Since this is the place to post concerns, I have one (more of a suggestion actually): I believe the Committee should focus on having an entire active roster in a forseeable future. Better: a known future. A soon future.
lemme try to explain why I think this is a problem that must be solved asap.
Here is the current status of the gyms:
Okie
Poison: Engineer is drowning people in stall
Flying: Jas is flying high away
Electric: Puppylover is loving electric puppies. Ironically, no jolteon.
Ground: IAR is playing with hippos
Water: Atheno is killing water goats
Psychic: Gerard is bored without challenges
Ghost: zara is writing harry potter fanfiction
hm...
Grass: Pwnemon is waiting for the ref to finish crushing me
Dragon: Texas was deemed a leader and is finishing up his arena. Isn't open yet
Normal: Maxim won one of the 3 matches and the other 2 are coming to an end soon.
Oh boy
Bug: Rediamond left the gym, but then came again. But not completely. And is somewhat gone again. I am confused.
Rock: Leethoof was deemed a leader
here, 9 months ago and has still to open his gym. I am a patient guy, but 9 months?
Fire: Qualifiers will be held someday somehow...
Steel: Qualifiers will be held someday somehow...
Dark: Lou was taken from the position as a leader and qualifiers were said to be held and then he is back and I have seen people say qualifiers will be held and people saying Lou will just be the leader. An answer would be lovely.
Fighting: Qualifiers will be held someday somehow...
Ice: Last qualifiers exploded and the new one is probably waiting for the next glacial age
The first gyms were opened at the begining of 2012 and one year has passed. And yet we are still half-way (7 gyms open and active, 3 gyms will open soon enough and 7 gyms are stuck, somewhat).
But that is not the problem.
The problem is: Gyms started with a batch of 8 (dogfish-electric; iar-ground; jas-flying; atheno-water; c$fp-steel; engineer-poison; kaxtar-fighting; korski-dark), all of them received challenges at the begining. After one year we have 7 gyms receiving challenges (dogfish-electric, iar-ground, jas-flying, atheno-water, engineer-poison, zarator-ghost, gerard-psychic). The number of active gyms
lowered in this year. We managed to get 7 new leaders (lou, gerard, leethoof, rediamond, texas, orcinus, zarator), but we lost (at some point, some came back but I don't know at which condition) 6 (lou, orcinus, rediamond, korski, c$fp and kaxtar) and 2 of them still didn't open their gyms (texas and leethoof).
Bottom line: gym leaders are not being appointed and gyms being opened fast enough to make up for the departure of the old ones. That is my biggest concern as far as gyms are involved: that we will never manage to complete the roster.
I believe the committee should focus first and foremost on completing the league before discussing replacement, elite four and what-not. The league is still incomplete and this bugs me, personally, as I don't see it being finished soon at this rate.
This will mean rushing qualifiers to some point. This whole "we will do it as soon as all parties involved are ready" policy is very risky, simply because most players won't ever feel they are truly ready. Also, this allows people to just jump in and start from the scratch training their mons and since you waited for the other candidates, you will have to wait for the new ones too, right?
All this cause delay. And too much delay means that the chances of other gym leader leaving for whatever reason increases and down goes the odds of us getting anywhere near a full roster.
I am probably exagerating, yeah. But I am concerned. And the numbers don't lie...after one year we haven't evolved much...if at all, as far as the number of open gyms is concerned.
My suggestion is simple: schedule a date/week for the next round of qualifiers to be held (or one different date per qualifier depending on how the respective candidates are). A Month, 2 Months, I don't know, but say the day/week it will happen and the format of the battle (like round 2 was held). That alone will motivate the candidates to speed up their training and to think their strategies and which mons they will use. The candidates, AFAIK, have good enough pokemon to hold their own on gyms (maybe,
maybe, not as much for fire type, but I am not sure who will actually run for it...), assuming they are competent, of course. That way it will be just a matter IMO, of tweaking stuff up. We can't wait for the optimal setup for everyone, as it might take a while...or forever. IMO, a good setup will do.
Also, the committe should go and decide what happens with the Ice (will a ww x glacier match be held on a specific day soon or will the committee decide to give some more time for other candidates to show up?), Bug (where is rediamond...), Dark (who is the leader? will qualifiers be held?) and Rock (where is leet's arena...) gyms. And stick to that decision.
If worst comes to worst, we can always enable challenges for the gym position to make sure the leader is the best of the type. But getting a new leader is (somewhat) easy. The hard part is getting the first leader and first arena up and running smoothly and fully.
just my 2 cents.