Pet and 3.4 Stream Summary (From Salty's Twitch Stream)

This reads like a post prior to Guild Wars. You might not rember, but that update caused massive upheaval in top Guilds for a few months. Now obviously pets won’t be as big of deal as GW, but still:

The Developers have decided to update the “Find Guild” tool after 3 years! (The never bothered to add anything for GW). They are purposely considering adding a Time Zone search criteria so it’s easier to find players playing at the same time when you play… Very Interesting.

Now we don’t know all the 30+ Pet bonuses, but a few of them are bound to be VERY popular and desirable (sought after).

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Complain, complain, complain. Can’t we give it a chance first?

One of two things will happen.

Pet events will be so incredibly common and annoying they will appear almost continously until someone complains. Nobody better complain.

They’ll be too rare, we all complain and they make them more common or longer.

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You will all care about the pets for 3 days and never think about them after that. They seem pretty useless to argue about this much

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I want pets nooooooooooooow!!!

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Speak for yourself. I’m a collector and lover of all things adorable. I’m personally not that concerned about their abilities which are pretty lackluster at end game. (Granted, I’m sure some could be useful for early game players.)

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To each their own.

I enjoy the collecting aspect of the game! On top of that I’m a “bit” of a Min/Max gamer, and 30plus new troops to:

  1. Increase Kingdom power
  2. Triple Stats in certain team builds
  3. Unknown bonuses

Sign me up.

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This is kind of the stance I’m taking.

I can’t visualize a good solution until I see exactly how this solution fits with how I play. I also have to embrace the idea that my play style may be incompatible with this feature but that the majority playstyle may find it very convenient.

I have some concerns, but all I can do is make guesses right now. I want to wait and see. My guess is the release of this version is very close and that we’re stuck with it as-is for at least a week even if the devs want to change it. My other guess is at least part of that is the devs make their tweaks not based on “what forum members say pre-release” but “what telemetry data tells us post-release”.

I’m in a glorious situation where all of my pet issues have been addressed. I’d like to pick up another issue and push to have it fixed, but I’m also finding value in delaying the selection of that pet issue. This is an ambiguous use of the word pet and I like it.

I already don’t care about pets all I need is that black cat

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The bunny definitely won’t be useless. It’s a bunny. Its existance alone is so amazing that even if it just were a cosmetic pet, it still makes the game 1000000000% better.
images

As for me, I - as a non-PVP-player - will be bothered by the event requirements exactly until I have the bunny. Then I won’t be. All other pets can remain in the hand of kidnappers or starve. I just need the bunny. And the War Corgi, likely. But mainly the bunny.:rabbit:

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Plot twist: The hero is the actual kidnapper. Ruthlessly stealing cute pets from their owners, leaving only broken homes and hearts in his/her wake.

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You know, if there are pet gnomes, maybe the pets actually are from Cedric’s private zoo or something and the gnomes are the caretakers. He obviously would have the money to own a lot of exotic pets.
Cedric Sparklesack - Greedy ruler of the vault during the day, adoring bunny-cuddler at night.:wink:

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I can see it now: an entire line of for-money bunny pets and a very bankrupt @Sheba.

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Personally pets are a waste of time and resources there is a lot of things in the game that need polish. But I’m happy for the ones exited to get them. I just dont care at all. Come on where is the patch? I NEED TO FEED CUTE THINGS TO MY Wyrmling!

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As a end gamer i got every troop avalaible except zuul and i am happy they are adding more thing to collect, that will at least give me another goal to do and i don’t really care about the cosmetic pets but im still interested about the gold,xp and color mastery bonus. I just hope they won’t be too hard to get, if so i would probably just keep playing how i was and i will do like if they never existed

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I had a much longer post here, but decided to wait until they are live so I don’t have to make so many predictions. As I said before in another thread, this is very similar to a system present in at least one other free to play game that I am aware of. I need more information on this one to see if they accentuated the flaws of said system, or did it better.

I’d like to address the reason I believe is the core of why the “one hour timer for guilds” isn’t resonating with a lot of people, though.

