The update that we’ve all been waiting for finally got the green light on Thursday with gyms being able to be claimed, along with raids, which put the Pokemon Go community into a frenzy over the weekend. I was away at a wedding, but once I got home I was able to experience the new gyms and the new raid feature and well…it’s different for sure.
I saw a gym with only one defender in it so I figured I’d go over and knock it out, take two minutes and be on my way…wrong.
With the old gym system you’d only have to battle that defender once and that was it. Now you have to face them 3-4 times before you’ve officially defeated that Pokemon.
The gyms can be filled up with no restrictions at all which is a problem. You can be battling a defender only to find out that someone strolled by and added two more Pokemon to that gym. Not only can someone come by and add additional Pokemon, but someone can also feed berries to the defenders to restore their health points, if someone wanted to troll you while you’re attempting to take down a gym, feeding berries to that particular gym would be the best way to waste that person’s time.
Niantic has adjusted the payout system for coins and pokedust, I’m okay with the current payout system mainly because I didn’t own too many gyms before the update.
Now lets chat about raids, again some positives and some negatives based off my experience with them. I thought raids would be not so common, popping up here and there….wrong again.
They are everywhere, happening all the time, the difference between them is a couple of things. 1. The degree of difficulty, which is displayed if you click on it. 2. Which pokemon that is doing the raid.
This is where raids get a little tricky; you have to obtain a raid pass to be able to participate, so how do you get one? Simple, just go to a gym and spin it to obtain a raid pass, but here’s the kicker…you only get one free pass a day….just one.
I’d be okay with that if raids weren’t as common but since they are happening non stop around me well one pass doesn’t seem to cut it. You can purchase another raid pass in the store, but that will cost you 100 coins.
The other thing that sucks is you have no way of telling how many people are in the raid lobby without using your raid pass, so if there’s no one in there and you cant beat the raid boss by yourself well…you just wasted that pass. Finally I ran into a group of four that were taking on a difficult raid, we were facing a lapras, which is pretty rare to find and the game began glitching halfway through the fight, making it impossible for us to beat it, that will need to be fixed ASAP.
Out of all the major changes there was one thing that put a huge smile to my face: seeing the Pokemon go community out in full force again.
I would have never met a lot of awesome people if it wasn’t because of this game. I’m part of a group on Facebook that shares the locations of raids, allowing us to be able to meet up and take on the raid boss. I cant wait to be done with work so I can be out there on a beautiful night chasing these hard to find Pokemon once again.
I’ll have more about these changes to the game soon as I progress, and lets hope that legendary Pokemon follow soon as well. Heres a few photos from the group over the weekend out having a blast.
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