Niantic has been making a lot of behind the scenes changes to Pokemon Go. This has been true since the beginning, but it’s become especially true as of late, with many updates happening over the last few months. Some of these have been great, like the introduction of Ditto and daily bonuses for catching and hitting Pokestops. Others have been more controversial, such as a lot of the changes surrounding gyms. Now though, Niantic is reverting a recent change, making prestige levels for training gyms the same as they were awhile ago.
“Trainers, the amount of Prestige gained when training at friendly Gyms has been reverted back to the original values,” read the simple, straight-forward update from Niantic. This Pokemon Go update should be server-side, so don’t go running to the Google Play or Apple App stores. The big question though is, what will this mean for the game?
Gym stagnation has been either a huge problem, or exactly how the game should end up, depending on who you asked. This new Pokemon go update should make it easier to train up gyms that are already owned by your team. This contributes to gym stagnation, but it also means gyms are more valuable, and worth taking over to begin with.
When prestige levels were set too low, as they had been recently, many players abandoned gyms. They were much easier to take over, than they were to defend. This meant players could just run around, take over a couple of gyms, cash out, and move on. Building up a gym and setting it up with your best defenders was useless, many felt, as any random player could swing in and take it out in far less time than it took you to build it up.
These new prestige levels could fix this, so keep an eye on your local Pokemon Go gyms to see if they start having more activity.
