Pokemon GO Gyms Are Back Online! Heaps Of Awesome New Features Have Been Added!

We’ve been waiting for this to happen ever since gyms went offline a few days ago, and now it finally has. Pokemon GO gyms are back online, and there are a bunch of awesome new features that have been added, too!

Gyms officially went back online around 7 hours ago, when Niantic posted to social media informing players that it was time to head outside and collect their first gym badge. Since then, a lot of new information has become available, and we’re going to do our best to include all of it below.

First of all, everything we mentioned in our previous article regarding the new gym system and the raid system has happened. Gyms operate in a first in first out system, which means you’ll fight Pokemon in the order that they were left in the gym, and not in the order of weakest to strongest CP (note: this doesn’t necessarily mean that the first Pokemon to enter a gym will be the first Pokemon to leave the gym).

Gyms no longer have levels, which means no more training (or prestiging) a gym to place your Pokemon inside. Gyms now have 6 permanent slots (instead of a range of 2-10), so if a gym is controlled by your team and has a free slot, you can drop your Pokemon in without having to do any work whatsoever beforehand!

There are now also limits on what Pokemon you can place inside a gym. Each gym can only hold 1 of each unique Pokemon, which means gyms packed with Blissey, Dragonite, Tyranitar, and Snorlax are a thing of the past. We must now be creative with the Pokemon we leave behind in gyms!

Pokemon inside gyms will now have something called “motivation”. At the moment that you leave your Pokemon at a friendly gym, it’s motivation level (and its CP) will drop significantly, and will then continue to be slowly reduced until it reaches 0. A Pokemon’s motivation (and CP) can also be depleted when a rival team battles your Pokemon. If the motivation (and CP) drops too far and reaches 0, your Pokemon will leave the gym and return to you, bringing with it some Poke Coins depending on how long it was in the gym.

Don’t fear; you can raise your Pokemon’s motivation (and CP) by feeding it berries (Razz, Nanab, and Pinap berries all seem to have the same effect). Not only does your Pokemon gain motivation (and what seems to be approximately 15% of its max CP), you will also gain 20 Stardust for every berry you feed to a Pokemon, and there is also the rare chance to acquire a single Candy for that Pokemon.

To make things better, you can even feed berries to other friendly Pokemon inside a gym, and receive the exact same rewards! There does seem to be a limit on how many berries you can feed a Pokemon at once (10), but we’re not currently certain how long you have to wait before you can feed it some more.

Back on to the topic of Poke Coins: As far as we can tell, each Pokemon inside a gym will gain 1 Poke Coin for every hour that it is inside a gym, with all of the accumulated coins being given to the player at once when the Pokemon returns. This new system can be both good and bad, and will reward players who manage to keep their Pokemon in gyms for longer, but may punish players who live in areas with high gym turnover and who can only keep a Pokemon in a gym for a few minutes.

Gyms now function as Poke Stops, too, awarding 2-3 items per spin, or 3-4 items per spin if your team is in control of the gym. Early reports are coming in that you can also gain a tiny amount of extra XP by spinning the photo disc of a friendly gym (when compared to a rival gym), but we have not confirmed this yet.

And of course, there are new medals/badges. The berry medal is awarded for feeding friendly Pokemon berries, and requires 10 berries fed for Bronze, 100 for Silver, and 1000 for Gold. There is also a defender medal, awarding Bronze for 10 hours of defending, Silver for 100 hours, and Gold for 1000 hours.

It seems that gym badges are awarded when you spin the photo disc of the gym, when you get your Pokemon knocked out of the gym, or when you successfully attack a gym. Multiple reports have stated that any one of these three actions can be the catalyst for obtaining the badge, but this could just be an early glitch/bug that will be fixed soon.

And that’s pretty much it. Pokemon GO gyms are back online! Are you excited to get out there and battle some gyms? Or are you not overly impressed with what we ended up getting? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

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