Happy Leap Year!

The wonderful WarcraftPets community has deemed today unofficial Leaping Hatchling day in honor of 2012 being a Leap Year (extra day in February)! So since today is "special", I decided to take out my own little raptor and make him not-so little with a Papa Hummel's Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuit. :D


Yes, this was the best I could do at capturing him in mid-leap. I love my baby raptor and all, but man was this screenshot hard to get! He just did not want to cooperate, and I kept missing the moment he was in midair.

Many brownie points to Drrum, who's vanity pet gallery is filled with pets in unique poses/positions. Nevermind the time and effort put into getting the pet or putting a matching outfit together, screenshot taking is an art form in itself!

But I digress.

Anyway, happy leap year! Alternatively, one could take out Mr. Grubbs in honor of leap year too. He's quite an acrobat. :P

Green Power Ranger, Go!

Taking it easy and spending some quality time with my Ravasaur Hatchling while wearing what I like to refer to as my Green Power Ranger xmog set. :P

As you can see, my little one's quite demanding. XD

The Sixth Meme

This isn't pet-related in the slightest, but I just can't ignore it.

Talk about being out of the loop. So apparently I was tagged by JD Kenada for the "Sixth meme", but didn't know about it until I read WowInsider's article on it. LOL! Imagine my surprise when I saw my blog's name in the giant mess of a flowchart image. Now I feel obligated to comply.

Anyway, the Sixth meme goes as follows:

Go into your image folder
Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couldn’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
Challenge six new bloggers.
Link to them.

I must admit I'm going to have to break a few of the rules. First, I don't have a single image folder. Instead I have multiple image folders, all scattered as sub-folders in different folders organized by subject matter, so since I don't know which one to use I'll just use my WoW screenshot folder. Second, I don't have any sub-folders in my WoW screenshot folder, so I'll just go straight to the sixth image. Third, I'm going to skip tagging anyone else. Why? Lazy. :P


click to view larger image
Ahem. Yes. Well a few words? I'd like to think the image speaks for itself..? :P

This was taken just yesterday while my guildies and I were waiting to fill up our 25 man raid. At first we were just goofing around in Stormwind and then I turn around to find THIS. The dancing bear mount belongs to one of our shaman healers and the dragon is one of our officers. Just a whole bunch of silly. I'm just a little sad that I didn't get any screenshots of when I added my green proto-drake mount into the mix. *cough* I'll leave how it looked up to your imagination. XD

Hah, leave it to me to write more than just a "few words" on a screenshot. :P

Competitive Collecting - Does Not Want

Is it just me or has collecting become more competitive these days? More and more I'm hearing and reading about players vying for biggest pet collection with the rarest pets. Have I missed something, because last I checked I didn't get into collecting to compete with anyone.

Or maybe it's always been this way, but with the announcement of Pet Battles players are being more vocal about it. Is this the evolution of pet collecting? The next generation of collectors are just more number oriented than content driven, and the days of non-competitive collecting are over. Is that it?

I can't speak for anyone else, but this bothers me to an extent, and it makes me wonder if this was bound to happen or if the idea of Pet Battles caused the collecting community to veer more in rat race direction.

I'm not very competitive by nature. Sure, a little push now and then is healthy and helps especially with those moments where you feel like you're hitting a wall. But in general, I never started collecting to match someone else or be able to say "Look at me, I have the most. I'm the best!"

I've always viewed the activity of companion collecting as an individual one, and something people did because they genuinely enjoyed the mini-pets and the company they provide. Is this an outdated point of view? Am I going to turn into one of those "get off mah lawn" types if I don't jump onto the bandwagon and start actively competing with my fellow collectors for that number one spot? I really don't know.

I'd rather not, though. Have to compete, I mean. Then again it's kind of hard not to recognize that you're in a rat race when there are others constantly reminding you that you're one of the rats. It's tiring to be honest. The feeling of "MUST COLLECT TO MAINTAIN POSITION" isn't one that I'm fond of, and if I can, I'd like to avoid it. I collect for me, not for anyone else.

There are already so many other activities and competitive styles of gameplay in the game, like PVE progression and PVP. Pet collecting is/was my escape and break from the constant comparison to others.

Yet with the way things are going, I worry that pet collecting will turn into just that. A competition where everyone's focusing on the numbers rather than the pets themselves. Pet Battles definitely won't help in that area, since it sounds like a feature that will be highly competitive with ladders, rankings, levels, and so on.

