Originally published at: New Pet – Hoglet – Gems of War
A new pet has been released, Hoglet. You can get your Hoglet from the daily Pet Rescue for the next 24hrs.
Hoglet will only be available from the Lunar New Year Pet Events.
If this is a Lunar event only, and it is year of the Rat next year, does that mean a 12 year wait until the Hoglet is offered again?
That was exactly my thoughts when I saw in spoilers that devs replaced panda with the pig for Lunar New Year event.
And what about years of Dragon and Snake? We already have various pet dragons and snakes!
We need a “Beekitty” pet.
Because i want people to have conflicting feelings about being covered in them.
@Maxx @Ashasekayi
Yuck. Another “mythic is a badge for people who spend a lot of gems” pet.
Every time one of these releases I go buy something in a different game to make me feel better.
Not sure what the problem is. So what if some people are willing to spend gems or cash to show off their shiny bling status symbols? They do it of their own free will. No one is forced to buy them to mythic. Just like the avatar packs people spend money on - they have no in-game benefit outside of cosmetics other than giving people a way to support the game if they wish. And these pets are an easy extra pet mastery level for those who don’t spend anything but the time to finish the event. 5 free gems or an orb? Yes please!
Not seeing a downside here…
There’s a lot of “diamonds” in this playerbase. Those are people who value collectibles above all else. One could argue part of GoW’s draw is it has a stronger collection aspect than a lot of other match-3 games.
“Only available once a year or less so it takes multiple years to ascend for free” is the P2W for diamonds. It hurts their feelings.
Going by Saltypatra, cosmetic pets don’t ever repeat except for Tiny Torte:
So yes, if for some reason you want an ascended version, the only way is to buy out the shop on the release day, there’s no second chance.
Every cosmetic pet will be available annually.
Including this current cosmetic pet. It won’t make as much sense next year. But it will be available every Luna New Year.
Just like Lil Freedom will be available again this July.
I wouldn’t bet on it, if you look at the quote above only Tiny Torte will be back this year, none of the others. I guess they pick a dozen or so special dates each year and make non-recurring event pets for them, otherwise they’d eventually run out of Wednesdays to repeat these events on.
I wouldn’t hold any of community managers to their word here. Plenty of times it was shown that they don’t really know what is going on in the acutal development of the game
It’s more like a square peg, square hole situation. They can’t fit the old event pets into the Wednesday schedule if they keep releasing new ones. At least unless they run several pet events in parallel, which feels somewhat unlikely to happen. The peg just fits the hole too well. They are probably aware this is against community expectations, so I wouldn’t really expect any more official communication about this topic until the first event pet would be due to reappear.
Salty’s quote doesn’t say that they won’t be available every year. I don’t understand why she said Torte would be easier to get. That doesn’t make sense.
We haven’t had pets for a full year. So you may want to play it out a bit more before encouraging others to sink gems due to them thinking they’ll never be able to get the pet again.
That’s a lot of coding and time to create a pet for only 24 hours and never again. Sorry man, the logic really doesn’t add up.
I saw a post someplace (maybe Twitter?) where they were asking for ideas for future cosmetic pets tied to holidays. Given that, Wednesdays would be dominated by cosmetic pets if they ever repeat, like Fourdottwoone said.
It would also explain why everyone gets a free pet via daily login, so lower level players can get at least one copy before they go away forever.
It’s easier to get because it repeats each year, unlike the other special event pets.
She didn’t say that.
Alright ladies and gents, as @Sirrian’s illegitimate Son. I feel confident in speaking for him even if I’m way off based.
Here are all the current cosmetic pets:
Every year there will be brand new customers to sink gems into cosmetic pets. It doesn’t make sense to think that they will be one and done. It’s possible that they will be available for cash instead of gems. But I promise you all, they will not be exclusive to the first 24 hour pet rescue.
I think it also works out like this convoluted mess.
Nothing is consistent in GoW. If we go by historic precedent, all decisions about mechanics are made up as we go along, and even firm statements by devs are subject to change. (This is not objectively bad. Sometimes the devs should change even strongly held beliefs. Let’s not discuss it and instead just accept it as a fact.)
We can’t fully trust the words written in releases. For a long time it was a joke that Sirrian kept writing “the pet will be available today, then will enter the rotation in 3-5 weeks” even though every week the pet was usually available immediately after the event. So we can gather a rule from these posts: what Sirrian writes and what another dev implementes are not verifiably consistent.
