Breanni wrote:A little clarification...
Right now, the thinking is that we would not offer two rating systems -- doing so would be cumbersome and confusing to our more casual users. Instead, we'd purge all the existing pet ratings because most of these ratings are pre-MoP, based on looks alone. Then we'd give people a chance to re-rate each pet from .5 - 5 stars. The rating would be based on both looks and battle prowess -- the whole package.
Can I say bleagh? A single rating for two disjoint sets is worse than useless.
Some peeps only care about collecting and having cute companions, and others want to poke'-battle and seek the ultimate team. There's cute pets that aren't that useful for pet battles, and oog-ly ones that are FotM for battles. Blizzard could add a hissing cockroach that was totally OP for battles, and that could get the same rating as the useless (but completely adorable) fluffball. Or they could add something like the new celestial companions (I haven't looked at their abilities at all) that could be both cute and OP. With a single rating, peeps wouldn't know if they're looking at a dainty pet, a beautiful brawler or ugly combat monster because they're all rated at 4.6.
And to throw in a further monkey wrench, the cuteness of a pet doesn't change, but since they're continually tweaking abilities in the name of balance, the battle rating could (and should) go up and down based on the current patch.
Also note that our intention is to change the way the "Top Rater" badge works where you'd earn that badge permanently for rating a set number of pets (like 100) instead of all of them.
This gives me an idea for a
totally unworkable suggestion.
I'd like to see two ratings.
First, an adorability rating
by model.
-For instance, all cockroaches would be under a single rating since there's only one cockroach model. However, there would be 3 ratings for rats, since there's white, grey and brown rats. This way if a new pet is added that has an existing model, peeps don't need to rate the new pet for this category. You've already got all the model/color info linked to pets, so I'm not sure what would need to be done to attach this rating to the pets, and maybe show the rating for the multi-skin pets (like the rat would show the rating for each color under alternate skins).
Second, rate the moves, not the pet.
-Each pet gets an battle score based on the average of their move scores. To make things simpler here, you could link like-but-different moves, for example illusionary barrier, ice barrier and beaver dam have different names and different family sources, but are all the same move and all would/should have the same rating. So if a new pet comes in without any unique abilities, peeps already have an idea on how it will perform. Similarly, if a new pet is coming in with a "unique" ability that's just a renamed/family-change of an existing move, it's already rated. It's only when it's a truly new move that peeps would have to rate it.
In both cases there's fewer things to rate (overall) since there's WAY fewer moves than there are pets, and I'm pretty sure there's fewer models than there are total pets (I could be wrong on that one). The total of the two probably isn't much more than current pet total.
And per my monkey wrench comment above, this also gives the ability for (sorta) dynamic ratings for pokemonitude. If an ability is being changed with the patch, when the patch hits, you clear the existing rankings for that specific ability, make a note of it on the news page asking peeps to re-rate based on how harshly the ability was was nerfed.
And with a two rating system peeps can search by either rating to find what they want, maybe even a combo if they want to field the hottest and fiercest battle team around.
*edit* It just occurred to me that the battle rating should also be affected by breed as well, since someone had mentioned the yellow moth. Why do peeps prefer the yellow? because it has a different breed than the red moth, so maybe some kind of multiplier based on breed preferences?
In any case, this is all probably moot.
!
!) in the collectablity(best probably) or battle categories to get a bigger varity of people telling you their thoughts on a new ranking system. Just a thought!
