With lure clusters lit up like a christmas tree you're likely to run into three minute spawns en masse. It really, really really helps if you make it clear that you caught that marvelous larvitar from a lure. Even a moderate distance is enough to make it more or less impossible to get there in time. Not only won't there be anything to catch -- people running to the spot will be confused and keep looking for something that's no longer present instead of collecting much needed larvitar candy.


Well, that's it for community day from me.

When to design it wrong

A very short strategy note here.

Common sense dictates that you place blissey as the first defender in a gym. There is, however one corner case scenario when you might want to reconsider.

To begin with, this is only done withi  context of a gym raiding community.

If you have reason to believe fellow team members will get physically close to an attacked gym in some five to fifteen minutes, and when you believe this to be true for long periods of time, then start with absolute crap in the gym.

Preferably hard hitting crap, but basically anything could go in first.


Now why would we want to do this?


1) Gyms lock for ten minutes after the first defender is kicked out. Nornally that means the blissey is kicked out. By placing shite in the gym first those ten minutes start to count down with the best defender still available for receiving berries.

2) If you're lucky you'll receive push notifications that the gym is under attack before the defending pokemon are already ousted. In such an occasion the first defender basically acts as an early warning system.


Lastly, this is very much a corner case scenario. After all it requires someone to act as a sacificial lamb, but it's hugely fun when you pull it off.

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.