Sadly, I do miss regular pet rescues. But thank you for @Saltypatra for the drive-by update. It is better than silence. Does make me wonder if the next update or two will shift player focus back to pvp and/or arena. Hmm??
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Thanks to everyone for your comments and likes but as soon as pet bait for real $$$ was introduced I knew this request was dead.
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Pet bait as itās currently implemented just misses the mark so badly itās crazy to think that itās supposed to be the sole āfixā
A not-guaranteed chance at a pet you actually need that can be lost if the battle decides to RNG you for not-a-small-amount-of real dollars astounds me, and Iām sure Iām not the only consumer that feels the same way.
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This developer indeed has an aversion to that āguaranteedā concept, which could easily be monetized while making customers happy.
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On the subject of pet gnome baitā¦ If we were still getting pet rescues, I might be tempted to buy it every now and then. But as is, the thought of it fills me with rage. I feel like theyāre holding pet gnomes hostage and I am unwilling to pay.
Itās almost the end of day two of vault weekend and our guild has seen TWO pet rescues. Iāve spent most of my game time in PvP and saw all gnomes but the pet gnome. Makes me want to just walk away until the weekend is over, whatās the point in playing if Iām just getting more and more frustrated?
And yes, Salty, thank you for letting us know not to hold out hope. Sarcasm aside, it really is better to know what to expect, even if itās not what weād like.
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While your statement is correct, the baits is strongly directed at the noobs that have not any or many pets to Mythic, but for us that have most to Mythic they are rather a waste.
Kindly please, spare us the attitude. Especially, when you deny customersā reasonable request. Remember, that we pay your bills and biting the hand that feeds you is self-destructive.
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Iām hoping the devās stance means that Arena and/or PvP are getting reworked to be as rewarding as explore currently is, so we can get back to regular pet rescuesā¦ 
Thanks for the reply in any case @Saltypatra , hearing back from the dev team is always appreciated (much better than radio silence!)
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No. Because the only reason is increasing the revenue and they wonāt publicly admit that.
Any other reasoning would be immediately dissected and defeated by people like you. And that is too much of a headache and a public humiliation.
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I believe both of these have been confirmed to be in the pipeline.
Edit: I mean that arena and PVP reworks are coming. I am not claiming that they will have any particular feature being discussed here. It remains to be seen what they look like when the rework is unveiled.
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@Saltypatra Pets are fine. 18 pet alerts Friday, 18 Saturday & 20 Sunday. Just takes coordination and communication.
Itās a gnome weekend, so cut those numbers in half or so.
What I can say is thisā¦
Some of your suspicions are correct. Having pet gnomes in PVP keeps the game mode more relevant after the re-work of Explore. The re-work brought more players back to explore, and made the game mode more attractive for mid to end gamers again. (Which was the intention! Most mid-end gamers were primarily playing PVP. More are in Explore now, but we also need to keep PVP relevant.)
I can also say that we are going to be making some additions to the PVP mode (later) this year. I canāt expand upon this, but we have been planning to for some time. I know you want a timetable, but due to the nature of game development and how often our updates are switched around and re-scoped, I canāt give you one outside of later this year. That means that you are unlikely to see this in-game until the second half of the year.
We did not consider pet gnomes to be found too often in the past, aside from that exploit that was mentioned to us well after they were introducedā¦ We are happy with the rate that they are found in PVP, but less people are playing PVP which makes them rarer. With the additions we will being to PVP the game mode should be more attractive to players again, meaning that more pet gnomes are found.
For the average gamer, there is no need to collect all the pets. These players are less concerned with the very high kingdom levels, and are more focused on events and troop collection than pet collection. For end gamers this is obviously different, and these players will need to prioritise their play time and resources more carefully in the context of pets to ensure they can max their kingdom levels. It is possible to max all the pets in game through play, but it will be a significant amount of play. You donāt have to use your gems on pets, but it be a longer process like everything else in the game. You can earn gems through game play, and use them to speed things up or benefit you accordingly (Eg, in guild events, to open gem chests, etc) and pets are no different. (This is excluding exclusive cosmetic pets. We added faction pets to kingdoms so players can still unlock higher power levels if they miss out on an exclusive cosmetic pet.) However, we have heard you about having less opportunities due to less people playing PVP, and that is something that we will look into when we look at PVP.
As far as this being an issue, I will be honest with you, we donāt consider it one. There are many more pressing things in game that take precedence outside of our new content that we consider issues. This is a community request due to changing play styles, which we understand. We arenāt able to add pet gnomes to explore at this point in time, so we are looking at making PVP more enticing to help players/guilds trigger more pet rescues. We have heard you, and I have been collating feedback on this in particular. It is something I have mentioned before as a quality of life consideration to the team.
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You are mistaken.
Cosmetic Pets canāt be leveled up completely without using gems.
