Maybe it is the time of day that I play (early morning), but I wish there were more Pet Battlers (PvP). Seems like I am battling the same people every time, and if they aren’t on… long delays!
Has this fallen off as a WoW activity? Or is this just symptomatic of less folks playing in general?
While playing the Comp Stomp brawl, it occurred to me that if the developers wanted to, they could fill the PvP pet battle queue with bots. It would be much easier than making battleground bots. I’m not sure if it would be good for the game, but it would speed up queues during off-hours.
I go through periods when I PvP a lot. Others when I hardly queue at all. Lately, it has been the latter.
Mostly when I queue I get the Hurr-Durr FOTM OP team (or in Discodoggy’s vernacular, Rodney Dangerfield). If it’s not that, it’s someone trying to get the Family Brawler achievement - something that’s over a year old now. Neither are fun to battle against.
It’s a time consuming thing to begin with. Trying to do anything else while you are queueing leads to really choppy play. So if I’m not having fun and it’s really inconvenient, why bother? For a far off achievement that awards nothing?
A persistent problem for me as well. I love to queue PvP pet battles in the evening (Oceanic), but it’s usually 1-2 people, and with a lot of long waits.
Blizz have made some changes to the ‘Find Battle’ matchmaking system, they haven’t been very transparent about it, but I believe people are matched in some sort of battlegroups or regions, and then there is supposedly a kind of hidden mmr.
It’s vexing to me to read in other threads people chatting about how to beat a certain opponent in their group and I am isolated from it ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
Things will be better in Pet Battle week, lots more people will be queueing.
But I hope Blizz addresses some of these problems soon.
Removing the isolated battlegroups and throwing us all into the same pool would help tremendously.
I wish the teams were more random or maybe you have a few minutes to come up with a team based on a theme when you enter. Anything besides the same old teams. And don’t get me going on the stall teams.
I gave up pvp pet battles.
Tell me about it. I can’t believe one of the most infamous villains of this parallel pet battle universe doesn’t even use Twilight Fire on their clutch sister.
At the risk of speaking only for my own veritable hellscape of bone serpents, imps, and clutch sisters, PvP pet battles is just incredibly unfriendly to new challengers.
It’s not even just that the pets used on a competitive level are in a whole nother league to what casual pet battlers would capture in Jade Forest but the sheer number of secret handshakes and exceptions to the rules that you really only discover through experience.
You have to stick with it to get into it all the while getting smashed by clonedance, Magma Trap, Sunlight, etc. run by people who already know what all the pets do, how all the buffs interact, and how to force the optimal matchups because they have already gone through the learning process to attain a strong advantage in the meta which is why they queue religiously: they keep getting the dopamine hits that newer players will have to climb their way up to gain for themselves.
The perfect summary of a flawed system.
I disagree with you to some extent.
Firstly, the meta is in a pretty good place right now, nothing is absolutely dominating the ladder like it has in the past.
Secondly, pet battles are not super complex, you can read the abilities and work out how to counter something pretty easily.
If youre getting repeatedly beaten by lets say, TCS, imp and bone serpent, you can pretty quickly slap together a counter to that.
(Even from Jade Forest- there’s a challenge for someone)
People just have to learn to adapt their teams and not bash their head against a wall- that was my problem when I started- I insisted on using the same team over and over.
If you separate all the “experienced” battlers from the “rookies” you increase the queue times and people just stop playing, instead of getting better.
It’s not that simple though that you read a tooltip and are suddenly on a level playing field.
For one, tooltips lack nuance and leave out a lot of crucial information that can make or break a game. Decoy protects my team from two attacks. But wait - some things count as “attacks” that consume charges and others don’t. Flurry will cut right through it while Quills won’t despite being worded identically. An active Death and Decay will eat it right up but Swarm of Flies will ignore it despite an identical tooltip description.
To get a full handle on all your options and the impact of each move requires a lot of trial and error that experienced players like you and I take for granted.
Players will use an ability that:
Vague tooltips are part of the problem, but there are also so many idiosyncratic abilities with counterintuitive quirks and interactions that can’t be summed up in 10 words or less.
