Note: I forgot to put "Unsure" in the poll, and I can't seem to edit that in, so if you are unsure, please reply saying so and why.

I've been a-pondering lately, and thought about a way to add a nice touch to the pet system, as well as make it an interesting and fun feature, not something thrown in to help tank or do a little extra damage.

Pets: All types of animals can be tamed (I believe they have stated this), it's just a matter of skill and not getting killed before you can tame it.

Here are my ideas to making pets fun and interesting:

- Pets should gain experience and be able to level up, just as any player can

- As pets level up, they should gain skill points that the owner can use for them to gain new skills and abilities. There should be many of these- pets should not all be alike.

- They should require food and water, just as you do. Different pets should also require different diets.

- While this may be harder to implement, I think different pet should have different "personalities." Some may tend to be aggressive, while others are playful, and yet others are lazy.

- The personality and actions of a pet are determined by the owner. Not feeding a pet, or not feeding it the right food, will cause it to be angry. If it gets too angry with you, it may not listen, run away, or even attack you. Pets that are happy should gain certain bonuses.

- Your pets should need rest, and you should be able to play small mini games with them.

- Some pets can also help you fish, while others may be able to help you track, and yet others can help to forage food. A pet that likes you may even raise your standing with that type of species when you have it with it. For example, if you have PET A with you, and it likes you, the species of PET A, which are normally aggressive to you, will now not attack you, or even help you if they see you being attacked.

The idea here is that each persons pet should have a distinct personality, and should almost like a "partner." However, they should also take a lot of work to take care of and train, and are not for people who just want it to add to their DPS or PvPing ability.

This also brings up a question- should tamed pets have permadeath? Also, keep in mind this sytem only applies to tamed pets, summoned pets do not have these traits. If there is not permadeath, then pets would take a big happiness hit when they die.

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-Zyke
Supreme Guardian of the Guardians of Gothar

"We must cleanse the land of Ganareth of light mana, in order to prepare it for the return of the God of God's, Gothar."

I think all your ideas are good ones, even though most of them are more fluffy than necessary.
Yes to pet permadeath! If there is a healer near-by he/she should be able to resurrect your pet before it decays and dissapears forever, but if there is none, then tough.

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I like the idea of pets having permadeath, but not of having pets level up. I think that as you gain skill, you should seek out more dangerous and powerful pets, and that if they die, they should die forever. You'd simply have to go back to where you found it, and tame another. It makes for an intersting dynamic to the pet system, and also makes you think twice about using your pet hold aggro on mobs while you pick them off from afar. In games with pets, they're always used to make leveling infinitely easier and takes away from the challenge of leveling. This would help keep that to a minimum.

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I think those are some great ideas you have offered, and should any get even partly aplied to this game by the Devs - it would go a long way towards emersion via pet interaction. (Wow did I make that sound more confusing than planned... )

Now, I'd like to add one more idea that I have brought up recently in a few other threads. As we know, and you have stated yourself - all mobs are tamable, but how many are mountable? I would like to see almost any mob that fits within a required size limit be mountable. I would expect other limitations (what I do not know for sure though), but some of the mobs we have seen would make great mounts if allowed.
- Those giant spiders could be great mounts, and if used by a small force for a raid - they could even cause panic to some lvl in the enemy forces.
- The sabertooth is my ideal land mount, and should they be allowed - it is exactly what I'd look for.

- Sorry, guess I did way-lay your thead a bit...
- I wish to note that among your ideas - the race benifits for other mobs who are the same race as your pet is (in my opinion) the best one you offered. Thanx for sharing the ideas, and keep em comming.

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Permadeath is not fun. It should take work and care to raise a pet. One wouldn't want their months of work to be lost foreve because their computer crashed in the middle of a battle, now would they? Permadeath also frustrates the playerbase far too much (generally), and causes account cancellations.

In regards to pets - Lineage 2 had an awesome pet. You can quest for a small dragonling which you can raise to a mount, and then to a flying, fire-breathing wyvern. It looked so awesome, but I didn't want to deal with possibly losing it. I never got a pet.

What makes permadeath a necessity? Are pets too powerful, that they must stay rare? The difficult training/taming process should be difficult enough to warrant the power of the pet.

If the pets are basic tame-and-go pets, then permadeath is important. That's not any fun, though. One cannot form a personal connection to their pets if they're just a cool-looking, fancy DoT, anyway.

As for the 'fluffy' features - those are what make games so awesome and memorable! Snowshielding isn't important, either. Neither are the useless, client-side friendly wildlife. But they're fun! I think the best kind of game are ones with tons of silly, useless, fun or just awesome things to do.

It would be too much fun fishing with my bear, playing catch with my dragon, or watching my hawk show off with some mid-air acrobatics. Things like this make MMOs fun - it makes the world feel like a real world (or at least one that's fun to inhabit).

I'd no more want permadeath for a pet than I would want pet for my own character.

I comletely agree, and that's what I'm trying to get at. I really don't want a boring, "attack and follow me" pet with no other mechanics to it. I want a pet that I can train, "grow up with" if you understand that term, and that can do more than just fight and follow me around. Yes, it isn't necessary so to speak, but its these unecessary extras that make a game great and keep people around.

