"Above all else, GBL seems designed to be a time suck"

#PokemonGO: I reached Rank 10 in preseason and S1 fairly easily, but I mean that in terms of performance. I won somewhere between 58-63% of my matches and churned forward pretty consistently, with only a handful of stinker sets really slowing me down. The time it took to reach Rank 10 at that fairly respectable win rate is another issue entirely. My 410-260 record at the time I reached Rank 10 in S1 translates to roughly 44 hours of gameplay, assuming each battle averages to around four minutes a pop, with matching time included. Nearly two full days to get an outfit, a pose, and the 82nd costumed Pikachu in the game.  Even at the time of reaching that pretty cool accomplishment in the game, that seemed like a lot.Rank 10 should be reserved for the best of the best. Rarefied air and all of that. But when that rarefied air becomes as much about volume as it is actual performance, then it seems fair to question Niantic's priorities with GBL. Is it here to prove who's the best at PVP? Or is it here to get people who like PVP to dump 44 hours into it? I felt even at the start of S2 that the answer was the latter and vowed that I wasn't going to go out of my way to reach Rank 10 this time around. The meta is stagnant. The rewards have barely changed at all. The only somewhat new incentive seems to be the leaderboard that only 500 players out of millions are going to finish on. On the whole, those don't add up to a carrot worth reaching for, at least from my perspective. Fast forward to today, and the bottom five trainers on the leaderboard sit at a battle rating of 2526. Their battle counts: 445, 374, 388, 479, 461. That's an average of 429 battles, or nearly 29 hours worth  to still be mired roughly halfway between Ranks 8 and 10. Among those five trainers is no less than KiengIV, possibly the most well-known PVPer of all time.Their scores put them only about 100 points ahead of me with more than twice the number of battles. I'm sitting at 2394 with 188 bouts, looking at their battle counts and wondering how double the number of battles I've already played for that smidgen of progress could possibly be worth it. That's before I even factor in the state of things at my current rung on the ladder. It's littered with former Rank 10s, with their Steven outfits and poses, serving only to tell most players "I am good. You should probably force close." We are still not remotely close to Rank 10 and face having to climb over each other again and again to get there. It is hard not to look at all of those factors and conclude anything other than my title. This is a time suck. A massive one. That's the point of it, and not much else.If the goal with GBL MMR was to pair players of similar ability so that their win rate stabilizes around 50-50, the resets from season to season would not be nearly as harsh. The top players would get a fairly easy path to the upper reaches of Rank 9 and have to scratch and claw for progress from there. Players toward the middle would not have to contend with former Rank 10s at every turn. We'd get metas that change ... ever ... to help the skills gaps from narrowing to the point of total stagnation. And they might even consider splitting the leagues for MMR purposes, as success in one doesn't necessarily translate to success in the other. Instead, this is the system we have, one that rewards an endless grind seemingly above all else. You certainly need to be good to reach the summit. But having reached it twice, it's hard to shake the feeling that the only thing I've really proved to myself is how much of my time I've been willing to give to Niantic. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2XOzL3I