Niantic says Pokemon GO gyms "need a lot more work"

Coming from Niantic senior product manager, Tatsuo Nomura...

“The gym portion [of Pokémon Go] needs a lot more work, and we are trying to improve it and make a bigger change to how the system works. Overall, I think we need a little bit more time to think through how we do it. We needed to define [gyms] in a way that works in a mobile game. For example, we didn’t have ... there’s no non-playable characters. That’s not how the game works. We’re an MMO, and we expect people to play with other people. We expected more people to play that portion, and a lot of that is game balancing and just mechanics-wise, there’s some part of that that needs refinement."

from GoNintendo