Gym territory and reputation part five

So you've decided on maintaining a gym territory. This translates into maintaining a bad reputation.

For this you need:

• Persistence
• Visibility
• Friends
• Maintainability

Persistence

The previous posts covered this. You attack enemy gyms and defend your own. You do this even when it's boring like hell, or just give up on those gyms.

Visibility

You need to be out there. If you've decided on a temporal aspect for your territory (in my personal case evenings and nights), you'll naturally be attacking enemy gyms. However, don't forget to get out there from time to time and defend them on-site.

If the gyms you're targetting is close to where you are, be it living, education or work, use that opportunity whenever possible to go on-site and refill a partially attacked gym. By partially I'm referring to a gym that lost a couple of defenders but were succesfully berried for ten minutes. This is especially important when one of the ousted defenders belonged to you. No one likes to see a defending player returning to a berried gym.

From time to time you ought to get to gyms outside of the conditions you've set up for your territory. Be it boss raids or tearing down a gym outside of temporal conditions is you've set those up.

If at all possible try to set the gyms up for your team prior to boss raids. This is especially true if the gyms are considered central for wherever you're playing.

Friends

Maintaining gym territory simply isn't done by a single player. Sure, you might run six accounts pouring cash into each of them, but if you do then you don't need to read this post in the first place.

Three players should be considered a minimum for maintaining territory. Half a dozen is, obviously, preferred. The territory I'm part of keeping up is primarily handled by four players.

Your group of friends should keep up a live means of communicating. A chat is perfect, but don't forget to meet in real life. This is especially true for attacking gyms when they're controlled by enemy teams. Two or three players tear down a gym in no time at all to a fantastically reduced cost in time and resources.

Make your friends into friends in the game as well. Up to ten percent added damage to a berried blissey does wonders for demotivating a defending player.

Players being physically close to the territory are best for being secondary attackers. By that I mean that players needing to spend time to get to the gyms should start attacks and report this over whatever communication channel you use. It's a matter of a few minutes for the secondary attacker to join.

Make sure you've more or less agreed on the conditions set up for the territory.

Maintainability

Potions, revives, berries and time are the deciding factors for handling gyms. Add attackers and defenders into the equation.

You need to dare emptying your bag of items you don't use to capacity. You also need to spin stops and gyms like mad to keep up your item-income. If you're serious about gyms this probably translates into discarding pokeballs in favour of space for potions, revives and berries.

You want to open 20 or as close to 20 gifts every day. They're an important source for max revives and max potions.

Make realistic conditions for the territory. More often than not this translates into adding temporal conditions. If your territory includes a university with lots of active enemy players you're unlikely to be able to hold the gyms during daytime, and conversely if you're a student there as well as your friendly players then make certain daytime is part of your territory.

Don't try to keep a territory larger than the number of maxed out blissey, chansey and snorlax you can place into them. You might get away with two grade A defenders in a gym or two, but your goal should be to have all three in a gym.

Next post on some interesting side effects.

Gym territory and reputation part four

With the influx of golden razz berries strangled you'll either need to boss raid a lot or feed your gyms smarter.

Assuming that you don't have the option to join five or more boss raids on a daily basis we'll have a closer look at smart berry feeding. Sure, if you can collect thirty plus berries a day then go ahead and spam those gyms.


Now, let's say you're limited to ten to fifteen berries a day. Any less and you're basically unable to defend gyms. Free to play simply doesn't cut it. So three or four raids a day. Yup, that means you're buying coins. Two or three if the opposition isn't all that serious about taking back the gyms.


Stick to feeding the big three. This especially if the gym you're defending sees a lot of traffic. You should be able to allow the crap to get ousted and see a new set of crap inserted. Most attackers drop off when the gym is repopulated.

In fact most attackers leave the gym if the blissey receives one golden razz berry. So that first berry is by far the most important.


Create a chat for handling gyms. After all it's impossible to reliably defend gyms alone, or at least with one account. During the occasions where attacking players get serious one feeder just doesn't cut it, but two can very often shut down the gym indefinitely.


Dare to see your gyms going down, but also be prepared to get out there and fix the damage if it's done while the conditions for the gym 'being yours' are met. Unless you're defending the gym prior to a juicy raid, just let it go down whenever you know that fellow players are inbound.


Next post on maintaining a bad reputation.

Gym territory and reputation part three

So, how to build that reputation.

Attacking

The first half basically requires you to spin gyms and stops as well as opening presents like mad. Cause you're out there tearing down enemy gyms, and it's going to cost you lots and lots of potions and revives.

It doesn't have to be 24/7, but there needs to be a system to it. Like, for example, you're attacking between 6 pm and 9 pm.

Worst case you'll be seeing an absurd amount of golden razz berries fed into the gyms you're targetting. Doesn't matter. Either they go down or you're not building that reputation.

This is why you don't want to do this alone. Two attackers cut the time and resources needed to one third of what's required of a solo attacker.


Now, most would argue that attacking gyms on a schedule makes you predictable and easier to launch berries against. That's absolutely correct. This is not about a suprise assault on one or more gyms. This is all about establishing a reputation. Predictable is good as long as the end result invariably is that the gyms go down.

You want the experience I have with my seven closest gyms. I attack during day time and I can expect a lot of berries thrown after me. I attack evenings and most defenders will simply yield the gym even if said defenders did indeed throw a few golden razz berries into the gym. Because if it's evening those gyms are going down. End of story.


Atacking gyms is also a matter of presence. Preferably you live close to the gyms you're interested in. If one of them gets miscoloured when it's supposed to belong to your team, then you go out there and rectify the error.


Last, attacking gyms does contain a certain amount of realism. If you're unable to control them 24/7, then don't even try. Just establish a schedule when they're going down and allow enemy teams to control them off hours, according to your definition of off hours.

Next post on defence.

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...