The new motivation system in Pokemon Go. (Niantic)
The brand new Pokemon Go gyms are now active. For the past year of the game’s existence, players have gotten used to visiting friendly gyms and training their Pokemon there, which has the effect of raising the gym’s prestige. But when you enter the new gyms, you’ll notice that there’s no clear way of doing that. So how, exactly, can you train in one of the new Pokemon gyms?
The short answer is that you can’t. Training in friendly gyms has been removed from Pokemon Go entirely. The prestige system no longer exists, and so there is no longer any need to train in gyms.
The old system of training has been replaced by a new system of “motivation.” How this works is that every Pokemon has a motivation bar, indicated by a red heart above its head. The longer the Pokemon is in the gym, the more motivation it will lose. It loses motivation gradually over time, but it also loses motivation as it’s defeated in battle. As the motivation goes down, so does the Pokemon’s CP, and so the creature gradually becomes easier to defeat.
However, there is a way of raising a Pokemon’s motivation: you just have to feed it berries. Doing so will bring the Pokemon’s motivation back up, and so this is sort of the game’s new equivalent of training. Instead of visiting a friendly gym and training in order to fortify it, you visit a friendly gym and feed the Pokemon berries in order to fortify it.
It’s not just your own Pokemon that you’re allowed to feed berries too, though. You can feed berries to the Pokemon belonging to members of your team as well. In addition to this ensuring that the gym is not taken over by enemy invaders, another incentive of feeding berries to your teammates’ Pokemon is that this gives you some Stardust and XP.
Niantic itself has described the motivation system as sort of a replacement for the training system.
“Since Gym Levels and Prestige are going away, there is no longer a need to train at Gyms controlled by your team to raise the prestige,” Niantic said on its website. “Instead, Trainers will now feed Berries to the Pokémon on Gyms controlled by their team.”
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