Although I started playing PoGo when it was released in 2016, I've been more of an Ingress player prior to the pandemic. For me, it was far more satisfying capturing portals (equivalent of pokestops) in the real world and linking them, creating huge fields on the Ingress world map and seeing how long they stay up before others take them down.

I decided to give PoGo another chance when I saw the news roughly a year ago that they were struggling due to the lockdowns and were going to make radical changes like removing the walking requirement from GBL. That's when I discovered GBL and started playing that even though I had only gotten to L25 when I played it for a few months in 2016 and early 2017 before losing interest. Within the span of the year, I had played over 6000 battles, made L41, peaked at about 2700, and accumulated countless GBL-relevant pokemon in all 3 leagues.

Right now, all of the activities surrounding PoGo like capturing and evolving Pokemon, capturing gyms, spinning stops, etc. have a lot more meaning since they all bring you one step closer to having a better team in GBL. I feel this game could have been a lot more successful and retained a much greater player base if they included GBL on Day 1 (even with the walking requirement) but of course, it's likely nobody even thought of the concept of GBL back in 2016.