"Gym update has fixed the meta in my area"

#PokemonGO: Like many players here, my initial reaction to the change was optimism about the battling buff, but disappointment at the nerf to training. I really enjoyed the fast training after the last update, and it's less fun when you get less prestige. However, after today's gym run I'm forced to conclude that the changes have been good for the game, at least in my area.I live in a residential part of a mid-sized city and work downtown. I'm level 29, which is midrange for gym participants here, and Mystic, which is the dominant team. Before the latest update, I was sitting pretty in 12 gyms on average throughout the week, and would just need to pick up a few on weekends to maintain it. After the update, my stable gyms fell to 6 until I decided to make a push this weekend.And it turns out the update has done our gyms nothing but good. Blue is still the most commonly seen color, which makes sense since Mystic has the most members here, but level 10 gyms are now very rare. Before this update, my typical gym run involved driving around looking for that rare gym that had been knocked down below 10; now I can interact with virtually every gym I encounter, and so can everyone else. There are still high-level gyms out there. But gyms with a lot of foot traffic are contested again: my first stop today was a park with 2 gyms, which had been blue towers for several weeks pre-update. Today there were families and groups of young kids running around fighting the gyms, which were flipping back and forth between Valor and Instinct. (I left of course, because who wants to kick out a 10-year-old?) At other local gyms I actually got to battle again, which would have felt too greedy before the update.So, now I'm sold on the update. I can still collect 100 coins - but I have to actually go out and do gym runs for them, not just hit the button the moment I wake up, which is as it should be. Gym runs can be local again, rather than scouting far and wide for level 9 gyms, and most importantly, lower-level players in my area can actually play the gym game again. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2fNupzs