Monday, 26th June 2017, 21:18 by Zooty
Here's my thoughts on the new update:
Gyms have been made more accessible, which is great. Maxed out gyms of your own team are no longer dead to you. Gym badges are a nice way to know where you've been. However, mechanism for getting coins is bizarre and bad. Any pokemon in a gym earns a coin / 10 minutes, up to a daily maximum of 50 coins. This is nice, but you only get those coins once your pokemon is kicked out of the gym, so staying in gyms longer than 8 hours is counterproductive. Feeding berries to someone else's pokemon is practically griefing. Opposing team also doesn't have much incentive to kick your pokemon out. Sure, they get an extra item if they spin the disc when their team owns the gym, but that's not worth spending 15 minutes fighting. They also level up their gym badge, but you'll eventually reach gold in any gym you frequent. Trying to get badges for gyms you don't frequent is pointless unless you feel like a completionist, since the only reward is extra items. Basically this means that I take the gym closest to my work after I leave and the two closest to my home before going to sleep and hope at least one of them survives long enough.
Raids seem like a nice concept, but it seems there are too few players where I play to try to tackle them meaningfully. The first Tyranitar raid around my neighborhood on the release day of the raids attracted 5 players and we couldn't finish it. Unless some way to contact other players is added, I'm just going to tackle a level 2 raid once per day and ignore them otherwise. Also, the attack warning doesn't seem to work during raid battles, but it doesn't matter since there's no point in dodging anyway. Raid boss will take approximately 3 minutes to knock out your pokemon, and even if it happens before time limit you can just throw some new ones into the fray.
Combat is even buggier than before. Syncing with the server is shaky, so energy and hp bars fluctuate pretty wildly. Switching pokemon usually means that the new pokemon is switched in, then the old one and then the new one again, so I've given up on that for all but the worst matchups. Revives are plentiful anyway.
Total rating: meh