The Pokemon Go Blissey Issue
”Oh boy, yet another opportunity to stand here mindlessly tapping my screen for at least 5 minutes just to take out one measly gym Pokémon. Awesome!!! What fun!”
About five or so months ago, I started playing Pokémon Go. However, I have been experiencing a strange sort of dichotomy regarding a particularly oversized Pokémon called a Blissey. This pink rotund cutie evolves from another Pokémon called a Chansey. However in the entire time I have been playing (and I am a not insubstantial level 35 player nowadays) I have never seen a single one of these in the wild. Not even one which then ran away. Not even a really weak crappy one. Literally none.
However, despite this situation the flipping things are all over the place in gyms, clogging up the entire game with their ridiculously inflated number of health points and OP defence capacity. Literally nobody likes them. The internet is full of people complaining about blissey “breaking” the game and “sucking all of the fun out of it” … which is quite true, especially over Winter when the weather is much colder and unpleasant. It takes a ridiculous length of time to knock Chansey out of a gym compared to other Pokémon, never mind its older sibling, and unless you have poured obscene amounts of precious candy and stardust into powering up a Machamp to the maximum level then you may as well give up trying to even take on the CP 2900+ Blisseys which are generously strewn around – because the game won’t even give you enough time to knock them out before it kicks you out of the gym battle for taking too long. The encouragement of widespread high CP Blissey dumping in gyms is a fundamentally unfair and boring game dynamic. It seems to be intentionally included to make gym battles long, drawn out, tedious, and in many cases impossible. It gives a huge advantage to anybody who has these particular creatures to put into gyms, and it is demoralising for anybody who hasn’t been to strange countries, or been playing since the very beginning; as those seem to be the two methods through which people have been able to procure these sturdy monsters. It is particularly deterrent for lower level players, who frequently struggle to maintain interest in the face of overwhelming adversity and game mechanics skewed against them, even without Blissey making the game even more off-putting.
Just look at it, standing there smirking like some sort of beatific destroyer of souls.
I gather that Niantic recently introduced a new rapid decay rate for Pokémon above CP3000 which are put into gyms, and a mechanism which restricts Pokémon in gyms to six while restricting added Pokémon to only one of each type. A lot of people who have been playing for a very long time are up in arms about this change, protesting because it means that their overpowered Pokémon can’t be guaranteed to stay in gyms undefeated for ages. But it is simple to put lower CP Pokémon into gyms instead, and nobody with any sanity truly longs for the dark ages when you’d get ten Blisseys stacked in a single gym. Few people genuinely enjoyed having to spend half an hour (literally!) standing about tapping their screen over and over again to take down the old-skool gyms. That wasn’t challenging so much as incredibly dull and exclusive of players lower than level 30.
However much certain ‘core’ players might gurn about it, these two changes to the gym dynamic have resulted in a much more fluid game dynamic which is overall much more fun for other players.
However that said, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Nobody really enjoys standing about tapping a screen monotonously for ten minutes straight every time they encounter a Pokémon gym, just to get past a Blissey (while people shovel it full of gold berries to instantly recharge their health remotely, which is another issue all of its own) …. Or gets pleasure from having to pass on even trying to battle at a gym because the Blissey is too powerful to take down within the time limit. And the sheer quantity of them isn’t a source of much joy either, with an average of 70% of the gyms in any area stocked with a Blissey and often a Chancey or Snorlax as well.
Expect to see this a lot
In conclusion, regarding Blissey my recommendation for Niantic would be to introduce some sort of Pokémon which is specifically good against Blissey. It could be a complete duffer against everything else, but specifically good against Blissey. Machamp really doesn’t cut it, but surely some other fighting Pokémon could be introduced which would be a good contender. I also suggest introducing a powering up dynamic whereby fighting a Pokémon at a gym powers up your Pokémon gradually over time, based on how many HP the defender has. This would make battling Pokémon more worthwhile, especially bothering to fight long-winded damage sponges like Blissey. This would also provide players (particularly newer players) with an alternative route to powering up their Pokémon. Surely overall these changes would make the game more fun, which should be what playing a game is all about after all