Since the week of its release, Pokemon Go has been plagued with bugs. One of the most recent bugs is the glitch where players only received 2 items from PokeStops. Niantic claimed that this issue stemmed from adding several new Gyms and PokeStops to the game and was able to fix the glitch for the majority of users by rolling back to a previous update. This has caused all of the new additions to disappear, but some players think that this was more than just a glitch.

People are beginning to think that this was a test by Niantic to see if they could begin converting PokeStops to Gyms. Players believe that since both Gyms and PokeStops give out items now, there is really no benefit to going to a PokeStop instead of a Gym. That being said, perhaps Niantic wanted all of this to happen so they could completely remove PokeStops from the game. This would be a terrible decision, and while I do understand that PokeStops are fairly useless, an overload of Gyms would destroy the competitiveness of Pokemon go.

Since players are now capped at how much they can earn by having Pokemon placed at Gyms, there would be no reason to overtake additional Gyms. This would allow the majority of gyms to go untouched for a long period of time, completely eliminating the need to keep playing. You could just plop any Pokemon down on a Gym, and since there would be so many Gyms in the game, nobody would try to take you out. Most players would be able to put their Pokemon down on Gyms to get maximum benefits without ever having to fight for their place.