Wowhead article with a list of suggestions they’ve seen over the years for various aspects of pet battles. It’s a good read! Please note this is a community feedback article, not an upcoming changes article from Bliz.
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It wasn’t a Wowhead writer, it was an article submitted by FlipMethod that Wowhead published on their behalf. ^^
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some of these sound awful, if im queuing for PvP i dont want to fight against bots, bans are a terrible idea and pets should be balanced properly instead of a lazy ban system which would only serve to punish people who don’t have many pets at level 25, its garbage in every other game its in it would be garbage in pet battles.
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This is just a measure against being stuck in queues for literal hours. I’ll take bots over 1-2 hour queues
The author even drew pictures for his idea, and I haven’t seen such a thoughtful article in a long time. I agree with his suggestions about function improvement, but pve and pvp content need further discussion.
The key to saving Pet Battle (PB) is to involve more people. The above PVE related proposals undoubtedly make the PB system more complex. As a PB enthusiast, I welcome these proposals from the bottom of my heart, but I also have to consider them for newcomers. Regarding the proposal for PVP rating, I believe they will not be successful. Currently, the majority of players participating in PB are casual players, and the introduction of fierce competition will only drive them away.
I am not opposing the author because no one knows what to do to save PB. It is heading towards death, and the silence of the PB forum is the most obvious evidence.
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These ideas are the wrong direction in my opinion. Adding all that complexity that people have to learn and work for will only discourage people from pet battles. They need to be simple and fun, this is not main content and they should not be as complicated as raiding.
To help fix PVP make it possible to play challenge individual players like a PVP duel, putting the matches in an octagon grid or raised boxing ring for all spectators to watch. This could be something fun to do while waiting for raids or waiting for a rare spawn in a group.
The idea of queuing to face random people whose teams you KNOW will be impossible is too scary for 90% of players to queue, they feel like they will be brand new players queueing for their first arena against seasoned pros.
Battling friends and people you know makes that easier and you’ll run into a wider variety of ‘talent’ allowing everyone some wins.
Offer mini 1 pet battles or full 3 pet contingents, you choose before the match.
To encourage people to collect and use pets I would suggest a real PVE tournament with a degree of difficulty. Similar to the Brawlers Guild where you have to face a set number of teams.
128 PVE teams consisting of all the existing pet teams plus new ones in a single elimination tournament with a consolation bracket. Teams will use different strategies instead of the same each time, for better or worse, and they will face off through an actual AI run tournament to determine who you play each round. Your competition and their strategies will be a mystery each tournament making this very hard.
With a large body of AI results in the database that computation could be easy, just roll the RNG dice according to the calculated odds of winning between the various teams and comps.
Same as Celestial tournament, you cannot heal. Perhaps even a 30 pet limit to take in.
To encourage non-pet battling players to the challenge, make some actually good rewards depending upon your place in the tournament. Winning should be like Fishing Tournament hard, only a few people a week can pull it off if any.
Top prize is a title, trophy pet and a mount that heals your pets. Other round rewards could be battle pets. Lesser prizes are other tokens to buy gear, tabards, mounts and unique pets.
There needs to be content that isn’t just quests, collecting and completing random tasks to encourage the fun in pets
I’m sadistic. I would love pvp pet battles that I can request (think duals), but with random teams. Yeah, unfair at times. 
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Wow. That’s quite the oversimplification. Some ideas are good, others not.
A lot of these ideas are just fun, sound effects and aesthetic enhancements.
Other ideas I liked a lot. For instance, Weekly of “Kill 30 Opposing Pets in PvP” instead of “Win 10 Matches”
I think that’s a great idea. It would mean, even if you lose a match, if you’ve killed one or two of your opponents’ pets, you still get credit for the one or two kills. And if your opponent decides to forfeit the match, you should credit for all three kills.
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The ONLY reason it is what it is is to prevent win trading, so by making rules based on worst-case scenarios, they throw out the babies with the bath water.
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Sorry but I feel that adding complexity to the process and all those customizations is the wrong direction to appeal to a wider audience. Those are just nice things to have for the people already here.
If you want to widen the community, listen to the folks who do not consider themselves to be a part of it and their reasons why. The game is already overwhelming for most and adding layers of cosmetic upgrades to pets that nobody can even see is not the best use of scarce Blizzard resources or a players time.
Just my opinion but I think if you want to fix pet battles, the focus should be on the battles.
These are problems that could be taken care of with simple algorithms
I ran a ranking ladder for MPlayer games long ago and had to devise my own algorithms. Players self reported results and of course I immediately ran into the problem of people trading wins with fake accounts set up to feed them points.
Simple. You only count the first result of the day between two players, account wide. With players averaging 20-30 matches a day, it was statistically useless to trade wins or any similar scheme like that.
Blizzard just needs someone to focus on these things and spot the problems. The solutions are not that hard.
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