‘Pokemon Go’ is available for iOS and Android devices. (Niantic)
UPDATE: The new Pokemon Go gym update is now beginning to roll out. Niantic had previously said that gyms would be re-enabled as soon as this update made its way to players around the world, and so we should expect the gyms to be back online either on Wednesday June 21st or on Thursday, June 22nd.
In Pokemon Go today, gyms are no longer in operation, and when you try to visit one, you’ll get a message that says, “Gyms are under construction.” So what’s happening, exactly? Why are the gyms not functioning?
This is not a glitch. Niantic Labs intentionally shut down the gyms this week in preparation of a forthcoming update to the game.
“Gyms have been disabled,” Niantic said on Twitter. “Once the next update rolls out to all players around the world, Gyms will return. Stay tuned for more details.”
Niantic has not specified any exact date when the gyms will return, but the company says that gyms will be re-enabled as soon as the new update is out. Statements made by the company over the past few days have suggested that this update will not take long, possibly being released by the end of this week.
“Once the update has been rolled out to players around the world, Gyms will return,” Niantic said in their announcement today. “The Raid Battle feature will then be rolled out slowly over the next few weeks, starting as a beta, with raids visible only to a subset of players at certain Gym locations.”
Niantic’s language there suggests that gyms will return before the raid feature starts rolling out, and the raid system will be released “over the next few weeks.” This implies that the gym update is more of an immediate thing and not a “next few weeks” thing.
A comment made by a Niantic employee on Reddit this afternoon fits with the idea of the gyms coming back online this week. A user asked if we should expect the update in a matter of days or a matter of weeks. The employee wrote, “I cannot share an exact timeline for you yet. Two things to keep in mind, except it to take days (not hours) and expect the rollout to be gradual.” This Niantic employee had the opportunity to say that the update will take weeks, but instead they said it will be a matter of days.
When they originally announced the idea of disabling the gyms, Niantic suggested that this would be a pretty temporary thing. They announced the Solstice Event for June 13th and then said that the gym update would be released “[s]oon thereafter.” They also said that gyms would be disabled “for a short period of time.”
Fans were also already expecting an update in Pokemon Go soon, at least if Niantic sticks to its traditional biweekly schedule of releasing updates. Granted, in recent months Niantic has sometimes taken four weeks, not two weeks, to release updates. But that’s likely just because they were working on this gym overhaul, and prior to April 2017, Pokemon Go updates pretty much always came out on a biweekly basis. The game’s most recent update came on June 5th, which means that based on the biweekly schedule, we’re due for a new one this week. In the worst case scenario, the gym update would probably come out on July 5th, right before the game’s first anniversary, meaning gyms would be shut down for two weeks.
Even if Niantic’s plan is to get the update out this week, keep in mind that this is the most complicated set of changes Niantic has ever made to Pokemon Go, so there may be some delays.
On June 19th, Niantic unveiled some of the details of the new gym update. It’s pretty massive, and it involves a new “motivation system” wherein Pokemon in gyms will have to frequently receive berries in order to continue fighting against enemies. If they aren’t given berries, it will become easier and easier to defeat them. Plus, gyms will now have six slots and each Pokemon in those slots will have to be unique, so you can’t have more than one member of the same species in a gym at once.
There will also be a new “raid” system, which involves players teaming up in order to take down extremely high-powered Pokemon. The goal of this whole thing is to make gyms more cooperative. Members of all three teams – Instinct, Mystic and Valor – can team up to take down the raid bosses. The raid feature will start as a beta and will be gradually expanded over the course of a few weeks. On Reddit this afternoon, a Niantic employee said that they expect the raid beta to last at least one week but possibly two, and then in another week after the beta ends, the raid feature will be expanded worldwide. However, this was just an estimate, and the timeline is still up in the air.
Stay tuned for more information about the Pokemon Go gym update.