It's easy to say, "Well if you don't want to feel like you have to compete, avoid it altogether." I'd like to be able to continue collecting without alienating my fellow collectors completely, but is that possible? Perhaps I'll simply have to find the minority within the minority, as it does seem like the mentality of non-competitive collecting is becoming a thing of the past now.

We'll see, though. Maybe Pet Battles won't make it into the expansion or it will be such a let down that collectors that started collecting just for the sake of the new feature will lose interest and the status quo will shift again. Or perhaps Pet Battles has nothing to do with it, and it's merely the vocal minority that's catching my attention and the majority still maintain the point of view that it's not a competition.

Or maybe this is all in my head and I'm just reading too far into things. Wouldn't be the first time. :P

Buy/Selling Vanity Pets

Blizzard released a reminder about the sale of pets/mounts for gold vs. real money. A summary of it basically goes like this (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong):

- If you are buying the physical item (such as a TCG card), you use real money.

- If you are buying an already in-game BoE item (such as a TCG mount/pet that's IN THE GAME and BoE or the Guardian Cub that's IN THE GAME), you use gold.

- For virtual goods that are NOT YET REDEEMED/NOT IN THE GAME YET, such as the pets from the Blizzard PetStore, you use real money.

While there are shades of grey for some transactions, it's likely any deviation from the above is a scam and participation in it will get you suspended/banned. Customer Service/a GM probably won't be able to restore any currency used in-game, and will probably remove the pet you purchased.

If it seems questionable and you're not sure if the sale is legit, just don't do it. As adorable and awesome as vanity pets are, they're not worth losing your account over. Besides, without that account, you can't even use the pet or have a collection! So just play it safe and use common sense/your best judgement. :)

In Someone Else's Shoes

I've started a thread over at WarcraftPets Forums about profession based pets, and what if ALL professions (primary and secondary) had appropriately corresponding BoE companions associated with them. There are some great ideas from users that I hope some Blizzard developer snipes and adds into the game at some point. :P

Brainstorming to come up with just the right pet for each profession is pretty difficult, though! I was sitting at my computer mulling each one over for quite a while, and even then I wasn't very satisfied with all the ideas I came up with.

It's definitely a reminder that it's so easy to collect and simply enjoy (or complain about :P) the final product, but the creation and implementation is a rocky and often rough road to walk.

As a developer, I could see how one would WANT to pump out as many companions for everyone to love and squee over as possible, but on the other hand one would need to make sure those pets made sense and weren't too boring, corny, over-the-top, or hard to implement. The desire vs. the reality of the situation seems like a pretty large hurdle to overcome. And that's just coming up with the idea, nevermind actually modeling, animating, coding, and finding a place for the pet in-game!

I wouldn't be against pulling ideas from the community, though. If I were (strictly) a vanity pet developer, I know I'd definitely stalk all the forums and websites where collectors gather just to lurk and maybe glean some inspiration. ;)

A Moment of Calm

There are only a few days left of the Love Is In the Air in-game event, and I'm debating what to do with the Love Tokens I've acquired. I could buy a couple Peddlefeet and hold onto them on an alt bank toon, but I'm not sure what I'd do with them. They would make great gifts for friends/guildies? Or I could go the business route and sell them on the AH during the off-season lol. Then again, I'm sure that's what many other players have planned so I'm not sure about how profitable they'll be.

Well, in any case, once the Vday holiday is over we'll have a whole month of downtime. The only upcoming pet-related event for March is the DMF, and I already have that somewhat planned out. The Darkmoon Cub will be my last pet to purchase from the faire and then I'm done!

My hope is that with March will come either MoP companion pet-related news or the release of the Soul of the Aspects (from somewhere - doesn't have to be from the Blizzard PetStore!) Or perhaps both new information on vanity pets in MoP AND a new pet to add to my collection? Would that be asking for too much? :P

The last couple of months have been chalked full of events with pets to collect so I think a small breather would do everyone some good. It'll give us a moment to take a break and just enjoy the pets that we currently have, or get back to hunting for older pets that we still need to collect.

And then after March comes April which brings Noblegarden, the DMF, and Children's Week... but thankfully not all at once!

Soul of the Aspects Coming Soon?

With the release of the mount, Heart of the Aspects, in the Blizzard Store, I'm eager and anxious to see if the Soul of the Aspects will come from the PetStore as well. They're both very similar in icon and model style (of course one being much larger than the other and well... a mount lol), so it would only make sense to pair them together in the store.

Unlike the Guardian Cub which had two separate item IDs since it was specially created with a cooldown so it could be traded/sold in-game, the Soul of the Aspects doesn't appear to have alternative IDs, so my guess is that it will be a straight forward BoP PetStore companion that will be mailed to all current and future toons on a single account.

