"No 'gym stagnation' does not need fixing."

#PokemonGO: I've seen so many posts suggesting ways to fix so called gym stagnation. All of them suffer from the same flawed reasoning. Firstly why are gyms 'stagnating'? Mainly because people are getting bored attacking them, there has to be some incentive. Now people suggest all kinds of new incentives to stop gym stagnation; these incentives will cause people to presumably become more competitive faster but as everyone reaches essentially the same strength as time goes by, the drive to become stronger will quickly decline. In a sense these new incentives make the game temporarily more dynamic in the short term but actually accelerate stagnation in the long term. Lets look at a few examples:Candy rewards:Gym turnover initially increases as players battle more to gain candy, it quickly turns into a farm for snorlax/dragonite/lapras candy which causes the gyms to be stacked with snorlax/dragonite/lapras much earlier than it otherwise would have so you pay for your short term decrease in stagnation later. Seasonal purge:How about purging the gyms every so often to increase turnover? Sure it would cause a frenzy near the 'purge' time, but what about between the purges? People would actually attack less knowing they have a much more viable option during the purge. Defenders would also be less keen to prestige up given there gym would just be purged next season. The result is decreased activity most of the time. Biggest prestiger gets highest spotThe problem here is that you immediately loose your incentive to add powerful pokemon to the gyms. This creates a 'race to the bottom' where players see no point in adding a high level pokemon if they are going to be Ninth place to someone with a CP30 weedle; might aswell save on potions and add something equally expendable. And with gyms filled with low level pokemon, everyone is forced to bubblestrat all the time. And that will get tedious much faster than the current training diversity causing activity to drop off. Single type/Level cap/More types of gyms:Firstly as soon as you increase the learning curve/ complexity you immediately loose potential interaction. The bigger the learning curve the less willing people are to engage, so you already have an immediate loss in activity by making the gym game more complicated. Secondly by invariably increasing the number of gyms you are spreading the activity over a wider area; the 'density' of actions per gym will go down as the number and type of gyms increases. This sends you into a vicious cycle, less gym interactions causes people to become less interested which further reduces gym interactions. Again in the short term, the novelty will increase interactions; but nothing ever stays novel. Most of these suggestions are well thought out but all have the same flaw, they use novelty as a means to increase activity in the short term, but novelty always wears off and you still have the same issue later on. And many of these suggestions actually cause people to hit various milestones and caps quicker meaning they actually worsen the stagnation in the long term. Also think about what will happen if you add a bias every so often against defenders. Initially more people will start attacking and activity will go up, but more people will quit playing the gyms as they can't hold them so its pointless. A new equilibrium will then be reached as activity drops and once again we have gym stagnation but with fewer players. Add another bias against defenders, you loose more players, the decrease in players makes it easier to hold gyms; a new equilibrium is again reached with even less players and so on. In summary its impossible to stop this kind of evolution towards 'end game', really that's not a design flaw, every game has an 'end game'. Think of chess, you start off with a diverse set of pieces and a large number of pieces, but 50 or so moves in you just have pawns and kings. And while chess has a 'lifetime' of perhaps 50-100 moves, pokemon go gyms have a lifetime of perhaps a few months to a year. And that's damn impressive to keep people playing such a long game. Niantic has done really well, and they have clearly thought this through. TLDR: 'Stagnation' is not a design flaw, its a natural process that occurs in every game. PS: Please, if you disagree with me leave a comment and say why and we can have a discussion. If you just neg me because you disagree then neither of us can benefit from the others insights. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2d4XPXd