Some Pokemon Go Players Are Worried PokeStops Could All Soon Become Gyms

A new theory about Pokemon Go‘s most recent set of bugs have some fans worried about the game’s future.

Recently, a subsection of fans have experienced an extreme dip in items due to the “two item glitch,” which limits the amount of items they get from PokeStops. While the bug originally affected all Pokemon Go players, developers fixed the bug for most players by rolling back the game’s map to an older version, thus taking away hundreds of new gyms and PokeStops added earlier in October.

Most fans have dismissed the bug as the latest glitch plaguing Pokemon Go (and let’s face it, the game has had plenty of different bugs since Day 1,) but at least one fan thinks these glitches are actually a test to eventually merge PokeStops and gyms together.

Merging Gyms and PokeStops

A player named “Chrossom” laid out their theory on /r/TheSilphRoad, one of the premier communities for Pokemon Go players. Chrossom’s theory is that Pokemon Go‘s PokeStops are basically obsolete now that gyms also spit out items. While players can still lure PokeStops, there’s no other benefit to visiting PokeStops over gyms, especially if PokeStops are also spitting out two items per visit.

Changing all PokeStops to gyms would also give players more potential raid sites AND give players extra XP when they either captured or battled there. It could also potentially give players more areas to use Pokemon Go‘s planned PvP function, provided that players needed to battle at specific sites as opposed to just randomly battling on the streets.

Chrossom also points out that Niantic’s other game Ingress has only one type of site (Portals) that has the features of both gyms and PokeStops, so such a change wouldn’t be totally unprecedented.

Still Inplausible

While Chrossom’s theory is both well-thought out and makes a lot of sense given the recent changes, it still seems a bit farfetched. PokeStops are one of the more iconic parts of Pokemon Go, and their disappearance would probably upset a lot of fans, even if their functionality is a bit watered down.

Plus, having so many gyms would greatly water down the competitiveness of Pokemon Go, as there’s a limit to how many Pokemon a single player can have out at gyms at one time. With no benefit to having 20+ Pokemon defending gyms on a daily basis, a lot of gyms would likely go untouched for days at a time.

Of course, the only way to actually disprove this theory is for Pokemon Go to fix the “two item” glitch once and for all. As long as people are getting cheated out of items, there’s going to be speculation that Pokemon Go is up to something, which probably isn’t a good thing for player morale.

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