Absolutely heartbroken to hear about pet battles being removed. I paid for the collectors edition specifically because it included the pets and hadn’t heard about the battling being removed. It was the main thing that drew me to WoW, spent lots of time on it and was so excited to be doing the new content. I wanted to reply to the main Xu Fu thread but it is only active on the US forums. Does anyone know if there is ANY news about them bringing it back? Genuinely devastated and feel like I wasted my money buying the collectors edition specifically for pets not knowing they’re now useless besides collections
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I’m heartbroken too, though because I knew in advance, I didn’t buy Midnight at all.
I’m sorry to have to tell you that there has been complete silence from Blizzard. They’re just hoping we go away … which a lot of us have, and more will - but go away from the game, not just the forums.
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Pet battles isn’t even my main thing and I miss it. There is this hollow feeling looking at a pet and seeing it has no abilities or anything. I caught a dragonhawk not too long ago. Looked at it, hoping to see what abilities it had. Nothing. I don’t think I’ll bother catching pets as much as I used to anymore. It was fun seeing how to counter enemy battle pets. Nintendo deserves to be clowned into hell for this.
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It really wasn’t about Nintendo. We’ve been over that severeal times. Theit auto-battle patent didn’t touch WoW’s gameplay, and they never made any claim that it did.
Also, it is about to be reversed in the US as well as Japan
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-patent-office-revokes-nintendos-205858530.html
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Thank you for the clarification. I really don’t understand why they decided to shift pet battles then ngl. Not enough time, I guess?
We are only guessing.
I’ve heard the idea that someone senior is standing in the way.
Or it could be that the people who used to work on them have left, or no longer want to, and the senior staff don’t care enough to force the issue. One thing that emerged from the Metzen interviews is that the command structure has flattened since his original time, and that is never a good sign for a company. That’s my preferred theory.
Of course, some people cry “Microsoft!”, but I don’t believe that any more than I used to believe “Activision!”. No, I’d be pretty sure this is internal dynamics of some sort.
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What does that entail?
I don’t know exactly. I’ve teed this up to the relevant portion of the discussion.
He talks about coming back in with a vision for a trilogy of expansions, and veeeerrrry gently hints that the staff and individual teams have now split into a more “democratic” structure where they all decide on where things are going.
In a small project, with 5-10 people, where every person is committed and capable enough to get their mind around the whole project, that can work. In a bigger project with a couple of hundred people, you are liable to get the Too Many Cooks or Too Many Chiefs effect, where teams are not well-aligned with a common plan, and cracks show.
In any software development, the people have a bias: everybody would prefer to be working on new stuff rather than maintaining old systems. When command loosens, and individuals are given more autonomy, that’s what tends to happen.
I have followed and posted replies in the New and Returning and Quests and Achievements forums for years. I have never seen such a complete mess as the last couple of years. The number of serious problems with scaling and quest flow and phasing is absolutely crazy. It feels like nobody in there has a handle on it, or any clue about how it all works. Or cares. I wonder whether that is also an effect.
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Yeah, I really wish they added new WQs in the Midnight zones.
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I miss pet battles a lot too. And I find the new “companion” pets soul-less - what’s their point to “live”. It was (and is) a lot of fun to level new pets. And pet battling was relaxing. Now these new compaion pets… I feel sorry for them! I don’t want them even. I want REAL PETS that can battle! Please fix. You can put a team working on adding abilities to the new so called pets and add some pet battles easily. As an update, a patch. PLEASE give the new “pets” some life!
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SOME of the new pets can battle, which is a relief. I’m genuinely super happy when I get one and see it can go on adventures with the other ones, like Kai from Voidstorm. L’il angry Godzilla pet! The trading post has some new ones capable of battling too - the system isn’t entirely dead.
I think letting the rare drops/rep-tied pets battle and then just having a few open-world non combat ones is a reasonable compromise. It reduces overall workload, eases pet bloat (there’s like 400 species of identical cockroach for A’dal’s sake), while still letting us collect some cute new companions.
I think if Blizzard communicated this as their design intention it’d feel less like we’re all going to die.
Can we please keep Pet Battle, because its the fun part and why i play wow.
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