This is absolutely terrible. The stones WILL NOT help. Allow me to break down the math.
There are 4 pet battles up at any time, usually one was not good for leveling because it was a single elite spawn but the others would give close to 3k xp for a leveling pet. If a pet battle take a maximum of 5 minutes to complete, that means that after I come home from a 12 hour shift working at the hospital and I want to wind down with pet battling for a half hour (because I didn’t have enough time to do anything else in the game on those days), I could do 3, potentially 4, world quests and earn a given pet 9k-12k experience, respectively, in roughly 20-30 minutes (included travel time between world quests).
What used to reward almost 3000 experience per pet is now giving me 210 with a safari hat. This is a 93% (NINETY THREE PERCENT) nerf to the experience.
Assuming a good day where I earned 12k experience for a pet, to figure out the new time frame I divide that by the new experience gained (210), multiple that by the assumed 5 minutes per pet battle to get the time in minutes, and then divide by 60 to look at a more reasonable number and convert that into hours.
What I used to be able to accomplish in one evening after work will now literally take me 4.76 hours of consecutive pet battle game play to complete. To get the same thing out of those world quests I now need 9x-10x the time.
Giving me a CHANCE at a couple stones does NOT make me want to put forth all those extra hours, nor magically GIVE ME the extra 4+ hours a night to do so. The stones were a nice perk and extra for those world quests, the ability to level our leveling pets with current content WAS the point of them. You have killed that purpose.
And for me, given the fact that you’ve now taken a 20 minute activity and made me need almost 5 hours daily to get the same thing out of it, I have 0 desire to continue with this aspect of the game. And given my work schedule and time constraints, now don’t have a reason to log on 4 days a week.
Why you guys thought a 93% nerf (And without notice, too!) would be a good change, I don’t know. And giving people incentive to NOT play an aspect of a game because you’ve made it too convoluted is NEVER a good sign for development. Figure out a compromise (like many of the good ideas stated above: give xp for the world quest but nerf it for repeated battles, limited the repeated battles to once a day, etc) or change it back.