Faction pets basically fall in that same boat, but can be earned I guess with millions of gold invested into the Faction I suppose.
But youāre right that both resources can be earned through play.
However, the Revered Kitty is what makes it impossible to get every pet to level 20 thus ruining the idea of pets for pure completionists. Totally niche issueā¦ But felt like it was a good time to bring it up.
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Yes, thank you for bringing up cosmetic pets. They do require gems. We added faction pets to kingdoms so players could still unlock higher kingdom power levels if they missed a corresponding cosmetic pet.
Iāve edited my previous post to reflect this.
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Pretty easy fix here.
Remove blessed from Life and Deathās upgrades.
And unnerf the gold in PvP so that players arenāt forced to do Explore mode to keep up with what they were used to earning in PvP.
Orbweaver is a pain in the rear, but wonāt nearly be as much if itās more easily stunnedā¦ And kept stunned.
Life and Death matches simply take too long. Even getting to tier 1 is a pain now for most because of the easily 5-6 minute matches Life and Death matches trigger. Since life and Death plus Orbweaver means I need to kill 8 troops instead of 4.
4 Likes
Which everyone (that is wise enough) appreciates.
That being said itās incredibly more easy to simply spend the gems necessary to get the cosmetic pet to Mythic. Then to spend basically the same amount of gems on the Faction Assault, but then also have to use the time to get the Faction to 2500. Yes the Faction route offers more rewards. But in the pure kingdom leveling stanceā¦ faction pets are grossly inefficient compared to cosmetic ones.
Previous week was 11 Friday, 8 Saturday & 13 Sunday. I still maintain that communication and coordination results in a plentiful amount of pet rescues.
I donāt disagree that can be true, because of course good communication improves the situation, but for Xbox endgame players (like me) there are a lot of additional caveats, and the pet system in general seems to be what keeps most accounts power-blocked right now, suggesting to me that it is perhaps the mechanic hardest to keep up-to-date because:
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Not always able to be at the box due to work / sleep / other obligations
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Most endgame-focused players are grinding out medals in explore (no pets) rather than PVP right now, which I think is smart (especially given the recent gold nerf)
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No way to guarantee that even a very active guild will trigger the pets you needāall others are just for pet food, but put one further behind week-to-week because, if we use your number of about a dozen rescues and generously assume each one gave 2 copies of the pet, that would still only max one pet, and one is added each week
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Cosmetic pets are massive gem sinks to max them, and each cosmetic is its own fleeting opportunity because they are available for saving so infrequently, not belonging to the main pool
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Faction pets are, as awr points out, usually pretty expensive, and the bonuses they confer that are meant to help one unlock the next batch for ascension are gained at the end of the delve cycle when theyāre no longer needed/relevant
Iām sure I could number a few more if I thought about it for awhile, but I donāt need to because my point is simply this:
To be happy, I donāt need to complete all content in a day, or as itās releasedāin fact, I want some things to take awhile, to have longstanding goals in the game.
BUTāto stay happy with that I DO have to have a sense of agency regarding my progression, and pets miss the mark on thatāI, the player, have very little control over my pet progression even if I manage my resources well.
And that sorta stinks 
11 Likes
On this point, I strongly disagree. And this leads into a big problem with the system as a whole.
Iām in a ācasualā guild really mostly by name. We complete every normal guild task and one epic task and usually a bit more each week (about 20 mil+ total donated in the guild).
Iām āendgameā, or at least endgame adjacent. I have the resources to throw around if need be (currently over 130k gems, 1.2mil glory, etc). I collect troops like most endgamers. I have the depths of resources to heavily go after any new mythic or legendary. I collect new things semi-aggressively and upgrade them with long term farmables (traitstones, ingots, etc) very passively. The tasks that require me to collect/ascend a troop or upgrade a thing are still trivially bypassed before pet bottlenecks are at this point. At the pace things are going, even with my lax attitude toward completing āgrindā tasks, even the āmore difficultā champion level requirements will be completed before the āpetā ones.
I can carefully ration and make my way through every other existing bottleneck in the game, or be patient for it to resolve itself in time, or accelerate it with gems (or diamonds, etc) with a generous window of opportunity for every other bottleneck. Everything except pets. Pets are different.
Basically, attempting to even gem accelerate pets is a double whammy. You want to do this is you are getting too few pet rescues or you arenāt present when they happen. But then you donāt have the opportunity to accelerate the pet you want because you are getting too few pet rescues or you arenāt present when they happen.
Now, all of that would probably still be fine if they werenāt required for progression. Except they are. And the difficulty bar for pets keeps increasing while every other thing (save earning a base mythic for 10 star, which is an appropriate bottleneck) decreases in difficulty.
Let me use one example of a situation I am currently experiencing.
