"PoGo, Hearthstone, and Gyms. 2 Big Ideas to "insure" players Stardust investments and create more meaningful gameplay."

#PokemonGO: TLDR on the bottom. Now, these aren't all my own original ideas. Credit for most of these ideas and thoughts goes to /r/TheSilphRoad community, where I've seen a lot of these ideas scattered around various threads/comments. I'm making this post because I think it'd be valuable to collect all these ideas together in to a single post.And I'm not making this post to rag on Niantic, Niantic has done a great job changing the game for the better. I'm much happier with the state of the game today then where it was in the past, but I think some additional changes like the ones below could go a long long way towards creating more content and meaningful gameplay. Now on to the 3(surprise 3rd!) ideas.1: Introduce a "disenchant" mechanic similar to Hearthstone's disenchant system. PoGo would keep track of how much Stardust you invest in powering up Pokemon, and if you decide to transfer that pokemon, it would refund you a portion of the total Stardust you spent leveling up that Pokemon.Current game mechanics encourages players to hoard as much Stardust as possible while only spending it as carefully as possible.My proposed mechanic would encourage players to more freely use Stardust without being so fearful of future changes and without fear of being too broke to LV up new teams for future super important raids/gen releases.When Niantic makes large balance/mechanic changes, like the recent(massive) gym overhaul, they could grant a brief period where players can transfer pokemon for full refunds of all the Stardust invested in them.This mechanic would create greater freedom for Niantic to change/re-balance the game without fear of screwing over the playerbase by making previously useful Pokemon useless.(like Rhydon)2: Introduce experience mechanics. Pokemon can gain experience(or stardust/candy) by battling Also, reward more experience that scales with how much stronger the defending Pokemon is than your attacker. And finally, re-introduce "Training" against your own team's gyms. As well as experience, training could reward points towards that gym's badge as well as maybe(or maybe not) filling up the defending Pokemon's motivation meter.This would encourage trainers to battle with virtually any Pokemon you wanna power up, not just the most efficient ones or the highest powered up ones.Caught a Zapdos? Now you have a reason to immediately start using him and battling gyms with him to gain him experience and power him up. With the current system, if you don't have enough stardust you have to watch him do nothing in your inventory while you spend weeks doing the catch/hatch/berry grind to eventually level him up.If you miss the "increased difficulty" of the old training mode, this would effectively bring it back. If you have a Pokemon you wanna LV up via battling, you're incentivized to pit him against the strongest defender possible, which would reward that Pokemon with more experience.Like in the old training mode, type advantages matter a lot more again. If you have a weak fire type, you can take advantage of grass's weakness to fire by fighting even stronger grass types for even more experience/reward.Starters will actually be useful with a pseudo progression of walking -> battling. With the current game states, most players universally agree it's an utter waste to spend stardust on LV 1 starters. With these changes, that won't be the most optimal practice anymore. Rarly level players can start out leveling up their starters via walking+catching+hatching for stardust/candy, and once their starter is strong enough they can use the starter to battle, further gaining that Pokemon experience. Once the trainer is a higher level and decides their starter is useless, they can easily transfer it for a portion of the stardust they invested in to it and spend it on stronger Pokemon they might need for any reason.On top of that, the motivation decay mechanics are given even more purpose. It'd typically be very hard for very early level players to find Pokemon in gyms weak enough to train up their own 100-500 CP Pokemon, but thanks to motivation decay they'd have plenty of opportunities to find those training moments.Surprise 3: New event idea. When a Fire(or any type) event comes around that increases the spawn rate of fire Pokemon, it should also increase the effectiveness of fire attacks. And maybe, as an additional effect, maybe certain type events could decrease the effectiveness of other types. Like a Fire event making Fire attacks stronger and Water attacks weaker.Pokemon attacks like "Sunny Day" from the original Pokemon series will probably never make it to Pokemon GO, this could be a nifty way for PokemonGO to implement them.It'd encourage players to invest in powering up Pokemon of every type.During a Fire event, it'd make fire types even more effective in gym battles and raids.At the same time, it'd make certain defenders and raids(like Moltres during a Fire event) even more difficult to take down.These kinds of semi-frequent type events would be healthy for the Gym meta, because during the event it would throw the Gym meta in to flux. Pokemon that are typically top tier defenders and top tier attackers might not be top tier for a brief time, and other lesser used Pokemon might be top tier that never were before. Same deal for the Raid-meta.I don't know if PokemonGO could technically handle this(my game crashes enough already), but Niantic could introduce graphical changes during these type events too. During a Grass event, the sun could be visibly shining down in the background while you walk around and during battle. Everything could look wet during a water event. Maybe an in-game, week long eclipse where moonlight increases the effectiveness of psychics/fairies. Etc. etc.That's it! Feel free to respond with constructive feedback and arguments.TLDR:Upgrade the Transfer button so it refunds a portion of the Stardust you've spent powering up that pokemon.Have gym battles give scaling Stardust as a reward, as well as bring back "Training" to the game.EDIT: Gonna give a shoutout. These two redditor's were behind the two most recent threads I saw sharing ideas exactly like the ones I proposed here. Thanks for the ideas/motivation /u/slimwhoisdirtay(who made a recent thread about re-specing stardust) and /u/zzsquared(who made a thread about battles giving experience.) via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2wxyfoa