Recently there was a large community effort to organize and host a PvP Pet Battling Tournament. With about 80 players in the bracket and many more watching and help organize, I wanted to put together a post of consolidate feedback & share our experience! Although I mostly collect pets (but, hey, 12th place NA in the tournament isn’t bad! Right? right? 
) I’ll try to consolidate the feedback to just battling in order to keep the scope reigned in.
I’ve put together two focused lists, “What is going well” and “What needs improvement”, with snippets of player feedback in light of this experience. In the conclusion I want to recognize a bunch of players that helped put this together, and call out a few resources that were used in making it possible. Between these sections I think Blizzard could make a few changes to the pet battling system come Midnight that will enrich pet battling for everyone - enhancing the player experience outside of traditional gameplay loops like M+ and Raiding.
The pet battling system is one of the oldest evergreen systems in the game. Yet, it has remained virtually untouched since its conception in MoP (2012). With the available in-game pet count rocketing up near 1,600 and player engagement of the system remaining low but steady over the years now is the time to make exciting changes, especially because they fit with the new gaming philosophy of improving evergreen content and broadening the player space. I hope you agree.
What is Going Well
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The pet battling format is very simplistic where new players could easily understand how to do it, yet through lots of practice it actually can become fairly nuanced. Pet swapping, counters, and abilities that cause backline pets to be effected add a level of nuance to a fairly simple system. I think it’s a good sign that such an old (13ish years!) game element holds up surprisingly well.
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The gameplay loop is separate from the rest of the game. Players are not compelled to raid or PvP just to enhance the pet battling system, and insanely meta battling pets are relatively easy to obtain. I think it would be tough if the best battling pet was Sir Snips or Bucketshell for instance.
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It’s lighthearted, casual, and competitive when players want it to be. Not every battle requires a Ph.D. in logistics to win, you can do most battles without a guide but there are some challenges for players when they want it.
What Needs Improvement
There’s a ton I could say in this section, and have said in the past, but I really want to boil the biggest concerns down into a fairly concise list.
- Balancing Needed. Every tournament participant from first timer to seasoned battler agrees that weather abilities are overpowered and uninteresting. In addition to weather abilities like Sandstorm, Reaping Hook when compared to abilities like Surge of Power are obviously overpowered. These abilities really need a nerf or some sort of counter needs to be developed. I understand that this may cause current PvE pet battling encounters to be more challenging in rare cases; yet, I think old content could be nerfed or even something as simple as a long cooldown on weather abilities would make those PvE encounter strategies stay the same. I also don’t think it’s a bad idea to tune pet battling abilities and have the playerbase figure out new strategies - we like doing that stuff, we’ll figure it out. Please, please, please… if you take anything from this post it’s that everyone wants the weather ability dominance to be nerfed.
- Tooltip clarity and bugs. Community member Remte has put together a google doc of nearly every ability instance where the tooltip doesn’t seem to be lining up to what is happening in game and where clarity is needed. I think this is a great resource for understanding player confusion & frustration behind many abilities.
- GUI, visual, and addon update. These have all been unchanged since 2012 and are starting to bug out. For instance, BONESTORM!-ing a floating pet rarely knocks it up and it’s unclear until the numbers come in what happened with it. The UI itself is straight out of MoP, and some of the icons look old. Could we get a fresh set of paint for the pet battling UI, and maybe some refreshing new effects for abilities? Furthermore, the pet tournament revealed that players need to have an addon to show their opponent’s ability cooldowns, so how much longer until their sandstorm is up for example. Myriad addons do this, but it really-really needs to just be a part of the base UI at this point - just a simple number indicator for how long abilities can be used (shown to all players) would remove essentially the need for any pet battling addons. Please add this.
Other Resources
In order to make pet battling work in a tournament setting a lot of resources had to be developed, these might be useful if there is appetite to add aspects of these tools into the game!
- PetDraft. This site will allow players to selectively pick their pets and ban other player’s pets such that there is some balance and strategy behind bringing pets. This has made the tournament much more fun in comparison to the usual PvP Pet Battling random queue where similar pets & teams are often used.
- Stages. Community members searched Azeroth far and wide for some of the coolest places to pet battle. I think a lot of these could be used to update the usual random queue pet battling locations.
Recognition
The tournament was a massive community effort to organize and pull off. The tournament simply would not have been possible without Flip_Method. Flip has been a long time pet community leader and this vision was his doing and he has made more friendships among players and he was truly a pleasure to work with. Beyond Flip, programmers such as Fwen and Nightmane were instrumental to make the resources necessary to make the tournament work. Des, Remte, Mutanis and Avendra were also helpful in developing the tournament and managing its rules and various challenges. There are many many people I could mention, this community is so great and it’s been an absolute honor to be a part of it.
As cheesy as it may sound, there’s something really special about pet battling in WoW. It’s an excellent community for new players interested in competitive environments with low friction and lots of wholesome players. Everyone I battled against was extremely kind and I’m happy to say that I’ve made a few friends along the way. I hope that future changes to the pet battling system can help us add some fuel to this great system so that way future events can be enhanced.
Thanks Blizzard! Happy Holidays.
