I’m kid, the gym leader of 852 Zone.

I know our score in the recent gym battle looked suspicious. I understand why some people assumed we were cheating. But we did not cheat, and we never intended to abuse bug for extra points.

Believe it or not, our score was miscalculated while we were playing the event normally the entire time. And I believe this issue did not happen only to us.

I read the YouTube post by the leader of the gym that ranked no.1. Their method was to use more than 15 tickets at once in a single stage to get about 10 times the usual score. Even now, they are still at Extra Circuit 9. We never used that method. If we had burned that many tickets in one stage, there’s no way we could have made it to Extra Circuit 25.

We are willing to share how we reached Extra Circuit 25. We hoped other gyms could use our strategy as a reference in future battles. That is why my Japanese teammate posted our strategy on twitter after the event ended. Unfortunately, that post led people to label us as cheaters. Our whole team feels hurt and deeply upset by that.

Our primary goal was always to push as far into the circuits as possible. The extra points were an unintended game's miscalculation. Anyone who has played at a high level knows that reaching Extra Circuit 25 requires strict ticket management and a solid strategy, which you simply cannot achieve if you are wasting tickets on an exploit.

What we want is a fair ranking. We hope the dev team from DeNA take this seriously. If a gym that stopped at Extra Circuit 9 gets first place, while gyms that reached Extra Circuit 25 are ranked fourth or lower, then something is clearly wrong.

I urge the dev team to recalculate every gym’s score. Another option, as some players have suggested, is to rank gyms by progression first and score second. That’s the only way to deliver a fair result to the Japanese players and to us.

Thank you for reading. Have a nice day.