Trading Wild Pets, Someday?

Don't hold your breath, but there might be hope for the ability to cage and trade/sell wild pets in the future. There hasn't been any official update on this since it was announced that wild pets would not be cageable, so all of this is based purely on speculation.

According to developers, the main issue that needed to be addressed and handled was that buying high level wild pets could potentially allow players to bypass the leveling and capturing process very early on in the expansion. Rather than manually leveling up a pet and then selling it, players could go out and capture high level companions and then flood the market with them. Obviously, Blizzard didn't want to see this new feature dismantled in such a fashion.

That being said, the "fix" (or rather temporary solution imo) was to disable the ability to cage and trade/sell wild pets altogether.

You may be thinking, 'Making wild pets uncageable doesn't prevent me from leveling up a vendor pet and then selling it on the AH. Wouldn't that cause the same results had they allowed wild pets to be cageable?' That was my first thought too.

However, it's not quite the same situation. Leveling each pet to max level (25) takes time, while it's easier to level one team of pets and then capture multiple high level wild pets. Because of this, it's a lot easier to flood the AH with high level pets using the capture/cage system. So yea, there will still be a number of max level companions up for sale, but not nearly as many compared to if caging wild pets was enabled.

So what can be done to prevent players from completely skipping content while still allowing everyone to cage and trade wild pets?

I don't know if I mentioned this before (as I just found out about it within the last month or so), but last I checked on the beta you can only add pets that are lesser than or equal to your highest level pet in your Pet Journal. I'm pretty sure this mechanic is still in effect and will go live with MoP, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.

For example: Let's say I buy a level 23 Sprite Darter Hatchling. The highest level pet in my journal is only level 18. This means I can't add the Sprite Darter Hatchling to my collection until I raise a pet to level 23 or higher.

Being unable to add a high level pet to a low level collection will help prevent the bypassing of content, and prevention was the main goal when wild pets were made untradeable, right? So logically, if this mechanic works and is a strong enough measure, why not re-enable the ability to cage and trade wild pets?

It's a fun and lucrative bonus to capturing pets. Many players were looking forward to not only making some gold on the side, but also being able to share their catches with friends, family, and guildmates. What better present than a rare wild pet of superb quality? In just the right color for X person too!

There's still some concern about farmers potentially camping spawn sites of more unique/rare wild pets in order to control the market, if wild pets are cageable. In situations like this, it's hard to say what the best action is to curb the practice while not imposing on player freedom, though.

Like I said before, there hasn't been any recent announcement guaranteeing or even hinting that wild pets will be cageable in the near future. However, with level limitations and possibly other measures to keep Pet Battles in line with how it was intended to be played, we can't count out that wild pets might become cageable somewhere down the line.

While I don't think it will be any time soon, there's still hope!