Updating The Pet Training & Talent System Suggestion(Devs)
Short version: Let players hand choose the exact talents/maycasts/spells we want to build our pets and remove the punishing random system.
The details: As a Wiz101 player for nearly 12 years enjoying being along for the ride on this journey with the game & community and having a love-frustrstion relationship because of certain aspects of it I and other players would love to see evolve. So, I have been thinking about a revamp for pet training a lot in the last few years. I have a suggestion for changing how we acquire pet talents/maycasts/spells to make the pet training system one that is a renewed, refreshing, and revitalized aspect that players want to engage with and enjoy and has meaning to spend time doing by hand-curating the perfect pet for the roles & scenarios players like.The goal is to remove the resentment, remorse, punishment, frustration, mental torture/anxieties that the current system manufactures in players that dread the odiousness of constant failure and disappointment from the lack of meaningful outcomes of producing random unwanted pet talents/maycasts/spells during training.
The existing monetization and use of pet snacks can remain the same and would encourage more interaction and activity with the pet training system in this way. I am suggesting that we just shift a few elements and slightly alter the pet mini games currently used to level pets, acquire talents/maycasts/spells(random currently), and stats leveling to one that is based on selecting the individual talents/maycasts/spells to mix and match to build the ideal pet talent list.
Rather than random acquisition based on constant failure that burdens players with a heavy depletion of time, resources, money with nothing worthwhile to show for it, make it where we actively *teach* the specific talents/maycasts/spells we desire to build on a pet. We would still feed pets in teaching them the talents/maycasts/spells as well as leveling the pet and leveling it's stats.
The already existing pool of pet talents/maycasts/spells can be specifically chosen and trained onto any pet of any school or type from that pool that already exists that you already allow on any pet. So, keep it simple and just have a popup occur after each pet leveling is attained that has all talents/maycasts/spells listed in scrollable columns in a menu to choose from(much like how you have pet names listed in the dye shop). One column for all damages & criticals, one column for utility/defense, one column for maycasts, etc. Players get that popup when hitting Teen, Adult, etc. for each talent slot as you level up your pet and select what one wants.(of course this excludes spells and such that are rooted to specific pets that already don't transfer over in the current system). This would let players engage much more because of all the possibilities to create vast numbers of pets with all sorts of desired talent builds for all sorts of roles and scenarios and players can have them on the pets of aesthetic choice to match outfits and holidays etc. without the chronic defeat of the rng and how it's all so out of your hands.
Additionally, the new system would also have the ability to use the higher rank 9 pet foods(to encourage more gardening since your stats showed that only 11% of the community engages in gardening) to increase the max of specific individual pet stat bars to enhance the chosen talents rather then them being randomized through pet hatching yielding random poor undesirable outcomes. So, for example, it takes 10 Fancy Yogurt or 10 Captain Cantaloupe to raise it's intellect by a certain number of points until it reaches whatever the max cap is set by you for each pet stat.
As far as the purpose of pedigree, that can just be a denotation of rarity of the type of pet and that can tie into things like hybrids, etc.
Pet hatching at the kiosk or with a player at a hatching sigil would still have viability for hatching rarer hybrid types or for a particular pet type for it's looks. This new training system would make these kinds of hatching obsolete for hatching for stat carryover so this would be a vanity hatching system now which would solve the much asked for ability to stitch pets players are asking for.
*as an aside, the fact that a "skip game" button option has been added in recently is a tacit admission that the existing pet games system is outdated, unenjoyable, monotony that needs new life and player control & choice*
Re: Updating The Pet Training & Talent System Suggestion(Devs)
Something else to add as I'm in the Pet Pavilion on another 2x Pet Benefit weekend right now but has been an ongoing frustration anytime is the Hatching Kiosk. Although it was a great new feature in general at first, in practice it's just not very useful anymore and hasn't been for quite a while.
It's so dependent upon other players being very active in utilizing it creating and placing *worthwhile* pets on it to want to go through the frustration and expense and time of the existing way of pet leveling. So many players don't even engage with the kiosk with their pets also and those that do just keep putting up masses of pets with unwanted talents and full of random junk talents or combos of failed talents nobody wants or finds useful or would go through the trouble to weed through dozens of fails to capture any useful talent.
It relies upon some subset of players spending inordinate amounts of time, money, resources, etc. to make pets worthwhile for the expense, time, gold, crowns, money, resources to "hope" to snatch one or some or most of *their* pet's talents IF... IF you can find something with anything worth copying(especially now after the critical changes where now there is a need for new pets with a different talent focus - and the pet training system isn't flexible for this kind of thing where my prior post suggestion above would be flexible for game changes and new pet creation and it would be fun and desirable to do).
Trying to wade thru thousands of types of pets with even more combinations of useless random junk talents is so tedious and inefficient and demoralizing on the kiosk. Players have no way to sift thru all this and the kiosk has just become a dumping ground for mostly useless pets. We need this serious overhaul of the entire pet system to put the control in the player's hands like I mentioned in the prior post above. We need to be able to design the talents for our pets and for various roles and scenarios. There is plenty of space to be creative and make this more streamlined and put the choice in player's hands on curating their pet's talents list and you can still maintain your monetization, just shift how things are done like my suggestion. After 12 years in Wiz I just can't stomach this antiquated pet system anymore and I love supporting this game but I wont put anymore money into the pet system until it changes to some form that puts talent learning in our hands directly.
