Doubling up on gyms

I suggested this in staff board a few years back and it was shot down for pretty strong reasons, but I've been thinking about this lately and wanted to see what people think.

The idea is this: we give a very small number of battlers the option to double up on gyms, and there are a number of ways you could set the criteria like current Champion/E4 or possibly just by head ref selection, but this gets more gyms filled without having to cut gyms or dilute the overall skill level of the gym system. For at least the last six months and probably much longer than that, we've held steady at ~30 of 36 gyms filled -- currently 31 -- which isn't terrible, but it's been a concern that to keep filling gyms we have to bring on less and less qualified people.

I like having gyms because it gives me something to do completion-wise, so the idea of cutting further (which I think has been floated before) really sucks to me. And I don't hate the idea of giving less than perfectly qualified people gyms since it really does help people learn and improve, but giving out the badge effectively for free and ruining the gym experience for future leaders has been a concern too. It's a fine line to walk.

Maybe throwing in more Ash K's and Syn's, who will win ten battles before they lose one, into the gym system isn't the answer either, and I think that's why this idea didn't fly in the past. (Also, I suggested it long before I was E4, so this isn't all bias.) Maybe the bar for somebody with a secondary gym to be booted by somebody who doesn't have a gym at all should be substantially lowered. Or maybe we're fine without that, and instead make gym ownership a competitive thing again.

But I dunno. The quantity of gyms is one of the strengths of the system to me (I really do miss having 48 of those things), but how we fill gyms while balancing quality is a tough thing. Lemme know if this is something y'all would be interested in, and then after that we could start discussing details. I've had a million conversations of this sort get sidetracked, so also please please please try not to do that.

 

Pretty sure you know most of my thoughts on this but I'm happy to encourage thread discussion so I'll post them here.

I definitely want there to be full gym leagues as it means better progression to E4 eligibility. Allowing existsing leaders to double-up does create the potential for a more competitive League system too.
What I'd like to avoid is a situation where our 36 gyms are filled by 18 people who have two each (unless it really was absolutely necessary for some reason). I don't think that's a better system at all.

I don't really want badges to be given out for free, but for people who aren't as skilled as Ash K, Syn etc, I don't want them to feel like they can't be part of the gym system either.
At this point in time I don't really favour a Dojo system, as I don't think we have enough people to run a full league for that either.

 

This is definitely not what I was suggesting. It's a careful balance, for sure, but I think you can achieve a good middle ground by letting even five people double up on gyms. We're at 31 leaders right now and I think Dash and Gray are both building up lineups to apply for unfilled gyms, so we're actually nearing a peak for numbers of gyms filled.

Just arbitrarily, if we give the Champ and E4 the right to second gyms, then I think we'd be able to hang at, or at least very close to, 36 consistently. (Hard to say with generally undesirable types like Ice) It gives LOs a fallback if they don't want to give a certain gym to somebody less than qualified -- or if they do want to, then not every Champ/E4 needs to have a second gym.

 

I think you're trying to solve two issues at once: not every gym is filled and newer gyms are having very low win rates. While every issue I can think of with the system you propose could be countered on one front, I'm not sure if the same holds for the other. Most notably, you say this:

If this were the case, then the barrier to entry wouldn't change at all, and newer gyms would still be just as likely to give out "free badges".

 

I'm not saying every secondary gym should be vacated the moment someone without a gym applies, just that you give LOs more wiggle room to flip them if they want to. Nobody's taking Fortree from Ash just by applying, but if he takes up Petalburg as a second gym and somebody without a gym also applies for Petalburg, then that becomes a consideration where somebody who isn't as good as Ash might still snag it away from him. But it's not cut and dry. You just give LOs the freedom to make that choice, and all the while an otherwise unfilled gym has a leader.

It's hard to regulate win rate, but this gives them more leeway without stressing about empty gyms.

 

I think that the unfilled gyms situation should be addressed definitely. I'm not sure if it's fair to give the most experienced battlers a second gym, especially for incoming members it might be a bit off putting. What we do need though is some change to the gym system. I really like the idea of having 18 Gyms, one for each type, with monthly gym purges or a bi-annual league but I don't have the time to flesh it out now (lol thesis fun).

Really glad there's discussion on this though. Summer and peak activity are just around the corner!

