The conversion of shiny to polished is fantastic, but… it has me worried that there are two motivations for the change.
A. Are they going to introduce a new charm type in the next xpac and just making the chance from shiny to polished now so they don’t have to worry about three pet currencies? OR
B. Have they realized that multiple pet currencies are annoying for players and are going to keep one single currency going forward.
Could you please not give them horrible ideas, thanks?
I’m inclined to think that two different currencies was a bad idea and one that the players didn’t appreciate. I think they wanted to offset the accumulation of pet charms we were all sitting on, due to the Zookeeper shoulder enchantment.
If they wanted to delay us from buying new pets, there were so many other ways they could have done it. Time-gating, rep-gating, etc.
This Dev team is the master of delaying tactics. Just hard to believe that new pet currency was the only way to go.
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I feel like Blizzard has been moving more and more toward evergreen content in every way that it makes sense.
There will probably always be unique currencies for obtaining gear in each xpac because Blizzard has compelling design reasons for players to play the current content to obtain the current armor, but that logic doesn’t really apply to pets. Although we get new pets with every xpac and sometimes you need xpac-specific currencies to obtain them from rep vendors, for example, the pet battling system doesn’t significantly change or scale in power over time. There are still 25 levels with the same power, speed, and health pools, and they can only ever be upgraded to Rare. Polished pet charms buy me the same leveling or rarity now as they did in Legion, I just need more of them due to the increased number of pets. Having a consistent single currency for pets makes a whole lot of sense, and since Polished Pet Charms will now exist across every xpac that has had such a currency, from Draenor to Dragonflight, it would be weird for them to reconcile the two and then add a third.
My guess as to why there were two currencies in the first place is that in the beginning when they were first coming up with a pet currency, Blizzard was still very much in the “every xpac for itself” mentality where nothing was evergreen. It took them a minute to figure out that a different currency for pet battles in every xpac was actually a stupid idea. I’m taking this reconciliation of the two currencies now as a positive sign that they’re committing to Polished Pet Charms and just making the system consistent, both backwards and forwards.
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