We'll have to wait and see in the coming weeks if this pet will really be purchasable from the PetStore or not. If not, I'm at a loss of where it will come from!

Withers On a Thirst Strike

Thanks to Neuropathy from WarcraftPets.com, it was brought to light that Withers is currently bugged. He will shrink down as normal but when brought to a nearby water source, he's unresponsive and refuses to drink to regrow to his original size. Even when fully submerged, he remains small.

After searching the WoW bug forums, it looks as though this bug started back in December of 2011. I'm slightly surprised that it hasn't been addressed already, although I guess developers must have their hands full with MoP and other more pressing matters.

Still, I hope Withers will get better soon and come off his thirst strike and start drinking water again.

Poor little guy. One can only wonder what made him start refusing water in the first place. :( (Perhaps he's unhappy with the holiday loot bag system too. :P)

Diablo 3 Tentative Release

As the title says, Blizzard announced a tentative planned release time frame for Diablo 3 during their recent Quarter 4 Conference Call.

"We've only ever said "early 2012". And we just decided we'd need until Q2 [2012] this week." - source

This places a possible release for the game between April and June. EXCITING! But as always, things could change.

What on earth does this have to do with pet collecting? For those that pre-ordered or will be acquiring the Collector's Edition of D3, the Fetish Shaman will be joining your WoW pet collection!

MMO-Champion posted a video preview of this fierce looking companion back in December 2011.

Will I be adding this pet to my ever-growing army of critters? I'm not 100% sure, but I think I might. I played the demo of D3 at Blizzcon the last couple of times I attended, and I actually liked the gameplay (I'm a Diablo n00b otherwise lol). I'd very much like to experience the game world and gameplay at a slower and un-rushed pace, though. Silly time-limits on the Blizzcon demos! :P

And unlike the CE SC2 (which was a gift *hearts*) where I only dabbled in the campaign, D3 might actually be a game that I spend more time in, so a CE version might very well be worth the money. Many of my friends are very interested in playing too, and we all know how gaming can be that much more fun when playing with friends. :) We'll see, though.

A Wannabe Warlock

Oh don't mind me. Just pretending to be a warlock with my Gregarious Grell haha. But since I don't have an ability like hellfire, I have to resort to using the Foul Gift of the Demon Lord for a warlock-y type effect. :P

Not quite as cool but good enough for me. :D

In any case, such an awesome and unique pet!

Do You Own Your Collection, Or Does Your Collection Own You?

This post is what I'd consider more of an introspection write up and a bit more personal than normal, but I think it's relevant since many collectors, regardless of what they collect, will eventually need to take a step back and ask themselves these questions that I present. If it's not your cup of tea, no worries. There's nothing really of noteworthy companion news here so you can move along and have a happy pet collecting day! :)

Anyway, I know I joke about it quite a bit, my "addiction/obsession" with collecting vanity pets, but I'd like to seriously address this topic. Is it truly an addiction? When is it considered going too far all for the sake of completing a collection? Have I reached that point or perhaps even past it?

Say NO to Destroying Pets

Many pet collectors have their own opinions and/or pet peeves when it comes to the holiday loot bag dropped companions, but a big one this Love Is In the Air in-game event is getting the coveted Toxic Wasteling on a character that already owns it. Normally getting a pet such as this would be a wonderful occurrence... except that this pet is Bind on Pick Up and therefore useless if the character already has it in their collection.

This type of situation isn't localized to just this in-game holiday. All the seasonal events that drop a BoP pet from a once per day lot bag are continuing to drop the companion for toons regardless if they have it already or not.

So what's a collector to do? There are only two options in a situation like this: destroy the pet to reclaim the inventory slot, or bank it in hopes that it can one day be traded/sold to a fellow pet collector.

I know I'm not alone when I say that being left with these two options just feels wrong. These are special pets, available only for a handful of days out of the year, and with SO MANY factors working against it actually dropping for many players. Yet being such an extraordinary pet means that it will more than likely get destroyed if it's a duplicate all because of its simple BoP status. Doesn't this seem illogical? Such a shame? It's downright heartbreaking for a vanity pet lover and collector.

I've wracked my brain to determine the cons of making these pets Bind on Use or at the very least Bind on Account (single use), and the only reason I can think of as to why Blizzard continues to refuse to change the binding status of these pets is "rarity".