Second, opposing players are capable of adapting as well. It looks great on paper to say “oh, TCS! Kor’thik Swarming counters it, problem solved!”, but the most critical element of PvP is execution. If you don’t have a way to deal with the Infernal Pyreclaw eliminating its speed by shaving off the Flying racial, your counter is effectively countered.
Winning the headgames to have the right pet in at the right time generally has far greater impact than simply having an aquatic that you can throw at their undead. The best teams have coverage so that they can’t just be rock-paper-scissored to death like in PvE. They stack the deck with pets that can be rotated fluidly with powerful cooldowns or have crowd control or combos that make swapping very expensive to force matchups; if your team can’t control the flow and force that Hermit Crab vs Bone Serpent matchup, it really doesn’t matter that it could win one on one.
PvE does very little to prepare players for any of this beyond basic teambuilding. Players that are open to chasing down competitive pets and alternating teams will very likely encounter a milder learning curve, but they’ll still need to bash their heads as they gradually work out all the fine details that their daily opponent has long mastered.
I’m not suggesting separate queues, simply observing why the PvP queue fails to retain more interest.
I have to agree. If I wasn’t determined to get certain achievements early on I would have gotten frustrated and quit queuing pretty quickly. However, I was determined, so I studied, learned, and because I have a vast pool of level 25’s I was able to have fun building my own counters to various teams.
So now, I love PvP Pet battles. Just wish there were more of us. ![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
you just revealed the secret to winning not only pet battles but most games in life. thank you!
The conversation of how to make pet PVP better has been around forever and I think the one major consensus that everybody could agree on was that the more people in the queue, the better the whole experience would be overall.
But how do you maintain a healthy queue?
I personally believe that rewards are the answer: pets, tabards, titles, achievements, mounts, etc.
But then the whole thing becomes a calculated juggling act. I think one of the major keys is that you can’t have “grindy” goals to hit because they will just lead to everyone spamming FotM teams in an attempt to race to their desired win number the fastest way possible. (See 5k achievement)
I think the Brawler achievements were a step in the right direction, but it needs to go even further.
Also, I’m a really big fan of the idea that proposes achievements requiring you to kill X number of whatever kind (floating-type pet for example) of pet in PVP, rather than having to defeat an entire team to earn credit. That way, even in an apparent loss, you still have a goal in mind. Better yet, one that your opponent probably doesn’t even know you’re working on.
That’s just one example, but I’m confident the team could drum up some out of the box milestones for us to reach against each other that would lead to a not-so-toxic environment.
I agree.
I really enjoy receiving a reward after a win, even if just 2 Pet Charms. But long dry spells where you win and get nothing, doesn’t feel very rewarding.
I also like the idea of a multitude of achievements related to team make ups. Not just the All-Magic teams, etc… but a definite mix of team comps. that would certainly drive change and probably participation.
I really don’t think the rewards matter that much, if you won 1 charm per win that’d be nice.
The weekly 10 wins quest should give updated rewards for sure.
PvP pet battles are just a game mode that I really enjoy- something I can do by myself, it’s turn-based, so don’t need to button-mash.
The first thing they need to fix is the matching system, which I think is really bad. You should be able to queue against anyone.
I also think the enemy character model should be the actual player’s model.
Agreed!
Not sure I agree with this. Stalking is probably a concern.
I dont think it would be easy to track someone down by just seeing their character model.
Anyway if you really wanted to be anonymous you could queue from an alt.
I just think it could be a good opportunity to show off some neat character mogs, and give your opponent a bit more identity.
Difference of opinion here, the lack of some sort of means of easing newbies into pet PvP is perhaps main reason most everyone gets disgusted and gives it up after being stomped first dozen or so tries. Long queue times are simply cause not many people doing pet PvP. Lot of fanatics about it, most of whom frequent this forum, but doesn’t suck a whole lot of players in.
There certainly is nuance to pet PvP, but the basics are simple- you dont really need to be eased into it.
If someone is terrorizing your queue with a sunlight team, break out the aquatics.
Even the noobiest noob understands the type advantage system.
I have to agree. Pet PvP battles, unlike regular PvP, is somewhat intuitive based on a turnbased system where split second reactions aren’t necessary and you can think and plan without interruption.
And if something fails, you research and learn. The arrows help too…