We also can’t trust if something changes we will know. Soulforge rotation changed without a peep, despite being in the top 5 player gripes at the time. Champion XP in arena was a bug for many months with zero acknowledgement it was a bug and zero initial acknowledgement it had been changed.
(Corollary: we also can’t trust that if something has historically happened it is correct. Champion XP in arena was only revealed as “a bug” when it was fixed. Every release is saturated with [LOOSE_TRANSLATION_STRING] and yet somehow this is filed as a bug. Etc.)
So we have a host of Sirrian posts about event pets and how event pets are distributed. But we know from the above that:
So, simply put: we don’t know squat, it’s best to assume you need to spend gems today if you are going to be upset without a mythic Hoglette.
I think the devs are trying to do something fun. I think we also have a clear disconnect between how devs and players perceive the game.
It is “sensible” that if there are some things that will not be given out frequently enough to be practically “completed” without spending a lot of gems that those things should have no in-game effect. Since they don’t help you “win” they aren’t P2W, right?
But the moment pets released, a leaderboard was desired. Even on the forums, a silent race began. The first person to mythic all of the pets got serious bragging rights. The first few still had bragging rights. I remember it being clear AWR and a few less-vocal others were seriously engaged in that race.
They were all endgamers and all in guilds at the top of the brackets. They had no other way to compete, and they were having fun with this new axis of competition. They weren’t dumb, unimportant newbies. They were some of the most influential players in the game. That is unquestionably a profit axis, right? But it was all free, so it was a fun race.
If they are “only cosmetic”, then it wouldn’t hurt if they arrived mythic, right?
Yeah, wrong. Someone out there noticed players wanted to fill out their collection. That someone also noticed that it was doable for free, and the people who were most excited about it were in the best position to get it done for free. And then we get pets where you can’t win the race unless you throw a lot of gems at them. In short, to win the race, you have to pay. Rocket surgery, right? I don’t need Steve and Blue to help me deduce if this is “pay to win”. You have to “pay” in order to “win”, even if the prize is nothing.
Don’t even come at me with the “that leaderboard doesn’t matter” angle. I challenge you to explain to me why any accomplishment in GoW matters, in that case. If you are invested enough to even bother posting on the forums, you’re already treating a video game like it matters more than it does. We’re all sick.
I don’t feel like the devs see the game the same way we do. That means the things they think are “fun” can often end up “insulting” or “confusing” on our end (example: “We thought it’d be fun if you could ascend/disenchant treasure troops.”) I wish our devs were players, too.
There are a lot of pets in game, and we cycle through them as often as we are able. We purposefully ensured that any pets with limited availability were cosmetic only in nature, so players did not need to invest in them to gain further bonuses, etc.
A point raised above is that completionists may want to mythic these pets on top of collecting them, which is true. Another thing mentioned by @Slypenslyde is a perceived leaderboard found on these forums. I’d like to point out that we haven’t made an in-game leaderboard, and there is no further benefit from mythicing these cosmetic pets outside of the value perceived and created by other end-gamers. However, it was important to us that these limited pets remain cosmetic, so that players did not feel that they needed to mythic them in order to obtain further bonuses, or be competitive in-game. That being said, we are stoked if you want to mythic your favourite pets! Have fun! Live your best life! The point of games is to have fun, and our players do that in a variety of different ways. Some like to play casually and match gems, some like to achieve in highly competitive guilds, some like to beat their personal bests on treasure hunt, some like to read the lore and explore Krystara, and others like the collection aspect offered by Gems of War.
I believe it is also worth noting that these forums can sometimes be echo chamber of the opinions held by end gamers, and show a different side of the community than any other social platform. What is important here isn’t necessarily as important to other sections of the playerbase.
On a final note, a few forumers mentioned a lack of clear communication and a change in policy earlier in the thread. Unfortunately, we cannot answer every question, as we are busy making the game and operating as a business. We endeavour to do so, and I pop up whenever possible to answer the bigger questions. Sometimes these answers aren’t what people want to hear, which can lead to people not believing what information I am passing along, or dismissing it completely. This means that I need to pick, choose and constantly triage what I am answering, how, and where, especially as things can change in the development pipeline, or due to a change in policy, stance or design decision. I am looking into the way we offer these limited cosmetic pets, so please sit tight as I investigate how we plan to move forward.