the current event pet Libby does not factor into the kingdom level requirements.
I find this a relief (even though I pumped gems into it to level it to 20 as well).
Ever since the only way to gain a previous event pet is to buy it for loads of money, there is a pressure to get those pets to maximum level the one time, that it is possible (and woe to those, who have the audacity to join the game afterwards). It is obvious, that there is no intention to reintroduce any way to repeat event pet hunts either.
If cosmetic pets become fully cosmetic again by this change (you should add a warning at a central position about it though), there is one less reason to hate this game.
@Jerry_the_skunk How would you handle all the cosmetic pets that people have already spent a tonne of gems on just to raise the kingdom level? I don’t think there’s a way to put this genie back in the bottle.
Personally, I think cosmetic pets are fine as long as they’re an alternative to upping the kingdom power level. That is the case for Sword’s Edge - there’s 3 regular pets + 1 faction pet. The max kingdom power requirement is “Collect 5 pets” and before that, “Level 4 pets to 20”, which you can do without spending gems on a cosmetic pet. Though I do hope by the time “Collect 5 pets” task is available, the game has added a non-$$$ way to get a copy of the 5th pet
The same way, kingdom levels were handled, when they were switched from gold to tasks: Let them keep the stage, they reached, even if they don’t fill the conditions of previous stages.
It has been officially stated, that event pets won’t be necessary for kingdom power levels. It has been officially stated, that event pets will return as hunts in a regular cycle.
Now, how many regular pets are there again for Shentang?
And no, campaign pets don’t count as regular.
This concept has been messed up so many times already, that I think, this current bug is really the best chance to finally get out of it.
Those “official statements” were made many, many, many moons ago. I believe it’s more than a little unfair to expect those statements to remain the case unchanging eternally when so many other things have changed. If you want cosmetic/event pests to remain unnecessary for kingdom power levels, either those power levels have to be de-coupled from pests entirely or the developers would have to keep adding duplicate non-cosmetic/non-event pests to the pool.
If the former were the case, there’d be no purpose to anybody spending any resources on cosmetic pests at all. If the latter were the case, there would undoubtedly be complaints from the usual groups of malcontents about how diluted the rescue pool is and how it’s impossible to get the one or two pests that a person needs on account of there being a trillion and six pests to choose from. (You know, the handful of people on these forums who never sound happy about anything and whose every post here is a complaint about something or a sarcastic quip that adds nothing to the discussion.)
As for getting event/cosmetic pests to return on a regular basis? I thought the Saturday redux events were a decent solution, but I suspect the whining of malcontents in these spaces about how that meant a full day where regular pest rescues weren’t available helped put the kibosh on that.
And I will once again advocate for conditions under which those cosmetic pests enter the rescue pool. Not on a regular basis, but perhaps they could be added on certain “special” occasions to encourage more play and more hunting during those times. Like maybe on Vault weekends, or maybe as available through rescues triggered in the Arena. Something unique any which way.
If you click on the Sword Edge - Raise a pet to level 20 requirement, Libby shows up.
I would like her (Libby) either to count, or to receive a refund on the 2000+ gems I spent to get her to level 20, not to mention all the food I wasted.
Those “official statements” could still hold true, though.
With lid now open for Pandora’s box called “single troop bonus”, there is no real obstacle for the devs to release as many additional pets for every kingdom as there are troops. It only takes artwork and copypasting code with respective ID changed.
But it would be nice to get cosmetic Saturdays back - I liked them. Any weekend that is not Vault (or Arena) is absolutely fine; make it one for every two months (six old cosmetic pets a year), if every month seems too generous.
As I said in another post. The easiest way to solve the Pet problem is to add them to Soul Forge as craftable. There is already a cosmetic pet in the forge that you can craft, but it requires cursed runes that for the majority of us are an extremely rare resource.
So do Pets like they do Troops in the Soul Forge. Add a Pets tab and cycle the pets based on the Kingdom each week and add in the cosmetic pets from previous years events that were basically a 1 time only and then never seen again.
And instead of requiring cursed runs to craft them like the Anvil pet currently in the forge. Make the requirements similar to the troop crafting. Make it use souls, diamonds (like 25 per pet), trait stones that match the pet’s food color requirement, and growth orbs (not major ones).
