so which players are "meant" to have gyms as you call it? i'm lvl 32 instinct with a pretty decent dragonite/gyarados squad that is able to take on any gym i encounter.

i did grind about 6-8 hours each day since US release, nearly all active players in my area knew me by the end of summer and they admitted that i put more work into the game than any of them.

when anyone needed advice, they came to me because i literally treated the game as a job for a few months and i had the answers they were looking for.

despite that, most of them were able to brag about holding 12-15 gyms at any given time and collect 100 coins every single day for weeks, only having to rebuild a gym every few days at most. you think that's fair? why? because they picked a different team color?

in my case, if i wanted to achieve the same as a mystic or valor player, i would have to spend about 10 hours each day to walk/drive to and also destroy the other teams lvl 9/10 gyms. except when i fight the third or so, i already lose the first gym so i'd still only get about 20 coins anyway even if i bothered to invest that much time and effort into getting coins which is why i basically completely ignored gyms since like 4 weeks.

my area consists of 60% mystic, 35% valor 5% instinct (at most.) and i can't. swap. teams. so despite the hard work that i put into my account, my best bet to achieve 10 pokemon in stagnant gyms for basic coin income would be to stop playing my instinct account right now and reroll valor or mystic.

this is just another example of horrible game design and foresight by niantic. they knew what happened in ingress and how stagnant most areas are so why they chose to split players into three(!) teams in pokemon go and implement a similar control point system like ingress is beyond me.

and since i'm only 45km away from the last dex entry that i can get without spending a fortune on plane tickets to get the regionals (which i refuse to do obviously), i honestly consider to reroll and throw my account into the trash because judging by niantics actions i think it's highly unlikely that they'll ever remedy this situation and offer a viable way for the underdog team(s) to get coins.