"Gym stagnation - To solve the problem, you have to understand the problem, and I believe Niantic didn't. Here's what I think the problems and the proper solutions are."

#PokemonGO: In the recent update, Niantic made prestige gain through training 4 times worse than what it was relative to gym attacking, in an attempt to make it much easier.. but that's not what the issue is. It was never harder to attack than to train, quite the opposite. To attack a gym, you would take your strongest pokemon and get 500 prestige per battle. To train up a gym, you'd have to selectively choose a Pokemon with type advantage, which is a little weaker than the target you're attacking, and be quite spot-on with your dodges, resulting in a much longer battle, much riskier and you'd get only around 500-700 prestige usually per battle(Unless you're a dodging god and could take a Pokemon half the CP without dying). Accounting for lower attack and more dodging required - Training up a gym already took longer than attacking it and this update made it several times worse, so that instead of solving a problem, it's creating a new bigger one.Given the current figures, the work of one guy training up a gym for an hour could be destroyed in 15 minutes by an attacker, making it extremely pointless to train gyms up. So now that we outlined what was wrong, let's see how it should be done right.Understanding the problem - What causes gym stagnation?There's 3 main reasons, which I'll break down below:Most importantly, and the real reason for gym stagnation - There being no incentive to take down high level gyms. If there's 10 gyms in my area, five of them level 8-10 and five of them level 1-5, I'm just going to take over the low level gyms and cash out my 50 gold.Bubblestrat, allowing extremely quick gym training with ease and no waste of resources.Areas with extremely strong imbalance between the teams.What's the solution for each problem?Simple and elegant solution: Give some incentive for taking down gyms, specifically a stardust reward. For example could work wonderfully. I came up with a base formula to work off: (Prestige_removed x 0.025) x gym_level. This would motivate players to take down gyms that are higher level.Calculation examples:Example 1: You took down 5000 prestige from a level 9 gym: 5000x0.035x9 = 1575 dust. [Equivalent of catching 15 wild Pokemon]Example 2: You took down a level 3 gym completely: (2000x0.035x3)+(2000x0.035x2)+(2000x0.035x1)= 420 dust. [Equivalent to catching 4 Pokemon]Example 3: Taking down a level 10 gym from full 50,000 prestige to zero is around a 10,900 dust reward. Not a small amount, but feels just about right for taking down a whole level 10 gym by yourself. Keep in mind this is also assuming they rollback the changes they made in this update and training/attacking would work as it used to. Formula could always be tweaked.Make it so you can't put a Pokemon below 50 CP in a gym and bubblestrat would no longer be viable. It's just.. So simple.Unfortunately there's no quick cure I can come up for team imbalances in certain regions but there is somewhat of a solution to that as well: With each day a gym belongs to a certain team, the dust reward grow increase - This would allow teams which are a minority in an area to both have more motivation to take down gyms and more rewards allowing them to strengthen their pokemon even more and rebalance the status quo a bit. With a live map showing gyms like Ingress has, people from other areas might also be incentivized to visit your area to take down some high-reward gyms.Niantic's new solution makes an already tedious part of gameplay become even more tedious and some would say even somewhat pointless. Instead of pushing players away from a game mechanic, they should be encouraging players to battle that game mechanic, but making the concept of taking down high level gyms more lucrative and attractive. If the gym stagnation update is rolled back and these 3 solutions are implemented, I believe not only would gym stagnation cease to exist, but the game would also be significantly more fun and balanced.Edit: I'd like to point out there's a few more issues that affect it, some of which you brought up as well, like the gym error bug, like the fact it doesn't remember the previous lineup of Pokemon when training or how when a Pokemon dies it goes back to the previous low hp pokemon instead of moving to the one ahead of it, etc. Those are all things that contribute to gym stagnation and discourage training, but they're easily corrected as simple bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Plus, they should have been fixed long ago and I'm hoping Niantic is aware of them. In my post however, I tried to focus on the meta and more central aspects of gameplay when it comes to gym stagnation. Just wanted to edit and point out in this paragraph the small things that also ruin gameplay when trying to training as they didn't get enough attention in the main post. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2fgQIN0