 

I do like the idea of cutting down on gyms more so than filling multiple with the same players. 18 sounds extremely limiting, and while it has been years, it has been discussed in the past back when there were 48 gyms (I especially agree with Monbrey's stance in the first part of this post on why 18 gyms is too few). That said, I can see why 36 is simply too large. I don't think every type needs two gyms (rock and ice aren't exactly in demand), but other than arbitrarily choosing what types should have one gym and which should have two (which would go against the spirit of URPG, seeing how the only thing we "ban" is Megas, and that's with an optional clause), the only way of having a number higher than 18 but lower than the 36 we have now that I could see would have to have one gym of every type (18) plus a debatable number of "duplicate gyms". Say we settled on 6 duplicate gyms; if 17 of the regular gyms were filled and the ice gym remained open, the duplicate gyms could house a flying gym, a poison gym, a steel gym, a water gym, a fire gym, and an electric gym. If someone wanted to apply for a fairy gym it would be denied due to all the duplicate gyms being filled, but an ice gym could still open as the last gym since the spot wasn't taken yet. Now suppose the duplicate fire gym leader stepped down; that fairy gym could get approved as a new duplicate gym. If someone wanted to apply for a third flying gym, I personally don't think more than one duplicate gym type should be allowed, but this is all just a rough idea; maybe there's good reasons why three or more of a gym type should be allowed.

That's just my personal take on how to handle restructuring the gyms to solve the open gyms issue, as @Synthesis is suggesting. Obviously I haven't seen as many combinations of active gym leaders as most of you have due to me being comparatively very new to URPG, so feel free to ignore this post, but these are just my two cents.

 

I think that's an interesting concept Gray posted (i.e. the duplicate gyms). However, I'm still in favor of keeping 36 gyms. If we're at 31 with two/three being planned on the way, then our issue is shrinking. If we slashed it down to 18 with 6 or so duplicate gyms, there would still be an existing problem. In the main 18 gyms left from our current stock, there would be 2 missing gyms: Ice and Rock. But there would be a lot of duplicate gym applications: flying, water, fire, grass, poison, electric, bug, dark, etc. So the problem isn't we can't fill gyms 'cause there aren't enough people, it's there are gyms which are difficult to fill due to their type, which is unfortunate, but slashing gym numbers, imo, won't really help that problem.

I'm also not for people holding duplicate gyms, especially if the qualifier is being an E4 member or Champ. The reason (which has been mentioned) is that those members are very skilled, which isn't bad, but it would make it much more difficult for newer members (or even just average members) to get started or progress in the gym system. I also agree we shouldn't allow just anyone and everyone with the bare minimum of qualifying Pokémon own a gym, even if we need gyms filled; but as Nitro said, it's a fine line. But this brings me to my main point.

Having some open gyms isn't a bad thing in my opinion. We surely don't want a lot of open gyms, but having some of them open isn't necessarily bad. It gives some members, old and new, something to work towards. It was mentioned, and well known, that Dash is going for an Ice gym (as well as another person atm, I can't quite remember, so apologizes to them) and Gray is going for the other Fairy gym. These members are working hard to get the Pokémon and EMs needed to feel comfortable to apply for these gyms and it honestly makes me happy to see these members have these goals and work toward them.

Also, side note, if we slash gym numbers down to 18 then the annual Gym Tourny will be even more restrictive, which is just gross.

 

I definitely don't see a reason to cut down on gym numbers just to have them all filled. It took a while but we have a lot of them filled and with mostly active members to boot. Now obviously this won't last, but the gym system is designed to handle having highs and lows.

Allowing people to double up seems like a good idea on paper, but once you get to the criteria for qualifying to have more than one gym it gets messy. To some degree there would be quantification of battle skill which really is nearly impossible or at the very least impractical. Being champ/E4 in and of itself already gives that person 2 positions if they already have a gym so I'm not sure about having that be the criteria either.

I'd love to see all the gyms filled [with skilled leaders] but I'm not sure we really need to put forth extra provisions etc. just to get them filled. At the end of the day, it's not the end of the world if there's a few empty ones (I don't mean that condescendingly at all; I'm just posing the question: is it really that bad if we have a few unfilled gyms?). Again, this might not won't last, but when that time comes we could look at other ways to encourage gym filling [by skilled leaders].

EDIT: Just read Syns post. I definitely wanna at least discuss the gym rotation idea some more (maybe in another thread idk). I certainly see some flaws with it but afaik it hasn't been officially defined or discussed on forums. Let's flesh out the details some more and see if we can get it to work.