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-Zyke
Supreme Guardian of the Guardians of Gothar

"We must cleanse the land of Ganareth of light mana, in order to prepare it for the return of the God of God's, Gothar."

why not make it so if you have a pet you have to your skill points to be able to have them it would be avialible to anyone, but if you use your points you are not going to be able to get anouther skill. this would make it so that people with pets would have to sacrifice some outher skills. would make people think twice before getting a pet, also i like what was said about pets gaining lvls and having a type of personality, if you had to use your skill points to tame a pet i think it should not be permadeath, but if they dont implement using your skill points then i think they should have perma death

its already been stated that pets will go up in level, and when you reach level 100 you can give your wasted xp to your pet. I think that pet perma-death is the way forward purely because i hate it in games like swg where players chuck pets at the mobs with no real consequence when the pets die. perhaps a tier system, where pets of lvl 1-5 have no neggative effect, 5-10 pets run away for set time 10+ they die. or as level increases, increase the time it takes for pets to heal, only natural healing.

*about the other points you make I believe it would be great if in a herd of animals some where harder to tame than others those that were harder to tame had better traits and those who were easier to tame had traits such as being lazy or cowardly, would add humour to pvp if the pet ran away ect..

*I also like the being able to train animals skills perhaps from the players own skill list, each skill requiring certain critea, and if the pet meets these critea it is possible to train it, although i hope that would take time. Also on the similar point about pets helping you track ect I think this is a great idea aswell, I think it wouldnt be too hard to implement either, this added extra off a pet would also balance the downside of perma-death.

*not feeding the pets will cause the pet to eat you..

*only one im against is the small mini games, to like tamagotchi i dont mind pets having emotes ala swg.

I think players should have a 30 second, or higher timer to heal/rez a pet from death. I agree with the pets leveling, not sure about the faction/fame thing, druids/rangers/explorers yes they LIVE with the animals and work on that faction and work on protecting those species...only makes sense that their pets should be cheeper all around if animal or "natural" (wouldn't a pet Treant ROCK??!! I think so. but what to feed a treant?? dirt? water? *shrug*)

Not sure about food and water, in EQ it ended up being a royal pain in the fanny (but then I was the guild mage, so I heard "HEY Mage gimme *insert summoned item here*" No please, rarely a thanks. *hrumph*). If they require three units of food and 8 units of water a day...as reality would demand...we would end up carrying NOTHING but food and water, and spend MOST of the game day either buying it, finding it, or consuming it.

No thanks on THAT much reality in game.

Pets could add so many additions to this game! I wouild love to have watch dogs staying in my house all day or a faithful wolf that nevers leaves my side. Becasue i found him as a pup and raised him!

I however dont think you should have permadeath. I think they should handle pet death the same way they handle player death. Maybe even carry the corpse of your pet to a healer in town so he can be resurrected! Many good ideas with pets!

I think that players should be able to have pets that gain experience and all that jazz, but being able to play games with your pet is a waste of time. You should invest in your pet, but I think that your pet, if it dies, should decay in a set amount of time. Hopefully it gets healed in time.

Fluff is darn important to games like this, the more fluff there is the more fun the game is because instead of getting on and grinding you 'waste' a whole evening doing something pointless in terms of progression but enjoy yourself loads.

As for variety of mounts...sounds good to me-you shall all bow to me in fear as i charge at you riding my osterich preparing to unleash my devasting pet clam!!!

I agree with you Asteldian. I would rather spend a night doing nothing productive, but having fun, than spending that same time productive, but bored.

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-Zyke
Supreme Guardian of the Guardians of Gothar

"We must cleanse the land of Ganareth of light mana, in order to prepare it for the return of the God of God's, Gothar."

HAHA... Hmm... maybe not so funny considering the size of that octopus...
Might I sugest changing that from 'Devestating Pet Clam' to 'Mighty Hell-Clam of Devestation'...

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I cant-it has to gain 10 more levels before it earns that title-its a new pet ya see....had to replace my previous pet as my Deadly Dodo of Doom met an untimely end

Once again I appologize, but my Obsidian Sabertooth of the Abyss was hungry and there was no one else around.

I, too, agree that its the fluff that will make/break a game; but I also think you can 'break' a game w/ too much fluff. As it stands - there is so much content (as I percieve it via the Devs hints) that these pet games are actualy unneccesary. Kinda makes me think of those obscene dog shows - they are supposed to be our best friends I thought.
Bah - now I'm going off on another tangent - I'll just shut up before its to late (I hope).

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Normally I wouldn't be opposed to permadeath for pets. But, I thought I read somewhere you could share your XP with your pet. So, if I'm slowing myself down I'd like to see it be rewarded with a permenant pet.

Mini pet games?
Fetch boy, Fetch! ataboy ehh

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Nice ideas, permadeath IMO is a good idea as it would make your pet worth more and more important to you. If you lose it in battle you would genuinly be sad about it.

Perhaps the game could give you like a five minute window to ressucitate your pet if it dies and if you cant do it by the time the timer runs out, you then lose the pet... maybe just to give you that last ditch effort of a rez spell or scroll or something.

I totaly agree w/ Disposablehero (like his name to) - if I am going to invest my hard-earned xp on a pet I don't want to have to worry about loosing them to permadeath so easily. I do, however, think that they should stay dead until rez'd - maybe via scroll, magic, or (worse case scenario) getting stuck carrying them til you reach someone who can help.
The same goes for the mounts if I can/am training them up in any fashion. I kinda hope we can - I think if the Devs make mounts as simply a branch of tames it would work well. Make a proggy that determines mountability by char size/tame size/status between tame and tamer (is the pet/tame happy or not) - they could even instal some limited race bonus' in something like that.
Someone above mentioned the idea that pet/tame death could affect a players standing w/ their pet - I think that might play the best idea - you put your pet at risk to much and you run the chance of them leaving you. I'd add the idea that should this happen it would become a harder tame for someone else, and maybe even lock its original owner from retrieving it again. We would then be forced to play our pets/tames with a higher lvl of caution.

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No permadeath, but big/huge disadvantage and/or 'regeneration-period'