Summary
In about January of 2019, I decided I wanted to get more stars on Pridelands, since I had the troops to do so and every other bottleneck was trivially passed. Pridelands currently has a single pet, Shymera, with no cosmetic pets and no current faction pets. I decided to attempt this without gems.
Somewhere mid 2019, I hit enough copies to allow the pet to be raised to level 10. Hooray. But sometime during the the year more troops became available, allowing me to push the kingdom level higher, so I now needed a level 20 pet to max star it.
Our last pet channel callout for Shymera was in November 2019, in the middle of the night. The only possible one before that for me to get was in August 2019. Theres been one of them as a Wednesday event, in December 2019, in all of the time Taransworld has been recording said events (so, about 1 year, 11 months). My Shymera is still not mythic. The only opportunity in the last six month period I would have had to mythic it with gems is the Wednesday event, and those are too bloated with cosmetic pets all stacked on a few kingdoms to rely on to get past this. And even that gave me less than one day to decide to spend a ton of gems or not, with no warning other than looking at (subject to change) spoiler data, whereas mythic rotations and event key drop tables and weapon crafts stay around for a week with soulforge following a no-repeat rule and the kingdom events having at least a bit of warning (being called out the day before).
Now that my opportunity has passed, I donāt expect to see Shymera as a guaranteed event rescue anytime soon, if ever, so that leaves me:
- Grinding a bunch of PvP to try to trigger the pet rescue myself and hoping for the tiny gnome chance, the chance that that is a pet gnome, and then the very small chance that that is the correct pet. Since Iām just 1/30th of my guild, I canāt influence this a whole lot even if I reach unhealthy levels of playtime. At which point then Iām allowed to spend my gems to overcome this bottleneck, because otherwise, I have to repeat this probably an average of 8-10 more times to hit mythic for this one pet.
- Change guilds to have guildmates that play way more and increase my minimum time obligation to way higher than I am comfortable with to increase my chances, at which point I very likely burn out completely before I even hit my goal. (Iām not willing to do this, but if I didnāt bring it up as a āsolutionā, someone else would have because āwe get plenty of pet rescuesā. Increasing my playtime for short bursts to overcome a goal is feasible, increasing my weekly/daily obligation to the game will lead to me quitting the game flat out and is not, and Iāve seen this countless times over in others.)
- Wait for it to happen organically from my guild, and hope Iām available during the one hour window, at which point then Iām allowed to spend my gems to overcome this bottleneck.
- Wait for a Wednesday pet rescue that has it on it (again, there was one in the last two years for this pet), at which point then Iām allowed to spend my gems to overcome this bottleneck.
- Keep not spending gems, while participating in a guild that very likely still well above the median in activity, with myself being probably one of the top 5 heaviest PvPers in the guild, and not see a mythic accession on this pet for well over two years, by which point I would have likely completed every other potential bottleneck for kingdom stars up to whatever the highest star available is (weapons, weapon upgrades, troops, troop upgrades, maybe even potentially elite levels). Thats not just a āsignificant amount of playā, its also a āludicrously long waitā. Like, passively earning ZuulāGoth without going out of your way to participate in any personal events that grant orb is an easier goal.
Now, we are far from a top guild, but we are also far from āscraping to make ends meetā. And even here, there is basically nothing I can do save for upping my playtime to 20+ hours per week and join a guild full of players that can do the same to not be bottlenecked for potentially years. Thats not feasible. I canāt (reasonably) even spend money to get past this because even the $20 deal is random and limited, costing potentially hundreds of dollars to get the right pet (then, again, needing to spend gems to get enough copies of it). I canāt spend gems to accelerate if the pet isnāt already in front of me, and the stars have to align for just this to happen. I have no way forward on this objective. Once ātroops existingā time gates are cleared, pretty much every other progression objective all the way up to 20 star Iād have a way forward on, even if I canāt complete them right now and even if it would take months at my current pace, I can inch forward.
And for this one situation, if I was actively progressing any one of several other kingdoms higher (I currently donāt take many across the 10 star threshold because of the basically broken PvP payout scaling and matchmaking), Iād be at the pet bottleneck for at least half a dozen more, in a similar situation there.
I donāt mind spending gems to accelerate if push comes to shove. Shymera wasnāt there for me yet, so Iām okay not having this maxed - for now. I just want more than 1 hour every several months that can be at any time including when Iām sleeping to have the opportunity to do so. I want more than maybe one guaranteed opportunity in a two-year period where I have a day (usually in the middle of my work week) to decide whether or not I want to undertake a massive cost to overcome a potential bottleneck. I want to be able to see an upcoming event in the event schedule that introduces new troops and therefore pushes kingdom star potential higher and then and make an informed decision to gem accelerate by seeing it one time guaranteed, in at least the months before that event (or during it), not preemptively spam gems at any pet I encounter in the hopes it wonāt bottleneck me by the time I complete the other goals. I want a way forward from any given time period, including right now, including if 5.0 makes it a game changer so now accelerating is the right play for me.