Yes, making the pets BoE would mean players could choose to sell/trade/give the pets away rather than force them to add it to their collection, destroy the item, or save it for a rainy day. But with the MANY other conditions that apply to these holiday loot bag dropped companions (such as limited number of attempts, limited amount of time per year, RNG, and low droprate), you'd think the rarity factor would be covered. In fact it seems downright overkill that on top of all those contributing rarity elements that these pets are BoP.

If these companions were BoE not only would duplicate pets be spared the fate of being put down, it would spread the vanity pet love and encourage other players to take part in collecting. It would also mean less broken collections since a player would then be able to send the pet to their main collector if they happened to receive the mini-pet on an alt.

At the very least, I'd argue that BoA (single use) would help cut down on the use of the "confirm delete" button and allow players to help keep collections together on a main collector.

In the end, I know many will argue that it "won't matter" since pets will be account wide in MoP. There's not much to say against that other than things could change and developers could scrap that idea at any moment or put so many restrictions on the feature that "account wide" may not really be "account wide" at all. But that's all still up in the air, and we could talk and debate ourselves black and blue in the face. We just don't know enough yet, so there's not much that can be said.

In the meantime, though, we CAN logically argue for a change to the holiday loot bag dropped pets. Even if it's just a small change. BoP to BoE/BoA (single use). An increased droprate. Multiple sources for acquisition. Purchasable with holiday currency. Making them farmable again.

Still, it seems the simplest and most logical compromise would be to make the pets BoE or at the very least BoA. Many of the other holiday pets have had their binding status changed, why not just change them all (holiday pets)? If companions will be tradable in MoP, then what's the harm of making them tradable sooner rather than later?

I can't speak for all pet collectors, but I don't want to have to destroy something so adorable. Stop forcing us to euthanize vanity pets Blizzard. :(

Good News, Bad News - But Mostly Bad News

Good news! I bought the Darkmoon Turtle so now Speedy officially has a friend. :) The rest of the DMF will consist of doing dailies and gathering more artifacts for next month. If all goes as planned, next month I should be able to purchase the last two pets! *crosses fingers*

Also, it doesn't seem as though there is a new Vday holiday loot bag companion, so pet collectors (who feel the same as I do) can breathe a sigh of relief (for now).

Alright. The bad news. And I apologize in advance for my sarcastic, knee-jerk-emotionally-driven ranting. You've been warned.

Three In One

Darkmoon Faire, Love Is In the Air, and Lunar Festival - all on one night soon! I can't remember the last time when three in-game events converged like that. Maybe it's foreshadowing that this year will be a doozey for holidays? We'll see!

Anyway, I'm ready for the faire (artifacts and all) and I'm all set to check out the Vday seasonal event. I'm hoping the DMF will be relatively bug free and that the Vday holiday won't have any new holiday loot bag dropped pets. I haven't found any information that would lead me to believe that a new pet is going to be added this in-game event, then again Blizzard has surprised us before.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit anxious and worried. But come what may, come what may. Can't say that I approve anymore or any less of the loot bag system (I still detest it with great passion), but I really feel like any requests for a change or compromise are falling on deaf ears. Either that or it's getting too close to MoP that developers don't see the point in spending time changing things now (since pets will be account wide in the next expansion). Sigh. Don't get me started. :\

Anyway, here's hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. Hm, one thing I haven't thought of yet is which DMF pet I'm going to buy next. Ahhh!

Matching Nightlights

After being sick for about a week and a half, I slowly but surely gathered enough coins for my Lunar Lantern. With some help from a guildie, I also managed to purchase a Festival Lantern. :)

Since each lantern pet is so lovely colored, I couldn't resist switching my transmog gear to match. :P Red and Blue! I'm just glad that there's no pink lantern because uh... not only do I not have a pink outfit, I'm also out of room to create anymore transmog sets. x_x

Overall, even though I got pretty sick and was unable to go out and buy the pets as soon as they were released, I'm still very satisfied. Not to mention grateful. I enjoy the hardcore grind for pets, but sometimes a slow but steady approach is also welcomed.

So thank goodness for the Lunar Festival! No limited duration, limited attempts, RNG-based loot bag pets to stress over! I don't think I would have been able to handle it mentally, emotionally OR physically if I got that ill during any other in-game seasonal event.

It really helps to put things into perspective, and makes it very clear how miserable the holiday loot-bag system is for many collectors. Not just due to the in-game RNG and restrictions but also because of the RL randomness that occurs as well. Put all of it together and a collector really just has NO options or work-arounds at that point. Blizzard really needs to take this into consideration and have a heart. Ease up on the pet collectors please; we can only do so much to play and enjoy this style of gameplay until we're at everyone else's mercy.