Topic: Pokemon Go

@nf_2
Swings and roundabouts. Some of the changes make the game a bit more of a chore but it's balanced by other things. For example taking down a gym is now slower because you're taking CP off the Pokemon rather than prestige off the gym. But you're taking CP from the Pokemon so they get weaker every time you battle. They also get weaker over time if the other team isn't maintaining it. It's the same across the board.

The new way to earn coins is based on how many hours the Pokemon was in the Gym when its returned. It used to be that you'd get 10 coins for every Gym when the timer went to 0. So on the one hand if you are in an area with a quick gym turnover you're kinda screwed. You now have to hold a gym for 10 hours to claim 10 coins. But at the same time you can now get 24 coins per day per gym rather than 10.

Same deal with the reduced number of slots in gyms. Now a gym will hold 6 Pokemon instead of 10. Which helps the game because full strength gyms are now easy to take down. But it also means less people can be on the gym at once. However they've also added more gyms. In my area I counted 13 gyms where there used to be 9. So its dropped from 90 to 78 slots. However those 78 slots are now open from the start. Before the update gyms would either have 10 Pokemon or 3. Now it's almost universally 5 or 6.

Overall I think they've vastly improved the game.

@skywake There's definitely a lot of give and take for the gyms. I think overall I'm for it because I like that I can actively support my gyms. I definitely like how gyms have 6 slots open no matter what instead of the prestige system. I think the balance they found with keeping higher CP Pokemon in gyms while still allowing lower CP monsters to remain relevant to a gym is pretty clever. Overall I think owning a gym is a bit easier.

As an aside, feeding berries to Pokemon in gyms does give you a small amount of stardust (I got 20 regardless of whether I owned the Pokemon) in addition to the badge experience.

I'm still unsure how the badge system is going to work in terms of rewards, but since gyms still provide coins, I'm not going to be too upset either way.

@nf_2
Well today I got three Pokemon in gyms and two have been returned for 13 coins. The third is still in the gym after 10 hours. So in theory I'm about 7 coins short of what I would have got under the old system but with every hour that passes I'm 1 coin closer. I think that overall I'm probably going to get more out of this system.

I'm a little confused at to how coins are actually awarded from gyms now. I've had Pokemon returned to me that have been in gyms for literally 2 days and I receive no coins, while some are returned after a couple of hours with 50 coins. I have no idea if it matters if they've won battles or not, but there's no obvious rhyme or reason to receiving coins.

EDIT: I just read that there is a daily limit of 100 coins. There is also a cap of 50 coins per Pokemon returned. So having a Pokemon in a gym for 5 hours gives you the max for that Pokemon.

Also, raid battles are pretty neat so far. The raid pass system is fine I guess (I'm not surprised there's potential to monetize it), but I do wish you could just collect your daily raid passes instead of being capped at having one at a time unless you buy more. Raids themselves are pretty straight forward. I easily defeated a Meganium on my own this morning as it was only 4500 CP (with only a Cloyster no less), but I've seen other higher levels Pokes hovering up to 27000 CP. The reward system from raids is pretty neat too. I got a couple rare candies from winning that match, and I was given several Premier Balls to catch Meganium after the battle (they disappear afterwards from what I can tell). If nothing else it's something different, and it prevents stagnancy from gyms. The Raid Bosses are also present for an hour, instead of the 5 minutes that was initially announced, but you only have so much time to battle with each raid pass.

Pretty sure Meganium isn't a raid Pokemon, do you mean Bayleaf?

A bizarre story involving the Lib Dems and a 30-man Pokémon GO brawl turned out to be fake news

http://uk.businessinsider.com/pokmon-go-surrey-brawl-story-is...

So how many people still play? I recently picked the game back up after not playing since well before Gen 2 Pokemon got added and was pleasantly surprised with many of the improvements. After playing for about a week I can tell that, at least in my area, the game is still pretty active with players as Gyms are changing hands with relative frequency.

Also I heard TMs were added, but I haven't found any, are they not from Pokestops?

