"[Anecdote] Elitist mentalities are spoiling the game for at least one small city"

#PokemonGO: Folks be crazy about Pokémon Go up in North Dakota:So for new years I was visiting my home town in North Dakota. There were a handful of gyms (maybe 10-15), a couple of locations with sparse pokestops, but the town was otherwise a semi-barren wasteland with a bias for rock/ground and fighting pokemon. I noticed a lot of valor gyms struggling to keep hold, whereas the Mystic gyms were VERY stagnant. Most of the bottom defenders started from cp2400-2700 with a lot of repeating names. These gyms were filled with what I wager to be an elite group of high 20 to 30’s level players. On my first day with some time to myself, I knocked down one stagnant gym next to my parents’ house as well as a curious gym with 7 of 10 slots occupied by Chansey. My Snorlax soldiers didn’t stick around for long in said gyms, so I figured I’d check in with the local team Valor Facebook group to see if I could help claim some additional red territory while I’m around.After getting in touch with a local authority, I discovered that I apparently violated a treaty between the red and blue teams without knowing it. They had a few gyms off limits to each other, but the rogue element (Team Instinct) dedicates all its focus to harassing Valor. In that sense, nobody ever touches Mystic, and everyone else seems to make Team Valor a living hell. Said authority tipped me off that it would make a lot of folks smile if a couple of a couple of Mystic gyms in a particular area of town went down.To avoid confusion, let’s just call these gyms by letters. I begin hitting Gym A, a gym so high that the bottom started at cp2700. I had JUST finished the run-through when a car comes scooting up, parks RIGHT next to me, and they glitch locked me out by training it up a level right as I was dropping it. I patiently waited a few minutes, attacked a second time, and noticed second attacker in the battle next to me, which immediately vanished before I glitched out again. They were using a dummy valor account to glitch lock me out of their gym. I ran off to the second location from the tip, and repeated the process with Gym B. I once again was glitch-locked out, but I couldn’t see the source. Not one to be discouraged by fowl play, I returned to Gym A and resumed attacking it again despite a different car in it’s place.A KINDER and FRIENDLIER mystic player approached me as I resumed attacking Gym A, and he identified the violating player to me. Not only this, he advised me that the woman stated right before departing that she was going to run home to swap vehicles. Even this fellow mystic player found it to be an absolute dick move to use a dummy account to lock me out and then tail me in an unknown vehicle. I conceded to leave him and his girlfriend in peace, and then returned home for dinner. Along the way, I saw a couple of vacancies in Valor gyms so I dropped off another two Snorlax on the way home. For those who are counting, I have 3 Snorlax in gyms by this point. So during dinner, I was chatting up the local Valor authority and discovered that this woman was not very sportsman like at all. During our conversation, I noticed that all three of my Snorlax had been eliminated form well established gyms in the span of minutes. This would have required an orchestrated effort as they were on opposite ends of town and two of the gyms were very high level.In euphemistic parlance, the poo poo had just got personal.I drove straight over to Gym C near my parents' house (on the opposite side of town) and get to work, only to see an enormous Ford Expedition pull up right behind me and park a couple feet away from my rear bumper with their lights still on. I was still just getting past level 7. Very clearly these people had contacts sounding the alarm on my location. It was dark so their fear tactics certainly had me feeling flustered, but I kept playing. They didn't try to glitch lock me out this time though. I just kept the car in drive and continued working down the levels. I knocked the gym down to zero, dropped in a Smoochum, and raced off to another location with said perpetrator.Gym D was a baseball field a block from my house with a massive open parking lot where no one could hide, and attempting to crowd my bumper could justify a call to the police. All the same, the vehicle still showed up after a few minutes, except this time I didn't just pick up one creeper, I had two. I was pointed toward the parking lot exit and was flanked on two sides by the Expedition on one side and an even bigger Chevy Silverado 4-door diesel on the other. I dropped Gym D down to zero while my creepers did nothing, deployed ANOTHER Smoochum, and then returned to Gym C to repeat the process.By time I got back, Gym C was level 6 again. I knocked it down, ignored the two flanking vehicles, and returned to the baseball field. If you can’t tell already, I led these two vehicles on a merry chase back and forth between those two gyms. They weren't using lures, there was nothing to catch, they just sat there and glowered at me. I could even see their screen reflections off the inside windows. They weren't doing anything. For nearly two hours, these four people tailed me around to reclaim any gyms in my wake. I figured that at some point their frustrations might just turn into rage even despite temps of -8 and wind chills down below -20.It’s one thing to employing exploits to try and stop me from attacking these elitist towers, but I can’t abide by elitist jerks that prevent anyone else from reaping the benefits. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2iKgrBQ