Crank it up for the battle pets?

Gameplay Pet Battles
1

Hello

So lately, a lot of my guildies have taken to farming battle pets. The thing, however, is that when you’re “done” collecting, leveling and battling trainers. There’s nothing to do. There’s not really an engaging “end game”. Why have an entire “side game”, that’s just collecting for no apparent reason?

I’ve been an avid battle pet collecter, battler and leveler since they came out. I’ve done all the content while slowly growing my collection to almost 1k unique pets and near 600 max levels. But as I get increasingly less enthusiastic about my battle pets and the time invested, seeing as there’s nothing to do really.

So I thought of ways Blizzard could improve this little sidegame in a very simple way.

Make PvP pet battling from the companion app a thing. We’re already logged in on our accounts to do table missions (or, well I used to be) so we should already be able to get all the information into the app rather easily. Design a neat little battle pet window where you can filter/search/select your 3 battle pets and their abilities and let people play on the go. Why not? What harm could it do? Would it severely hamper Blizzards servers?

There’s an achivement to do 250 PvP pet battles and to win with select “family” teams in PvP. That’s all fine and dandy, but why not expand on it? We can literally grab the ranking system from arenas. Let people grind rating and earn some titles, unique “gladiator pet appearances” or whatever for being top of the pet battle leaderboards!

Sure. At the top, it’ll be all the “boring” meta teams, as described in quite a few topics in here already. But on the other side, there’d likely be much more people actually doing pet battles if they could do it on the fly. If they could even get some cool appearances for their pets (or other fun little gadgets related to their battle pets), I’m sure it would just see a surge in people playing, for example when commuting. Pet battles is not something that needs to take a long time but it could let us play with something we already have and in a universe we all already love, instead of playing all sorts of other mobile games and watching useless videos.

In short;

  • make/use app for pvp pet battles
  • allow earning achievements from said app
  • (likely) see a big upswing in people doing pvp pet battling
  • voila, you now have a seasonal end game like arenas, but for people who enjoy simpler things and less requirement on reactions and swift fingers.

Thoughts?

2

So you have read the threads already. But still, I’m going to state the case as I see it at the moment, for the benefit of anyone just tuning in. And who knows. someone may come up with a brainwave to fix PvP that the devs could actually adopt!

 

This question comes up sporadically. People have opinions. Well, some people have opinions; the vast majority - including the vast majority of battlers - don’t care.

You should also be aware of the devs’ view, from the horse’s mouth:

MMR Ranking / more serious PvP: “Not quite the right thing for the silly game that pet battles is.”

Here is a statement of the problem, as best I can manage:

  1. PvP pet bettling sucks.

a) It sucks because the meta is very strong in it. In any given meta, the power law is real. Generally, 5 pets will constitute about 25% or pets used, and 20 pets will constitute around 50%. This makes matches very repetitive and boring.

b) Because of the meta, you the player are limited to choosing meta pets, counter-meta pets, or losing. This feels sucky. When I win because I’m using meta pets, I feel bad. When I lose because I’m running a deliberately non-meta team, I feel bad. Counter-meta is the only mode where I can possibly not spend most of my time feeling bad, and I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about it.

  1. Even if it sucks, the devs could add rewards to push more people in?

Yes, they could, in theory. They could add anything up to Mythic-level weapons for 10K pet PvP wins if they really wanted, and flood the queue with zillions of people being miserable. But that doesn’t sound like a desirable outcome.

Currently, PvP rewards are terrible. Awful. PvP and PvE rewards were decently balanced back in Mists when it was first introduced. PvE had levelling as well, ofc, but the weekly reward for your PvP wins then was commensurate with a weekly CT win, once you had your pets.

Since then, PvE rewards have been boosted to the skies, while the PvP reward hasn’t changed at all. Yes, we now have a Purple stone every… 7 weeks? … for 5 PvP wins, but you can buy a Purple stone for the price of 2 WQ with Charm rewards, and usually have a couple of Charms left over. And the effort isn’t remotely similar. So I can never understand why that motivates people to do 5 wins.