@Heavyarms55
Yup, lots of changes. You get TMs from raids which were introduced mid last year. This is how you get legendary Pokemon in the game although those higher level raids with legendaries need to be taken down in a group. But there are lower level raids with more common Pokemon which also sometimes drop TMs. They also recently added a quest system where you perform research tasks. When you complete these they also give you an encounter with a legendary Pokemon.

They also now have fairly regular "community day" events. These revolve around a specific Pokemon often with a specific and unique trait like surfing Pikachu but also have bonuses like longer lure times etc. Lastly gen 3 Pokemon were added towards the end of last year as well as shiny Pokemon. And if I was to guess we're probably not that far from them releasing gen 4.

A good time to start playing again.

I still play regularly. The research/quest system is one of the best features they've added to the game imo.

Hey guys, question. So my friend in the states and I got the (not so?) bright idea that we could log into each other's accounts so she could get the Japan exclusives and I could get the US ones. We were able to log in just fine, but when we tried to do anything, nothing worked. Every Pokemon runs away instantly after one ball, can't put Pokemon on gyms, and cannot collect Pokestops. We came to the idea that this is some kind of penalty for seemingly teleporting around the world.

Anyway, my question, how does the penalty work? Is it a time limit? If neither of us log on for say, 24 hours, then log in in the other country, will it work? Has anyone tried this? Perhaps 48 hours?

@Heavyarms55 I haven't heard of that penalty but I don't think you'll be able to get the region exclusives by switching accounts. You can only find the Japan exclusives when you're actually in Japan (for example), so logging into another account won't change that.

@Dogorilla I know that. I live in Japan, she lives in the US. The plan was that we would log into each other's accounts in our respective locations and then catch the exclusives for each other.

@Heavyarms55 Ah. Yes. Ignore me.

So my friend and I are experimenting. She lives in the US and I live in Japan. Before when we tried to log into each other's accounts in our respective towns, we could not catch Pokemon, place Pokemon in gyms or collect Pokestops. We came to the conclusion that it was because we were both just playing ourselves at home - thus it appeared that we teleported to the other side of the planet in the blink of an eye. So the game was penalizing us. We've waited about a week and we both logged out. We are going to wait 48 hours and log into each other's accounts again. The hope is, to catch each other's regional exclusive Pokemon and get gym badges and pokestops in each other's regions. IF it works, we are gonna try it again with a 3rd friend in Australia. I'll share the results tomorrow. The idea is, it has been a week since we tried it before and it will have been 2 days since a previous log in. The hope is that the game will just think we actually traveled to each other's country.

Has anyone else here tried doing something like this? Do you think it will work?

These people better not take forever to actually allow us to submit Stop locations, if it ever happens I MIGHT play this game again...I've been sick of paying $5 or whatever just to catch a couple of Pokemon in an hour or two.

Update: It works!

Has anyone else had any problems logging into the game over the last few days? Every time I open it it just says 'Failed to log in'.

@Dogorilla I have run into that before, especially when I used my Pokemon Trainer Club account to log in. I suggest linking it to your Google or Apple account and logging in that way. It tends to work better for me. If you are still having issues, try force stopping it from your apps menu and then restarting it.

@Heavyarms55 Yeah, I logged in with my PTC account, and after looking on reddit this seems to be a common problem after a recent update. Someone on there suggested clearing the app's data and cache, so I did that and it seems to have solved the problem.

Pokemon Go was a phenomenon again. On the community day we just had on Saturday, I was playing in Kyoto, and it was just like the game was during the height after it released. Dozens and dozens of people visibly playing it, men and women, kids, teens, adults and even at least one elderly couple that I saw! And I don't know why, but the event ran long in Japan. It was, as far as I know, only supposed to last 3 hours. But it ran at least 4.5 hours (which is when I stopped because my feet hurt and I had 11 shiny larvitar!)

Perhaps to word that the game will connect to Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee plus the nice summer weather, has pumped the game back up!