Mixing Pet battles and Housing to promote both content

Community WoW Community Council
1

Many players miss pet battles and it had a very engaged community. It is fair to consider them something less played moreover when we don’t get much content that is interesting to do with them.

I think the last time we had hard content for them was Shadowlands and DF had a couple interesting fights on forbidden reach but in last expansions it felt like simply a collecting game which is not why so many players like them but also that they had a certain use.

I personally like using pet battles as world quests same as I think something people have missed in Midnight is the skyriding races.

I would propose a feature that would both make people visit people houses more and pet battles with pet battles pvevp.

You would be able to create a pet trainer in your image preferably and setup 3 different set of 3 pets and choose their skills configuration and the game would use those to emulate a random challenge.

You would be able to queue for this like you currently queue for pvp pet battles and to see who’s trainer has the best winrates and reward pet satchels and rewards for defeating a set amount of trainers each week, it might as well also count for pvp pet battles achievements. When fighting other people trainer it would teleport outside their house in a set location where they put the “trainer” down. This would increase people visiting other people house and let people that like pet battles create their own content. You could also simply fly over to your friends or guildies house and fight their trainer.

3 Likes
2

The larger looming issue is the swap in development energy towards where the players are. For example, too few players play PvP to justify development time - which is clearly also the case for pet battling. So there seems to be close to zero development resources spent on these areas of the game - unless (like housing and pets) they provide profit through MTX.

We can argue that in our MMO-RPG we ought to expect larger world building and participation outside of the main funnel of the game, and that these things build out an ecosystem that supports the longevity of the game and a design philosophy where “The world is the main character” - and profit will follow…

But I don’t think MSFT, ATVI, or (perhaps) Blizzard executives see things that way, and would rather have a quicker cash-out. This is connected to larger conversations about capitalism and decades-long “en-s**-ification” of all things… but I don’t think I need to say more.

Not saying this to be dismissive btw, I just think it’s a large challenge to make this (very good!) idea happen.