But the more rewards they add, the more they push people into misery. And the devs may be misguided (or various other words people use about them! :stuck_out_tongue: ) but they are not malicious.

  1. Even if it sucks, an external mobile app would give people something to do?

Some people. Maybe. A few more than currently PvP. I have grave doubts that it would be popular as it is.

I have other reservations, as well as the practicalities involved in programming and updating. Can you really imagine PvP without Rematch and Derangment’s?

  1. OK, so we need to make PvP not suck?

Great idea! How?

Nuke the meta - or at least flatten the curve towards the long tail.

Great idea! How?

There is no possible way to balance 1500 pets. The best that can be done is to force rotations of the meta, so that it keeps changing.

I find the idea of changing pets themselves - their stats, ability power levels, abilities - entirely out of the question. It attacks their identities, and undermines our learning process. The devs change a few pets once per expansion, and I think that is about right in principle, even though they can get the changes drastically wrong. The Sandstorm buff, for example, was [insert bad word here] insane. :woman_facepalming: and the Shattered Defenses change was … just mostly weird, and mostly bad, and mostly ineffective. Not to mention screwing up Flurry. :angry:

And then, changing pets every month or patch for PvP would totally screw over PvE, and that’s the tail wagging the dog - pleasing 1% while angering 99%. It would certainly be the end of pet battling for me.

One suggestion that is often made is to put limits on how many times you can queue with a specific pet, like you can use each pet 3 rimes a week, or each pet has a 3-day cooldown. It’s interesting, but I’ve never been able to find a convincing solution in it.

My only suggestion was to have a mode in which each week a smallish, randomish subset of pets - say 50 - is available for queue, or each week a bunch of the “best” PvP pets are excluded from queueing, so each week you’ve gotta figure out a new meta. But could that co-exist with Family Brawler? Ummm …maybe?

 
OK, so that’s the base case for PvP. Now consider your suggestion of adding PvP alone to the companion app.

I certainly have no objection to this. If they added in some PvE to it, I would have many, many objections, but I don’t see how adding only PvP can create problems. I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t use it, and the vast majority, like me, would simply ignore it, leaving those who enjoy it to get some extra benefit from the game. All good! :+1:

While I think a PvP app would be a good thing, I personally would prefer that the devs focus on making PvP more fun, because - and we have to look at the Big Picture here! - that would benefit ME as well! :rofl: Family Brawler was the most fun I’ve had with pets since Mists, so I know it’s possible that PvP can be fun.

Now, expanding on the base argument, here are the questions that would need addressing:

  1. What’s in it for Blizzard? How many people would use it without a change in the desirability of PvP? for how many aggregate hours per month?
  2. How would it interact with the in-game systems? As I have heard the lore, the PvP instance code was hacked out by one guy with an intravenous Mountain Dew drip over the course of a crazy week or so, and the devs really don’t want to mess with it - hence the unfixed-since-the-start bug about the result display. Hooking that up to a mobile app in real time doesn’t sound like something anyone is going to volunteer for.
  3. How would it work? As someone with negative talent for UI design, I am often amazed at the ingenuity of the people who design apps for phone-sized screens that can display and organise a lot of information. Still, it’s not a trivial challenge to make a pleasant and usable interface.
  4. How much would it cost, in man-hours, to develop, and for ongoing updates?
2 Likes
3

Ok. I’ll admit, that I didn’t exactly READ all of the latest posts here, simply because they seemed so old. I did quickly run through the headlines though.

Also, even though I felt prepared, I have to admit that you laid the nicest poopoo on my face that anyone ever did. :smiley:

I agree in principle about almost everything that you said, but I still think that Pet Battles is one of the few WoW things you can add to a mobile app in a meaningful way without really disrupting anything.