We can make projections about roughly two years from now, and if we are in a similar place we would have about 50% more global pets and an average of 4-5 more troops per kingdom (and a lot more having factions to bring them up to the level where factions are) - and thats if whatever 5.0 is doesnāt accelerate new troop introduction. āMidgameā collections for a given kingdom will now fairly easily meet the criteria for 13*+ kingdoms with regard to troops, every other thing to reach this point has become easier (save base mythics, which come slower per year overall but can still be guaranteed within a few months if targeting them, thus, far greater agency), and pets have become harder - less chance to get a specific one randomly from rescues, and who knows how long between guaranteed specific ones.
This isnāt just limited to the number of pet rescues that are getting generated (though the problem is worse when a low amount of rescues gets generated). Its been something that has been brought up here and there for quite a while. The lack of targeting, the one hour time limit, the fact that Wednesday rescues donāt guarantee a normal pet that can help you progress a kingdom in a given time cycle (and instead repeat pets ad-nauseum and throw out multiple cosmetic pets per month which even then stack high on a few kingdoms), and the fact that you only have the duration of the pet rescue itself to accelerate with gems is a perfect storm for frustration in trying to progress when you have the resources and drive to try and work toward a goal, but donāt want to commit to a burnout inducing baseline obligation with the game.
Like I said, getting our raw number of weekly pet rescues back up is a start. The other issues will still persist until the entire system is improved in some way. At one point on one of the dev QA streams, one of the ideas spitballed was a āthree choicesā system for any triggered rescue to allow targeting a bit easier, which would help slightly, but only really to the person triggering them. Another was restricting specific pets or color pets to specific days of the week (which honestly would probably make the issue worse, so Iād like to express disapproval of that one right now) or tie triggerable pets to the current event week (might help people like myself over the extreme long term but would hurt anybody getting a lot of rescues short term and piss them off, so probably best not to go this route). A relatively high cost way to trigger one for the guild (from a narrowed pool, hopefully, I know it wonāt be a specific one), or maybe a lower cost way to trigger one for just yourself in the same manner are other things that can be explored, with the primary items being pet food/jewels, gems/diamonds as the premium resource, and souls being the catalyst/sink.
So yeah, its an issue. Iām probably significantly āahead of the curveā in terms of resources and kingdom progression for someone with my level of weekly playtime because Iāve been playing so long, but the longer it goes on, the more egregious the pet issue becomes for more players as its a bottleneck you canāt overcome by just playing more, paying gems, waiting, or even paying cash, you have to do a combination of several of them. Most everyone else currently with this depth of resources or at this progression point (on PC/Mobile, anyway) where pet collecting can even block you from a relevant progression have much higher playtime with a guild also backing them with much higher member playtime which, in my opinion, approaches āunhealthyā levels (no offense to those that enjoy playing this much, but it shouldnāt be used as a baseline for being allowed to progress) and it is that subset of people that are maxing pets without using gems while one rung down we barely have an opportunity to use gems if we want to. Eventually a fairly large people playing a paltry <7 hours per week will be at this point with basically no clear way forward - money, gems, or otherwise. By that point, it will be a āproblemā, just like not having a viable way to get missed mythics before soulforge existed and not having any way to get missed old weapons before they were put in the soulforge.
This probably sums it up better than I did:
I wonāt deny there are more pressing issues (PvP matchmaking being an absolute mess, PvP payout scaling being broken at the top end, faction team delves overall and also compounded with the unhealthy hypercompression of the Tuesday delve event being highly optimal at completing this goal, and the āflowā of explore interface being obnoxious, to name a few that are far more far-reaching problems that are already at or near the level of āproblemā), but please keep this issue in mind. Iām fine with pet gnomes not being in explore right now if we get a better long term solution later, but its not something that should be completely ignored either.
But it is nice to hear that the reason they donāt want to be put in explore is to keep PvP enticing in preparation for the upcoming PvP revamps, so if those fail to get us back to the numbers we had before, we can at least revisit this issue at that time.
tl;dr - Fewer raw numbers on pet resuces in the short term make the issue worse, but lack of targeting + growing pet pools + no guaranteed rotation + huge number of cosmetics messing up any potential for a rotation + no way to accelerate a pet with gems unless youāve already got a rescue + the one hour window you have to be present for even when accelerating with gems are the main problems with the way pets work as a progression bottleneck, and this will become more of a pressing problem the longer it takes to get addressed and they bottleneck more people that have every other progression task covered for several star upgrades beyond. And also, no, no they arenāt even close to every other thing you can speed up with gems, because you actually have the opportunity to do so only during a rescue, which heavily runs counter to the reason you are trying to accelerate in the first place (not seeing the pet).
edit: typos
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