My nearest gym (and only one in walking distance) at the aforementioned church is clearly being dominated a few local groups of players. Every time I look at it, I see familiar names with pokémon each having cp in the high hundreds or low thousands. It currently has
seven players defending it.
My strongest pokémon has 460 cp, an amazingly lucky/rare catch, and they quickly drop off from that.
Combined with the constant lag and hangs, I feel like I have no chance against these guys. I keep holding out hope that performance is going to get better one of these days. I've seen strategies for timing dodges in gyms, but when every third or fourth operation fails to get a response from the server…
Maybe I just need to start going out at 4AM.
With it being summer and kids out of school, I wouldn't doubt that's what some of the local ruffians are doing.