A War Over A New Gym

In Cyprus, there’s not really much going on between Pokemon GO’s three teams, Valor, Mystic and Instinct. It’s not too difficult to get your 50 coins a day, and contests over gyms only really happened before raids, so you get extra Pokeballs when catching your Legendary Pokemon. But normally, the use of gyms where I live isn’t hectic. And the few places that are hectic, they’re always in the tourist areas.

However, not every Gym is that peaceful or quiet. Especially the one down the road.

A new gym?

So, recently, I moved house. I moved from one side of the city to the other. Where I used to live, I did a huge amount of work nominating Pokestops, to the point that the area is potentially good enough for a proper pokemon GO event. Sure, most players here either go to the city hall or down to the harbour. Those are the traditional spots for community days and they’ll always be the best spots. I massively improved on the area though. What started off as one gym and four Pokestops turned into eleven gyms and 20-ish Pokestops. These were mostly scattered over the area but there was a clear walking route to get most of them.

However, where I live now, it’s mostly empty. There are two already existing Pokestops, but since I’ve moved, I’ve managed to get two new waypoints added. One was a Pokestop for just a week then turned into a gym, thanks to the appearance of a smaller Pokestop. I’ve actually already done two raids at this new gym, because Kartana, an Ultra Beast, is spawning in raids and it’s a really good grass type Pokemon.

Raids aside though, there’s something going on with this gym.

It keeps on changing colours.

Seriously, since its appearance two days ago (as of writing), I’ve lost count how many times that gym has changed colours. The gym was colourless at first and was swiftly made blue, only for it to change to red about an hour later,m and then changing back to blue again afterwards. That gym also managed to be yellow for a bit, but it wasn’t yellow again until after we did a Kartana raid on it. Our Pokemon didn’t last in that gym for long, and were kicked out by Valor players, only to cycle between all three colours as the afternoon slowly passed.

The only thing that slowed the war down was the appearance of multiple Skarmory raids. No one really wants to raid for Skarmory, but the raid protects whichever team is currently occupying the gym for an hour or so, until the raid ends.

Now though, it seems to have settled down a bit. The gym is currently blue, and I haven’t gotten around to turning it back to yellow. How long it will stay blue, I have no idea.

They’re all most likely spoofers.

There’s no way these battles are going on with people nearby. I’d be able to see them. This new gym is very easily accessible and is surrounded by a large, open area. If they were real people, they’d also have to be pretty bloody speedy. They would be rushing to and from the gym to retake it. We’re in the middle of technically nowhere, it’s not an obvious spot, and that clearly isn’t happening. I don’t even recognize any of the names either.

Hopefully though, the spoofers will get bored of it, then move on to another gym in the middle of nowhere. And when they do, that gym will be all mine.