I will object to the notion, that people who are into pet battles are only doing it for collection and that it’s a very very small portion of the total player base, who would be into something like this. It is true, that it’s a very small portion of the player base, who currently engages in PvP pet battling. Heck even I don’t. There’s no incentive. However I do think there’s a sizeable niche and much bigger than what most people think. Also it could open up for more mini games in the future.

Basically; it feels like to me, that someone got a decent idea and then they never got around to really flesh it out. There’s so many things you can do with pet battles, that you can’t really with “normal WoW gameplay”, but it’s just lying there. Unused.

I like your suggestion with having a pool of pets available every week/month/period or banning certain pets. I think having a pool available is the best way to go, rather than ban. Could do like HotA and give “rentals” if you don’t have any pets, then there’s at least one of each you’re allowed to use. If pool is too small, there’s a very real risk that people simply might not have any of the 20-30-50 pets if it’s mostly random.

1 Like
4

PvP pet battles, agreed.

Yeah. There’s a lot of that going around. Scenarios, Islands, Torghast … even the Garrison. Nice concepts, but they never tried to iterate, or didn’t learn from, or didn’t find an answer to the problem of how to make them popular.

Even the Weekly is called “What we’ve been training for”. :smiley:

Pet PvP could have been/could be an endgame for pets. If only we could figure out a way to make it.

The idea comes from the few informal tournaments that PvPers have organised. Either there is a theme for pets that are allowed in, like “Profession Pets”, or “Wild pets from Kalimdor”, or they allow the participants to exclude certain pets they don’t want to see.

I thought about the problem of people not having the pets. And considered that maybe it’s not so terrible. About half of all pets are wild and easily captured. And half of the rest are very common/very easy to get/very cheap at the AH - even too cheap and common to bother selling!

So long as they don’t make a set of Murkalot, Baby Blizzard Cub, Spectal Tiger Cub, etc., I think it’s legit to say to players, espcially for an endgame activity, to go capture yourself an S/S Mongoose if you want one.

5

PVP has been massively mismanaged by whoever is responsible for this part of the game. It means that right now an app is as far away as it has ever been.

There’s some big problems surrounding the game mode:

Meta pets
Meta pets are left far too long once it’s clear there’s a power level issue for whatever reason. It’s unlikely that the meta pets will be more than a handful of pets that rarely overlap into the PVE part of the game so making changes would rarely impact that community.

Developer balance changes
In the more recent expansions when changes have been made to “balance” PVP they’ll also add something massively overpowered. For example nerf bone serpent whilst then adding hermit crab. Nerf hermit crab then buff weather etc. They make a positive change then undo all the work by adding something just as if not more broken. It’s difficult to understand why they waste their time like this. Right now the PVP community have nearly all been driven away by the unannounced changes to weather and aoe that were unwarranted in both pvp and pve.

Bugs/inconsistencies
Pet battles in general is plagued with bugs, inconsistencies and unintuitive abilities. For years there was a bug with Flurry that made it the outlier compared to similar abilities. The Hermit crab was added with inflated stats now we have chompy with the same issue. Fists of the forest does 40 base where Sandstorm does 45 base and the weather effect on top. There’s now two different damage increase/ CD increments one with most abilities and another with weather and aoe type abilities. There’s a whole bunch more abilities but it’s too long to list.

PVE Vs PVP communities
I would say a large majority of pve players just input a script for every fight they have ever done and don’t learn how to battle. This means that once they try PVP they get beat by anyone who’s experienced. Because this isn’t their usual always win outcome of it puts them off from PVP and anything that involves that part of the game. So many people who PVE will do anything not to PVP and often dismiss any issues. Why would a PVE player want to nerf an ability that helps them complete a fight faster even it it does 5 times the damage it should.

I genuinely think that the developers aren’t able to make a version of PVP pet battles that contains ~50 different pets to choose from and compete with one another.

1 Like
6

moths, moths were the moths

7

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.