90 % sure it ' s Kimi ni Todoke . <| sep |> You got any salamander pies ? <| sep |> I really like the combat res idea , since you ' re totally right that hiding for a huge rez is a bad mechanic . Instead of loading charges , however , I think that you should still be stopped at 100 % charge , but then you get a refund based on how many people you rez . For example , if you solo rez you ' ll get 50 % charge back , two to three could be 25 % refund , and above three would be zero charge refund . <| sep |> I work in the earthmoving industry so there ' s always dirt and sand flying around . So it gets behind the door and scratches when it comes on and off . Not to mention I keep the doors very tight ! <| sep |> I see no reason why they can ' t satisfy both sides of the argument . The old gym mechanics were actually really well balanced but there were some external factors that were spoiling the system . Bubblestrat was a major cause of the problems . Lack of incentivization being another obvious and glaring issue with the system . There are incentives to do gyms , but not to participate in them longer term . Once you collect your rewards , you basically have no more incentive to participate until the next day . For more casual players , they need instant gratification , and this can spoil many game features for the more hardcore players . And let ' s be real here when I call myself a hardcore player , I ' m still only talking about playing a few hours a day at most . The term to me just means a player has invested more time or energy in a game to hold a higher status in the game . Once I had an idea of how gyms worked , I strived to level up faster , to upgrade my teams sooner , so that I could be at the highest bar possible and be able to compete ahead of the curve . The gym system before that prestige update was fun , and I can easily say the closest to balanced things could get , if you ignore that bubblestrat was a strategy , as that caused several of the problems people complained about 1 . Reboundability of downed gyms We abused it to no end , so I won ' t try and pretend we were above using it . We could fully rebuild five gyms in a single lunch break with bubblestrat . 5 minutes flat . 2 . Overpowering prestige speed not only did this make building fast in general , but you could even build the gym up ON TOP of an enemy player trying to take it down . Many times we got to a gym too late to defend , and what we did in those situations was wait till the enemy took it down . Then we ' d snipe the spot with a bubbler and proceed to twoman bubblestrat while he desperately tried in vain to counter us . It just wasn ' t possible without a massive effort of people to outpace bubblestrat and this cheeseball strategy probably discouraged attacks on its own . 3 . Lack of cost bubblestrat was also infamous for requiring no item investment to level a gym , so it was fast , free , and easy on top of it all . As you can see , were bubblestrat simply nerfed there would be much less whining and probably more encouragement for players to attack , knowing the inconvenience of rebuilding was actually an inconvenience . There were other factors that could have been tweaked also that I had observed contributing to the issues back then . Preboosting strategies usually dominant players in an area would build gyms to 10 ahead of time as a group and then all the open slots were for randoms on the team to occupy . Because of how mechanics worked , you didn ' t need to preboost all that high , either . With one person , boosting to 34 , 000 was all you had to do , since adding a Pokmon to a gym would raise it 2000 prestige passively . With 18 spots filled , those 7 placements add 14 , 000 , opening a 9 th slot , which adds the final 2 , 000 and opens the 10 th slot . In addition to preboosting being such an effective build strategy , it also padded the gym so that attackers would be required to spend much more time to take the gym down even though there were only 2 or 3 defenders in the gym with 6 open spots . You only got credit for what was in the gym , and since the prestige was at 36 , 000 . well you can do the math . Chipping the gym down at 2500 per clear means you have at least 1415 runs to complete to take it down . Adding in a penalty for vacant slots in a gym would discourage preboosting or require players to either train the spots as occupancy presents itself , or have the extra defenders on hand to fill those spots at the time of training . It ' s risky to preboost and leave a gym with 28 spots open if the attacker gets a bonus 500 per vacancy on full clear , meaning instead of 2500 for two kills , the extra 6 spots hnfilled at the time means you ' re getting 5500 per 2 battles , and the gym collapses more quickly to its actual level . In fact right now you can do this too , preboost a gym to 10 and only having 2 mons in , you ' re only getting 3000 per clear which leads to needing more runs than you normally would , close to 1517 runs just to drop the gym even with the current system . You actually create a much sturdier gym by leveling it up and leaving multiple open slots in the current environment . Especially when those two spots