the game meta can change at any moment (and just did)

After the gym rework, I posted that 3K+ CP pokémon would lose motivation 10 times faster than >3K CP pokémon.

That was true until this weekend. Turns out, it was a bug! All gym defenders were meant to lose motivation at the same rate. Niantic has released an out-of-sequence update (this was a migration week, not an update week) and it's bursting with bug fixes.

Just thought you'd want to know. It's safe to go back to defending gyms with 3K+ CP pokémon. :-)

How to keep Blissey off your raid squads

Do you get tired of the game auto-recommending your high-CP Blisseys and Chanseys for raids? What you really want, of course, are pokémon with the type advantages to deal the most damage per second, thus getting you more rewards, and your team more premier balls! For that, I learned this great tip at a raid yesterday, and will try it at the first opportunity:

To keep the game from default-suggesting certain pokémon, assign them as gym defenders, let them faint, and then don't revive them until you want to use them on purpose. The game won't recommend fainted 'mon!

(Blissey, with her unmatched endurance, is the best defender by far! But she's often a marginal attacker. She's slow and lacks super-effective same-type attack bonuses. So it's not considered best form to raid with Blissey/Chansey-heavy squads. It kind of suggests that either you don't know about type advantages, or you expect to be carried by the other trainers' expenditures of effort, revives, and potions.) (I'm so embarrassed when I don't have time to pick all my squad — because of connectivity, lag, app restarting, players already in the lobby, whatever — and the game default sticks me with a wall of pink.)