Pokemon Go Gym Raids are very competitive.
Some Pokemon Go players are learning the meaning behind subtle changes in the appearance of the Pokemon Gyms that populate the overworld.
In the mainline Pokemon video games, each gym is protected by a single gym leader who usually favors one type. As such, players can easily learn how to defend each gym by searching online guides and can prepare a counter-strategy based on their leader type preferences.
In Pokemon Go, gyms are completely different, as they are guarded by Pokemon belonging to regular players. Each player guards their own Pokemon Gym in the name of the team they chose at the start of the game, with battles fought in the promotion’s name of Team Instinct, Team Mystic, or Team Valor.
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The color of a Pokemon Gym reflects its current ownership, with blue gyms for Team Mystic, red gyms for Team Valor, yellow gyms for Team Instinct, and gray gyms for unclaimed ones. There’s an additional difference in the gym’s look that some fans are just discovering.
NianticThe color of Pokemon Gyms in Pokemon Go equals their difficulty
User on Pokemon go reddit We created a thread asking our fellow players what height different Pokemon gyms are supposed to reflect. It turns out that this is not an accidental design flaw, as the size of the gym reflects its contents.
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“This is a representation of the total CP of all Pokémon above a certain threshold. “I’m not sure what the exact number is but several thousand,” one user claimed, while another explained, “8 thousand for the tower gym shown in the picture. 4K for medium size.
One of the reasons players haven’t noticed this design choice in the past is because of bugs. Gyms in Pokemon Go are known to be glitchy, with creatures fluctuating, so they don’t always appear correctly in the overworld.
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The size of the Pokemon Go Gym is a great visual shorthand for how strong its defense is. If a player is fairly new to Pokemon Go, they should stay away from larger gyms, as they will likely not have a team that will impact their defenses.
It’s funny how fans can play Pokemon Go for years and miss details like this, especially for a game that requires so much engagement on a daily basis. Then again, it’s not like Pokemon Go is flashing big tutorial banners over everything, and it’s easy to ignore small visual quirks when all you care about is conquering a gym.
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