Felcycle / Alternative to Torch 5 Please!

Gameplay Pet Battles
1

Could you please consider offering an alternative method that allows players to skip the pet battles for the secret mount / Fel Cycle? Many of us cannot do the Pet Battles, because Blizzard has given us no means to completely remove our battle-pets from the Battle Pet slots. By this I mean, once “a” pet is locked in, it is permanent and they cannot be removed from the slot; only replaced with another.

The reason this is an issue is because many websites data mine this pet data and use it to post all of a player’s current alts, regardless of whether the player has or has not agreed to share that information. Due to that, it is routinely used by stalkers to sniff out a player’s new characters.

Because of that vulnerability, many people who would otherwise love to try pet battles, cannot do so because we have no way of securing our armory page from intrusive eyes. I would legitimately pay 200,000 gold to the NPC to simply skip this step, not because I dislike pet battles, but because if I engaged in them, it would permit folks to track me via my battle-pets on the armory. I’ve seen a lot of friends harassed into quitting over the years, and so I tend to sit on the ‘better safe, than sorry’ side of the spectrum.

This happens a lot more than you guys at Blizzard realize, and because 90% of it happens over Discord, X, or Tumblr, there is very little you or your GMs can do. The best and easiest solution would be to allow players to completely remove their pets from battle slots, and return them to being empty when or if they wanted.

Alternatively perhaps you could simply prevent players from seeing another player’s battle-pets on the armory and what pets they have collected. Either of the above changes, would resolve this loophole nicely and allow more people to pet-battle.

Unfortunately until there are meaningful changes, it means a large part of your base that does not pet-battle, will continue not to; and will be forced to avoid / or be barred content that involves it. Again, it’s not because those players aren’t interested, but simply because of these vulnerabilities.

I hope you’ll change your stance and make some form of a correction. It’s clear a lot of effort went into the design and creation of Pet-Battles and I’d love to give it a try… But it’s just not worth it when there is the possibility that if I triggered the wrong person, that my pet team could be used as a weapon by creeps who I’d placed on ignore, to keep tabs on me or one of my friends.

Thanks for reading.

3 Likes
2

First of all, let me say that I agree with your basic request. Blizzard should allow us to clear our pet slots. There is no reason not to allow this, and it would ease the minds of people like you, as well as those who make an aestheric choice to start always with clear slots.

It’s a harmless change. I wouldn’t use it myself, but for those who want it, why not?

This is where I believe you are wrong.

Sites used by stalkers do mine pet AND mount information, as well as other stuff, but definitely not just the current loaded team. Right now, because of the week and the event, I’m sure I would easily find thousands of characters with one of the common Squirt teams in their current team slots.

And on any given day, you would find lots of characters with teams set up for the pet battles available on that day.

That is, while the whole list of pets will be pretty unique between two different accounts, the three slotted pets would be not nearly enough to identify anyone.

I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying here.

The sites that identify alts simply cannot get your character data - no-one except Blizzard can - if you turn off third-party sharing in your account on the website here in Account Settings. Including your slotted pets, or any pets.

While I suppose it might be possible for someone to scrape data from the armory “by hand” instead ofthrough the API, they would have a hard time searching, it would be very slow, and I expect that Blizzard has rate-limiting software that would kick in, since that would be like a DoS attack.

Now, OK, if someone already suspected that character A and character B were alts, they could examine their armory pages by eye, but again, the three slotted pets would be the least of their evidence.

2 Likes
3

Partially, but I forgot one other bit of info that might sway your mind. There is a second part to it that I should of mentioned, but forgot to. Such sites also use in addition to the above data sample, the ‘current name’ of the pet. What I mean by this, is they often cross-check the pet, with the ‘name’ of a given pet. Lets say you had the Mischief Pet for example but named it “Caterwaul” for whatever reason.

Several of these sites check will player characters, against that pet name on that server, and with it are able to triangulate and compile a pretty specific list of ‘likely’ alts and often in seconds. Achievement comparisons / honor level does the rest. It was so bad once for a friend of mine, that me and a couple other friends wound up once helping them by renaming several of our pets to the same things theirs were.

Within a week the person who was harassing them was getting mistaken identities all across the board, which gave all of us being mis-identified a pretty good laugh. But yeah it is happening, and I wish Blizzard would address it. I feel like it would definitely improve the number of people that were into pet-battles if they did.

4

I agree, it’s a reasonable request.

I also think the OP’s reasoning for the request, though, is a bit over the top. It may be that pet teams is one of the several factors used to help identify alts, but it’s certainly not the only one. I also seriously doubt that there are more than a handful of people that aren’t pet battling just because someone might figure out who their alts may be. I mean, this is the first time I’ve heard of this since MoP came out - I seriously doubt that it’s a reasonable fear.

So don’t rename your pets? I mean, I’ve renamed all of one of my nearly 1500 pets. No one has ever even noticed.

Not to victim blame, but I do have to wonder what OP and his friends are doing to draw the ire of people to the point that they’re afraid of folks finding out who their alts might be.

5

Maybe I am truly underestimating the severity of this issue, but I just feel like with all of the other information available on an account (Achievements, Mounts, Actual pet collection) the pets assigned isn’t going to push anything over the edge that isn’t already happening and what could be an actual issue is being used as a cloak because someone just doesn’t want to do the pet battle.

