As I’ve already started this week with an unusual post, another one can’t do much harm – therefore, I’m covering the one feature that the WoW dev team has all the possible tools for, but not actually putting it into practice makes it a very unpopular thing to do, and that’s PvP pet battling. So many of us enjoy collecting them, but what for? To do world quests with until the end of days, or to just fill in the collection slots? This is the feature we need, and in this post, I’m covering the what, the how, and the why’s of pet battle for mobile.
PvP pet battles are meant to be on-the-go.
As a former Hearthstone player, I’ve always understood the value of having a mobile version of a PvP feature in a game that doesn’t last too long, that you can play on the go, and the one that doesn’t require you to sit in front of a big screen in order to do it. Since I’ve started playing WoW, I’ve been aware of how massively underrated this feature is, especially in comparison to how successful Pokemon are, for example. Maybe this feature just doesn’t quite belong in a PC version of modern WoW. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be there at all, but the design of pet battles and their abilities makes it simple enough to go mobile and still look fantastic.
Careful, though.
Of course, if this was a thing, it would have to be done very carefully, in order to avoid the overall drama that happened over Diablo mobile.
Firstly, this kind of app should either be free as a standalone, or included into the WoW companion app as a feature, just like the mission table is, and the only requirement should be the WoW subscription. Also, you should only be able to access the pets that are already in your collection, and I strongly believe that the app should not offer any character or pet progression through the mobile game.
It should only be a feature to use what you already have in your collection, and apart from getting the PvP pet battle achievements that you’d acquire for winning a certain number of games (which is only natural to get), I would be against any other form of progression.
Most importantly, you should not be able to log into WoW on your PC or anywhere else while you’re in the Pet battle app, to prevent the double usage of time and your character unrealistically doing two things at once.
The benefits of mobile PvP pet battles are numerous.
By having this feature on mobile, I think many of us would be more inclined to do some PvP pet battles while we’re out and about, and collecting all those pets would finally start to make more sense, other than purely to have them. From the perspective of a content creator, I’d love this format to be more viable and interesting to people, as it would create a surge of content, guides and videos that would be relevant to a higher number of people, while giving us yet another thing to look forward to in the game.
From the logistic point of view, the whole engine needed to do this, or at least a skeleton of it, is already owned by Blizzard Entertainment, and that’s Hearthstone. Considering how massive it’s really been as a card game, WoW could benefit from this just as much, if not more. All those hours put into the design of beautiful companions and their abilities would finally be put into good use, and I’m not a coder or a game designer, but I believe that this kind of feature would not be as challenging to create and maintain considering Blizzard is already doing it on one front.
Oh, the cash grab temptation.
Of course, a great feature can always be ruined by introducing pay-to-win (and even pay-to-play) features, but I’m gonna go ahead and be an idealist here, although that’s hardly ever gotten me anywhere in life.
If Mobile pet battles were to exist, they would need to be a bare tool for the users to have a good time and spend more time playing WoW in a meaningful way. Introducing it, seeing that it works, and then adding a bunch of things to buy that go along with it would be a wrong way to go, as we’re already paying for the game, the expansions, the subscršptions, and the cosmetics.
Having Mobile pet battles and leaving it alone, to actually serve the customers without asking them for additional money is the way to go, as it would potentially boost all the other sources of revenue: the subs could go up, more pets would be bought from the store (although I’m not a big fan of battling those in PvP, but there’s not much to do about it as they’re already there and that’s that), and the gameplay uptime would be increased, as people would play it pretty much in bed or on a toilet, whereas you can’t really do that with WoW. (If you can, I tip my hat to you, ‘cause I haven’t found a good way to do that, but I respect the effort.)
What do you think?
Anyway, this was just some food for thought. This idea is not mine alone, of course, there are countless of forum threads suggesting the same thing, but thinking about this without reading any of them first, only to find so many likeminded people, has made me feel good and I’ve wanted to give this idea a voice and just bring up how incredibly beneficial it would be for all of us, the players and the company alike, in our own different ways. Let me know in the comments what you think about this, and you don’t mind getting easy wins in WoW, you can check out all of this in my video – and subscribe for more awesome WoW stuff!
Mom's Den 