Originally this is what developers announced:
- Day one migration from Cataclysm has been changed. You will now get all of your extra pets directly in the journal (rather than pet crates in your bags/mail) These pets will be allowed to exceed the 500 total/3x per pet limits for this one time event. Note that unique pets will be merged into one. - MumperHowever, since then, it appears that things have changed:
- All standard pets will be merged, with a limit of three per type. Players who currently have more than three of the same pet across their characters will see a total of three after the migration. Examples of standard pets: Orange Tabby Cat, Brown Prairie Dog, Crimson Whelpling. - KaivaxIt's unclear if the most recent blue post about duplicate pets is talking about it in general or if developers have really changed the plan going forward.
Players will still be allowed to exceed the cap of 500 for total pets right after Patch 5.0.4, but unless there's some clarification, we'll have to wait and see about the 3x companion cap.
Personally, I'm torn about the limits.
On one hand, if the 3x cap is in place on patch day, I think some collectors will be quite miffed. It's understandable that some extra special pets need to be combined into only one, but for the other more common or general companions (yet "rare" and sometimes still a challenge to find), a lot of dedication and effort may have been put into collecting those. The limit on how many pets they can save from being squished and combined into other pets is kind of a slap to the face and disregards all of their time and energy spent building up each collection.
On the other hand, I can understand that this new feature needs limits otherwise it would get out of control.
Pet collecting can be pretty intense! Seriously, some collectors will go above and beyond to add to their army of critters. ;)
Not only that, but it would probably eat up too many resources if players had an excess number of companions. While some would be ok with Blizzard concentrating on pets and Pet Battles, I don't think the other WoW communities would be too pleased. So in order to balance things out and keep things under control, some restrictions need to be put in place.
After weighing these points, I still can't decide if I'm ok with the caps or not.
From a collecting point of view, I lean more towards wishing the caps were removed or made higher. As I've mentioned in previous posts, the total number of collectable pets in MoP is already nearing 500. This doesn't really leave much room for duplicate companions, does it? That means dedicated collectors and completionists will be hardpressed to collect everything (models, colors, qualities, etc).
As for the 3x cap... honestly, I can't say I feel as strongly about being allowed to preserve essentially only 3 individual collections (due to only being able to have 3 of the same pet in the Pet Journal). I see both sides, and I sympathize for pet collectors with more than three toons that collect companions, but since I'm not in the same boat I can't say that I'm fully behind hoping for the removal of this rule. I do all of my pet collecting on one character (save for Lumpy which I ended up finding on an alt /facepalm), so this may not affect me as much as other players.
Still, I can understand how upsetting it is to learn that any time and effort put into multiple collections will be mostly lost. I would be pretty discouraged as well.
Anyway, I thought the plan to allow players to exceed the pet caps (but only at first and post-patch) was a good compromise. It gave pet collectors some room to adjust to the changes, but there were enough guidlines in place to make sure it didn't get out of control.
But now I'm just as confused as other players. Will there be a 3x cap on patch day? Or is this referring to the rule in general? Will it be temporarily suspended during the merger?
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
SO I don't get what we are supposed to do now. All my pets are going to be combined, I get that. I will probably have over 500 because I have a couple toons with 100 pet achiev, and a couple others with 75. I get that.
ReplyDeleteSO they're all combined and I have over 500, but I can't cage til MoP (if that is correct.)
Until then I keep my over 500, and wait for MoP to cage, OR I can release pretty much all of them til I have 186 (my current highest) or save the extra ones that you can't really buy to cage for later, but if I want to capture all the new pets, I'm going to have to cage/release.
Ideally I would like to give away my extra collections to someone else, but that has to wait til MoP to be able to cage them.
Why didn't they give us the ability to cage now so we can sort it all out NOW and not at launch?
@pandy: I wouldn't mind hearing the answer to that question as well. It seems more efficient to be able to organize it all sooner rather than later.
DeletePart of me thinks they don't want the market to be flooded with pets this early on. Not ready for it and stuff.
Also, perhaps they haven't quite perfected the caging and uncaging ability yet. I recently read there were some pets that were supposed to be cageable but were bugged on the beta.
It's pretty inconvenient just holding on to certain pets and waiting until MoP, but I'm sure there's a good reason behind it. For now I guess all we can do is record what changes we want to make to our collection in the future and then sort it out come expansion date.