1 Like
6

Yeah, it be nice if we could get some kind of workaround since there are a lot of people who don’t like pet battles so forcing people to do this for a mount is a joke. That or make it less cheap so players aren’t wasting so much time trying to win against this cheap pet trainer

1 Like
7

I can give you my team. I test it 5/5 on wins in a row.

1 Like
8

Sure at this point I’ll take any kind of help I can get.

9

I used Baa’l, Spyragos, and Snowclaw Cub

Open with Baa’l-

Scorched Earth
Murder the Innocent
Shadowflame until the eye is dead and Baa’l goes down on the tonk

Swap in Spyragos

Deep Burn as long as Scorched earth is active otherwise pepper in Deep Freeze/Dark Flame as you want. Should easily take care of the tonk and then just spam the same attack until he goes down on the monkey.

Swap in Snowclaw Cub

Flash Freeze
Deep Freeze
Bite until the monkey is down repeating the freeze stuff as it comes off cool down (Though the monkey shouldn’t last that long)

Worked every time I tested it. I got a stun on the tonk from Flash Freeze on Spryagos once and tested it more to make sure that fluke didn’t change it.

10

There are also ~ 30 strategies up on Xu-Fu’s for it.

Click on ‘Browse Alternatives’ right above the pets.

https://www.wow-petguide.com/Strategy/22577/Jeremy_Feasel

11

It is victim blaming, because 9/10 times it’s not something anyone actually does. But it’s alright. I’ll just better explain it. Doesn’t affect me so much, but I have seen many it has affected. Anyways, to answer your question, it’s often not what ‘someone did’ it’s something innocuous like a minor mis-step or a joke taken out of context.

These are the sort of people who want to know another person’s alts. E-Stalkers.

You don’t get to run away in those cases. You’ve scorned them and so their new mission is to terminate you, and armory, battle-pets and other things are how they will look for you. Every time they see a character they think might be you, they feverishly open the armory page scouring it for info, or running that info through websites for any lead. No I am not joking. These people literally have nothing better to do it seems.

Of course, like with all things; sometimes they will even make a mistake and mislabel someone completely unrelated to the subject as their missing ‘boogeyman’. The thing is, just like a T-800; they don’t stop. By the time they finally realize they messed up on the IDing, they’ve lied to so many people; that they can’t really admit they got it wrong.

I’ve encountered a few over the years, and while for me it’s always been enough for me to ignore them, one must remember that ignoring them does not silence them or keep one’s name out of their mouth. Nope. Their psychosis requires them to ‘avenge’ being ignored by doing further petulant things and let you know that they are responsible for it.

By this I mean, they attempt small mean-things, like whispering every single person you interact with, presumably to try and poison the cup, or they will join larger guilds / befriend guild officers in said guild expressly to seed doubt against their target. They also will do things like walk up on alts and start spamming emotes like /comfort /pat etc. on their target. Mainly as a demeaning tactic.

They also often engage creating false narratives on Tumblr, Discord, or places they feel they are safe from Blizzard Moderation in. The truth is such people need attention, they need to demoralize their target, and they do so because they are enraged by seeing their avatar on what they feel is ‘their’ server. You might think this isn’t widespread, but it actually is. Never discount the vindictiveness of humans. Especially on a roleplaying server.

Anywho to get back on topic, the above vulnerability ultimately is a major reason a lot of people don’t do Pet Battles.
I’d love to get the Fel-Cycle, but I’m not sticking pets in my slots that I can’t remove; to get it.

12

I don’t know why, but whenever I see someone claim this it’s because they’ve said something borderline racist and they’re not happy about having to deal with the consequences. I’m probably wrong, though.

I also find it interesting that you have a whole bunch of pets, including ones that can only be acquired via capture, so you must have been fine with having a pet battle team at one point. Just having a pet collection, on top of your mount collection and your achievements, is enough to find you. Sure, having a team makes you slightly easier to find, but not THAT much easier. Half the fights in Khaz Algar can be beaten by the same team, so if you just kept your team set to that when you logged off then you’d hide amongst the masses.

13

Yep, your not wrong. I originally did Pet Battling, and for my part I did enjoy it; but then as I mentioned originally, the issue isn’t about me. If I wanted to, I could go back to Pet Battling and wouldn’t have an issue. But others would. As for the rest, there was actually a reset which removed everyone’s pets I want to say around Legion? I forget.

In any event, by the point that happened I’d learned from a old friend who was being affected by this issue; of this being a thing. So I simply opted to not bother with restoring my team. As for what happened, I’d appreciate not speculating on ‘what if’s’. It wasn’t anything like that.

In the case of my friend (who I keep trying to get to return to WoW), the player who turned stalker and harassed them was mad that someone who wasn’t them, was RPing with someone that they believed was exclusively ‘their’ RP partner.

From what I’ve gathered, it started out with veiled animosity and eventually it graduated to full blown insanity. There are actually people who are that possessive and deranged. That’s why I just opt for ignore myself, and that tends to be enough. That said, I still don’t think people should be barred from pet battles when a small change would fix the matter for anyone it affects.