"Observation: Pokemon Go works best as a game in midsized cities. Rural areas have too little. Big cities have too much and their gym balance is a mess."

#PokemonGO: Crossposted to /r/pokemongo.I've traveled around a bit while playing Pokemon Go, and this is just an idle observation I've made about the state of the game.I live in Austin, TX, USA, which I'd consider a midsize city, and the game works quite well as a whole here.There's no crazy Central Park that has everything all the time, but this makes nests more meaningful. One of my favorite parts of the game is how it has encouraged me to go out and explore parks I'd never heard of before in order to collect rare Pokemon you can't easily get elsewhere.For those times when you just want to walk around lures and spin stops and be around a crowd all playing, the Capitol building in downtown is usually lured and full of people.I'm even okay with the fact that not everything is available here. There are no credible accounts I've seen of Lapras ever having spawned in Austin, but that's okay, it makes it that much more special when you get one from an egg or someone travels elsewhere and brings one back. I actually think it's pretty cool there are some Pokemon you can't catch here, it makes the game feel deeper.The gyms are all contested, but not contested to the point where it's bad except for the couple in the middle of downtown. If you leave a gym in the level 1-5 range, it's probably not going to last more than a few hours. However, if you take the time to build a gym up to level 7-10, the training is hard but it might last for a week or more as a reward. If you put your mind to it and train hard for your team, it's possibly to collect the max cap of 100 coins every day. Doing so is actually fairly deep and a lot like end-game raiding content in other games. This feels very balanced, like how the game is supposed to work.In contrast, in rural areas the problems with the game are obvious and have been gone over at length here - there just isn't enough to do or catch.The problems in cities haven't been talked about enough I think. I find the game clearly less fun when you can just walk in circles in Central Park and achieve a full Pokedex. Players could still choose in theory to go out to nests to collect specific Pokemon, but as have been observed before, in games players will always gravitate to winning in the most efficient means possible, even if it means less fun for themselves. Thus, it's up to game designers to ensure that the game balance rewards players for doing things that would let them have fun. In the case of the big cities, this balance feels off.Furthermore, in the big cities, gyms are under attack almost all the time. There's no point in building a gym up to level 10, it'll just be taken down again in 10 minutes. There's no point in walking down the street to try and take another gym to collect another bonus, someone will have taken your previous gym before you can get there. There's no point in fighting a gym at all actually, because there's a good chance it'll get sniped before you can add. Instead, the most efficient strategy is to just wait near a gym for others to battle, and they definitely will because there are so many people, and then snipe the gym when they take it down. In short, the entire gym system is broken and unbalanced in the cities.I've loved this game since it came out, and a big part of that I think in retrospect is because I got lucky enough to live in one of the places where the game is balanced and actually works like it's supposed to.Edit: More ruminations on this.The way I play the game over time has also changed, enabled by the mid-sized city dynamics. When I first started playing, I just went to where the crowds were, and caught lots of the basic Pokemon fast. Then when I started to want more of the rares, I went to nests, exploring and finding the specific Pokemon I needed. Then as my Pokedex started to get close to full, I got into the gym attacking game. As I got stronger Pokemon over time I got into gym training game.Now, I like to travel around the city looking for promising gyms to train up. There's a decent amount of nuance to this, including how strong the gym is, where it's located, whether this gym has been contested in the past, what Pokemon are already in the gym, how easy the bottom defender is to train, etc. A lot of people have criticized this game for being shallow, but I find this late-game content actually fairly deep with strong elements of multiplayer psychology.This strikes me as an entire aspect of the game that doesn't seem to be as available in the big cities, given how hard it is to hold gyms there. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2czygzN