Storing pets in their cages: Will they go buggy?

[Telsek]

Having just read the thread about pets being returned in the wake of a hacking in bugged cages, I was reminded of an occasion several years ago when I tried to learn a Black Tabby that had been in my bags for a long time and could not as it had bugged. This was a pet I'd caught myself.

Now I'm wondering whether its risky to store pets in cages. I have a number of caged pets, duplicates that I could not learn again because I already have three in my journal. I would like to keep them as it sounds like having dupes will come in handy for breeding in WoD.

Do the cages bug out frequently? I'm thinking it may be dangerous to store valuable pets long term in cages. Am I being paranoid?

[Peanutty]

Given how weird and random the whole pet cage bug issue was/is, I don't think I'd risk storing rarer pets in caged form. More common pets I do have caged, just because I don't know what else to do with them right now.

As far as the bug I admit I don't know what causes it or how frequently it occurs. I haven't had it happen yet.

[Kiella]

Unfortunately, I have a great deal of experience with this bug. It appears to be connected to storing pets in a guild bank. After removing the pets from the guild bank there is a chance the caged pets will be converted to the bugged generic cages. It seems to be more likely the bug will occur if the pets are sent through the mail- I particularly encountered this after expired auctions were returned to me through the auction house.

I was able to have many pets restored to me by not clicking on any pet attachments in the mail that appeared to be affected by the bug (the icon will show a generic pet cage instead of the normal pet icon). The mail in this case should still include the name of the bugged pet in the title so a GM should be able to easily confirm what pet is in the attached cage with no danger that you could be lying about what pets were affected. It is a very time consuming process, however, for both you and the GM- I very clearly included in my tickets the nature of the bug and a list of every affected pet, which they could check themselves against my mail.

Since I figured out the nature of the bug I have stopped storing any pets in my guild bank and not had any further issues- pets stored in the individual character bank do not appear to be affected, so I would suggest storing your pets there instead.

[Ziboo]

Thanks for sharing that tip. I have a bunch stored in an alt gbank. I think I'll move them to personal storage, at least the rare ones!