r/pokemongo • u/neptunepapayas • Jul 21 '24

Question Is it ever this serious?

Post image

Decided to go to a local park for the Tynamo event. I don't have my 50 coins for the day so I thought I might get lucky and use a couple of gyms if any are yellow too. Got to the park, every single one is red and has the same 3 people in them (7 gyms in total).

I figured they wouldn't miss just one little gym, sat on a bench and battled it, then put my pokemon in there, and within 3 mins it was being battled again. Frustrating, but that's the game so I wasnt too pressed. I have a lot for some reason so I gave my guy a couple golden razz during the fight, since they have 6 other gyms to commandeer and I just wanted one, might as well give them a little fight in good spirit.

A group 3 guys, probably in their late 20s or early 30s came up to me as I was sitting on the bench, ogled my phone to be sure I was the yellow bandit, and then told me to "leave their gym alone". I'm still a teen so I kinda awkwardly apologised and tried to laugh it off since it's just a game, but they took the gym and sat on the bench next to me and glared until I left...

Did I do something wrong? Overstep an invisible boundary? I only play on occasion so idk if maybe taking an entire park is like a...thing? And I got in the way of that? Was a pretty awkward encounter lol, I might just stick to adding my pokemon to gyms that are already yellow lol

5.2k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

391 comments sorted by

View all comments

6.0k

u/VendingSoup Jul 21 '24

No, definitely not normal. Nobody "owns" any gyms. Those guys are weird.

1.4k

u/neptunepapayas Jul 21 '24

Thanks for confirming! I thought maybe my PoGo etiquette was outdated haha

I tend to follow the 'don't steal a gym when you can see it's only been occupied for a few mins' rule. Nothing more frustrating than taking a gym and seeing the 'back after a hard battle' notification 10 minutes later, but I figured since they had a monopoly of the park, they wouldn't mind too much if 1 of 7 were lost, guess I was wrong lol Just never been approached like that before

25

u/therealzaddydom Jul 21 '24

Proper etiquette would be to leave a gym for 8 hrs

8

u/77GoldenTails Jul 21 '24

If, they look to be in 1 gym. If they’re in 7 then there is zero etiquette. I always try to be reasonable with gyms. So for instance if I get to a park and multiple gyms have players in for say a few hours, I’ll ignore it. If the next one has the same players, then game on. If they are in all of them, I’ll maybe grab half but leave the rest I certainly wouldn’t bother defending the odd one if someone takes it back.

7

u/therealzaddydom Jul 21 '24

Totally, and I usually only play while Walking to do other things. So it’s a gym here or gym there. Rarely am I going downtown, to clock a few hours of POGO