3/10/17 Two and a half hours, playing on my phone on and around U of O campus. Today I made it my goal to take as many gyms as possible, by any means necessary. My team consisted of a Jolteon, Hitmonlee, Vaporeon, Kingler, Exeggutor, and a Clefable, with a Flareon, Pinsir, and Starmie all ready for swap outs as necessary. Over the course of my play, I was able to take a couple of gyms between my house and on campus, but once on campus, I found that the gyms had insanely powerful Pokemon that I couldn’t contend with (cp’s of 2500+, where my max level is a cp of 1134). But it was an extremely beautiful day out, so it wasn’t too hard to find someone else who was playing Pokemon Go. I got lucky and they turned out to be team Valor as well, so we worked together to take down a couple of the “easier” gyms on campus. The dynamic of being able to meet someone on the street and instantly having a connection with them is amazing, and honestly I’m surprised that I was able to make that happen, despite the decline of Pokemon Go over the past months. By the time I made it home, I had placed five of my Pokemon into gyms, which allowed me to collect 50 poke-coins from my store rewards (a huge boost for me, as it gets me 1/3 of the way to an egg incubator. The magic of the game that I have previously mentioned has been lost on the new Pokemon Go certainly can be found, but it requires a good amount of effort on the part of the player. I cant tell how I actually feel about this, because on one hand it is up to the player to work for the rewards of a game (for example grinding out levels in WoW in order to be able to participate in the amazing PvP or dungeon diving), but then on the other hand, I feel like it should be the goal of the producers to preserve that magic in the game and not undercut it at every corner and make it the players job to preserve it. As it is, I don’t think this game will ever be able to hold my attention long until they reintroduce the traditional Pokemon battle system, because this frantic tapping nonsense that they have now has absolutely no strategy to it, and frankly, I might contract carpal tunnel from it.