Connecting this to a guild wasn’t something they did as an afterthought to share with each other, it was a calculated part of the design. The fact that it is centered around a group rather than an individual makes it a stronger activity hook than if it wasn’t, because you never know when one could appear, even when you are not playing.

The one hour timer is another activity hook that attempts to make people to conform to a certain pattern of play. It doesn’t actually matter how common the pet events are - if the pet events are common enough for the individual to see (say, 1 in 100 PvP battles), there will almost always be one up in heavily active guilds - they have to play a little bit every hour or so to complete events if they want the new things, and you still want to check frequently to not miss one that might be “new”. If pet events are rare for the individual, they still have to check every hour or so (if they weren’t already with tributes), but with still the possibility of having to drop everything for 10 minutes or so to complete a pet event. A person would tend to be a bit more willing to let, say, a handful of gems and dozens or hundreds of glory go for missing a tribute or two if they step away from the game for a while, but what about that one that permanently and passively buffs all your gold gains, or one that makes your stupidly fast and strong meta team even stronger?

Any implementation of this time incentivizes the type of staggered interaction with the game that forms a habit. This is the same principle energy systems work off of, to the long term benefit of many games. But, as I’ve said many times before, I have to express my disappointment that we are moving further in this direction with this game, especially since this is another thing that attempts to prod people out of their already established social groups and patterns of play. Especially for longer term players, where the new thing is likely to be the only thing that even matters, but they have to still continue checking off the boxes for the old things. Once you pass a certain threshold, activity hooks just turn into draconian play requirements. This is, of course, different for each individual, but it nice when a game maintains a relatively steady expectation of activity/play patterns.

Silver lining is they might still have ways that let players avoid interacting with this system. Again, this depends on the implementation. They could be common enough where you fill out your roster fairly quickly, and the end goal centers more around getting multiple copies of fodder to increase their level cap and levels, with monthly new pets making this a moving goalpost. They could rotate through the weekly guaranteed events, with the new releases being that weeks guaranteed events. But thats just me saying “it might not be that bad”. I can still express my displeasure that they felt the need to add another of this type of activity hook in the first place.

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Aww, you should name the spiderling, Lucas!

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Whoa there. You mean interact meaningfully BEFORE coding dozens of mistakes??? That’s a terrible idea

Pet Addendum

Note: This information comes from the recently released and official 3.4 Preview - Pets video. I will only include information that was not mentioned in the previous stream.


Pet Types:

There are 3 types of pets: buff, loot and cosmetic.

  • Buff: Doubles (or triples) team bonuses.
    (Team bonuses can be given for all troops of matching kingdom, all troops of X type, etc.)

  • Loot: Gives extra XP, gold or souls.

  • Cosmetic: Gives no bonus
    (However, refer to the pet mastery section to see why leveling all pets has a benefit.)

Pet Mastery:

Leveling a pet adds 1 point to your pet mastery.

  • Every 5 levels gives some gems.
  • Every 25 levels gives a chaos orb.
  • Every 100 levels gives a greater chaos orb.

Pet Rescue:

New pets will be introduced through the weekly scheduled pet rescue event usually.

Pet Shop Tiers:

Tier Gems Contents
1 25 1 basket, 1,000 gold
2 50 2 baskets, 2,000 gold
3 100 3 baskets, 3,000 gold, 4x featured pet’s food, 1 featured pet
4 200 4 baskets, 4,000 gold, 5x featured pet’s food, 2 featured pet
5 300 5 baskets, 5,000 gold, 6x featured pet’s food, 3 featured pet
6 400 6 baskets, 6,000 gold, 8x featured pet’s food, 4 featured pet
7 100 2 baskets, 1,500 gold, 2x featured pet’s food, 1 featured pet
Tier 7 is repeatable.

Pet Misc:

  • They have been working on pets for the last 12 months.
  • They will give away 1 pet as a login reward on 3.4 release day.
  • In the stream, it was stated that pet gnomes only appear in PVP. However, the video shows a pet gnome appearing in Arena as well.

Pet Art:

Click to reveal pet art.






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From the images, should we assume that the ones labeled “event pet” are cosmetic?