‘Pokemon Go’ is available now for iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)
The latest Pokemon Go update has made some significant changes to the way the gym system works.
One of the alterations in Version 0.41.2 for iOS, and 1.11.2 for Android, concerns how training in friendly gyms works. Prior to the update, players would enter friendly gyms with one Pokemon of their choice, fighting Pokemon in order to boost the gym’s prestige. But now, you can take six Pokemon into friendly gyms for training. So with that in mind, how exactly is the prestige calculated with this new system?
According to users on The Silph Road who have gotten their hands on the update, it basically works the same as the old prestige system, but with the game calculating prestige based on the Pokemon on your team with the highest CP. In case you’ve forgotten, according to Gamepress, here’s how the game determines the prestige you gain through battle:
- When your attacker has a lower CP than the defender: 500 * (Defender CP / Attacker CP)
- When your attacker has a higher CP than the defender: 310 * (Defender CP / Attacker CP) – 55
So in the new update, even though you have six Pokemon, the game just takes the CP of your highest-leveled Pokemon and plugs that into the above formula. The other five Pokemon won’t really have an affect on how much prestige you earn.
It remains to be seen exactly how this new system will work out for most people, but some are already complaining that this makes life difficult for users when they’re training in gyms where there’s a large disparity between the CPs of defender Pokemon.
“Think a 1000 CP at the bottom and a 2500 CP Snorlax at the top,” a Reddit user wrote. “You don’t want to be attacking the Snorlax with only <1000 CP Pokemon and bringing anything higher ruins your prestige against the bottom defender. Defeating only the first defender and then running isn’t a viable option anymore; selecting six Pokemon takes too much time.”
In other words, if you’re attacking a gym where one of the defenders has an extremely high CP, you want to bring in a high-leveled Pokemon to defeat that creature. But doing so will lower the amount of prestige you gain, since the CP of your high-leveled Pokemon is used in the formula.
The latest Pokemon Go update is not yet out on the app stores for the majority of players, but it was announced by Niantic on Monday night, and it should start rolling out over the next 24 to 48 hours.