are just two max cp snorlaxes , for example . Then the attacker has to trudge through 3034 really annoying , long battles just to get the gym down . So really , IMO all they had to do was keep the same numbers as they were perfectly balanced around prestige races , and would provide a purpose for upgrading better defenders to slow down attackers and beef up the defendability of the gym in general but remove bubblestrat , penalize preboosting , and maybe even remove the 2000 boost for placing defenders . This would adequately nerf training speed without destroying defendability . Lowering gym total max prestige from 50 , 000 to 40 , 000 and squish the tiers down to accommodate the lower scale , and thus would retain the current faster takedown time while keeping the balanced updown rates of the old systemI did a lot of racing to defend my gyms back in the old system and it felt perfect outside the aforementioned exploits and unintentional issues . I don ' t see why they couldnt satisfy both camps , because right now it feels like they baited and switched many people who built their entire play style , spent money , and many hours grinding with the explicit intention of playing the gym system exactly the way it presented itself to be played . To change it so drastically so late in the game really feels like they scammed us . But it also doesn ' t seem like a feature that casuals can ' t live without . I refuse to believe we can ' t have a good balance of hardcore play and casual play . If they really wanted to be like that why not impose a limit on how many gyms a player can occupy ? Why not segregate gyms into different classes ? Instead of complaining why aren ' t we communicating ideas to niantic about how to fix it so everyone ' s happy ? Why does it have to be absolutely all favorable to casuals just to spite hardcore players ? Why alienate an entire demographic you could keep playing ? It just doesn ' t make sense to do that , when there are definitely ways to satisfy everyone . There ' s tons of ideas being thrown around that aren ' t bad at all . Gym occupancy limit keeps single players or groups occupying more than 10 gyms at a time , so that they can ' t be in that many gyms . This caps hardcore players from being too abusive and would have the ability of not locking weak players out . Not my favorite suggestion but I could live with it if it meant being able to defend my gyms . Segregated classes of gym e . g . S , A , B class gyms for the low level amateur trainer up to S for the hardcore elite players . Make the tier of gyms affect something like how many reward points are earned instead of coins , and maybe these RPs are accumulated over time based on what class gyms you occupy and for how long . They ' re like coins but are the sort of free 2 play exchangeable point alternatives while coins become strictly monetary exchange currency . This also would allow for expanding the metric for shop item costs in a way that there ' s less worry of giving too many , with a possible cap per day . The RP cost of shop items would be different from pokecoins cost and probably need more RPs while adjusting pokecoin costs of items downwards to incentivize buying coins , while This way gym rewards don ' t have to overlap with the monetization point of the game but can give players access to premium items without spending $$, but rewarding more participation in the gym system . Streak rewards , I . E . taking gyms down that have been on a streak , like every 24 hrs the gym stands its reward multiplier for taking it down increases , to prevent exploitation or crossteaming , the gym rewards for being on a streak for the occupying team also increases so players are less likely to just give them away or trade since it would require several days of holding to reach those streak levels . This also incentivizes players to gang up and take the gyms down to break the streak and get a small reward for taking down a streak gym . Adding leaderboards to every gym players can view and get on , showing the trainers who perform the best at those gyms to incentivize more status play , more encouragement to train your gyms and defend them , to lead for that gym in rankings . Every month or maybe every week the leaderboards reset . I mean there ' s tons of ideas that could make the gym system robust , fun , and engaging for both casuals and elite players alike . Competition is not as reviled as people think , there are merely a few vocal bottom feeders who didn ' t understand what they were seeing , assuming gyms were stagnating , when they were just the product of a team ' s focus and were being defended pretty actively . But no matter how you look at it , I doubt niantic really wishes to drive players to quit due to stale and one dimensional content when they have the potential to be so much better . I would think it ' s in their interest to retain players of both schools . Because while more players might be casual , one hardcore player is for sure spending loads more money than tends of thousands of casual players justnon their own . Without any content to satisfy the more hardcore player they ' re only denying themselves more money potential .