Pet training is a real problem, a fact that ought to be easily seen by the number of max level players that are playing with either no pet or mostly untrained pets or completely junky pets.

The truth is that although the pet system is easy and on the surface way better than pet training is on Wizard101, it just isn't family friendly and no parent should ever really want their child to play such a game that puts so much real time time demand upon their child.

There are a couple problems with the pet training system. The largest problem is the amount of time it takes to fully train a pet in terms of real time. Pets train quickly at first which isn't a problem, but the time in which they take to train increased by their current pet level and that becomes the problem. You take a pet that has over 8 hours to train, there are only 24 hours in a day, which means in order to train a pet twice per day and assuming that a person sleeps for 8 hours per day the game is asking people, and even worse children, to cut into their sleeping time just to train a pet twice in a day's time. As such there needs to be a limit placed upon the maximum amount of time a pet's return time is to maybe 6 to 7 hours tops. This problem is made much worse by higher level activities taking more time to complete than lower level activities

The problem with higher level activities taking more time to complete than lower level activities is that the training experienced earned is way to low, so much so that what you feed a pet is typically going to train the pet more than what the training activity itself has given, which means a person who wants to train up a pet as quickly as possible (like in a month or two of real time) should only be training with skull island activities and nothing higher, and this itself means that pet training is broken. Higher level activities should take no longer than lower level activities to complete and should reward more pet experience than the lower level activities. That is not the case and doing higher level activities mostly slows how fast a pet is trained due to the low non-food training experience given and completely unrealistic return times.

Really, who wants their child to spend month's training a pet in any game? It takes around four generations of hatching against a near perfect pet just to get a pet to turn out halfway decent. As such, the game pretty much demands a player to spend a good year or more to create a pet that is remotely halfway decent assuming they have friends with near perfect pets who they can get to hatch with them. Again, this is not family friendly cause if you told a good parent that this game will require their child to spend a year or more to train a halfway decent pet and that their sleep will most likely be interrupted for most of the time it takes them to train the pet, well the parent simply would never let their child play this game.

Pet training needs to be fixed, and the best way to fix it in my estimation is simply to cap off maximum training times to most likely no longer than four to six hours, and also match higher activity level training times with skull island training times, and also maybe even up the amount of experience given to the pets by the activity that is not due to food.

Takhethis on Jul 16, 2019 wrote:

Pet training is a real problem, a fact that ought to be easily seen by the number of max level players that are playing with either no pet or mostly untrained pets or completely junky pets.

The truth is that although the pet system is easy and on the surface way better than pet training is on Wizard101, it just isn't family friendly and no parent should ever really want their child to play such a game that puts so much real time time demand upon their child.

There are a couple problems with the pet training system. The largest problem is the amount of time it takes to fully train a pet in terms of real time. Pets train quickly at first which isn't a problem, but the time in which they take to train increased by their current pet level and that becomes the problem. You take a pet that has over 8 hours to train, there are only 24 hours in a day, which means in order to train a pet twice per day and assuming that a person sleeps for 8 hours per day the game is asking people, and even worse children, to cut into their sleeping time just to train a pet twice in a day's time. As such there needs to be a limit placed upon the maximum amount of time a pet's return time is to maybe 6 to 7 hours tops. This problem is made much worse by higher level activities taking more time to complete than lower level activities

The problem with higher level activities taking more time to complete than lower level activities is that the training experienced earned is way to low, so much so that what you feed a pet is typically going to train the pet more than what the training activity itself has given, which means a person who wants to train up a pet as quickly as possible (like in a month or two of real time) should only be training with skull island activities and nothing higher, and this itself means that pet training is broken. Higher level activities should take no longer than lower level activities to complete and should reward more pet experience than the lower level activities. That is not the case and doing higher level activities mostly slows how fast a pet is trained due to the low non-food training experience given and completely unrealistic return times.

Really, who wants their child to spend month's training a pet in any game? It takes around four generations of hatching against a near perfect pet just to get a pet to turn out halfway decent. As such, the game pretty much demands a player to spend a good year or more to create a pet that is remotely halfway decent assuming they have friends with near perfect pets who they can get to hatch with them. Again, this is not family friendly cause if you told a good parent that this game will require their child to spend a year or more to train a halfway decent pet and that their sleep will most likely be interrupted for most of the time it takes them to train the pet, well the parent simply would never let their child play this game.

Pet training needs to be fixed, and the best way to fix it in my estimation is simply to cap off maximum training times to most likely no longer than four to six hours, and also match higher activity level training times with skull island training times, and also maybe even up the amount of experience given to the pets by the activity that is not due to food.

Is the time it takes pets to level up an objectively valid concern? Sure. Most established Wizard101 players (ones that have 1+ max characters with mega snack gardens) can train a pet w/o spending money in a couple of relatively short play sessions (< 2 hours of in game time total). In pirate, even players with good/great snacks take around 2 weeks to train a single pet.

However, I don't think the current system needs changed (it could do with something being added to it, as I'll discuss below), nor do I think the current method is remotely unfriendly to kids, assuming you do things properly.

In Wiz, you'll have people training only 1 pet at once. This strategy obviously doesn't work in Pirate, as it's beyond inefficient. Instead, the correct response is to train multiple pets at once. Find someone to morph with (in game, on various fansites, and in Discord servers are all excellent places to look), morph ~3 times, take those morphs to adult, repeat the morphing process with the best of those 3 pets before continuing to train them (these are called safety morphs). This method will get you a handful of pets every month, which, while somewhat inefficient, isn't entirely unreasonable.

Now about how long each activity takes and how it interferes with sleep schedules. I think those concerns are completely unfounded. Yes, if you pick the wrong activities, you will interfere with your daily life. That's why you don't pick the wrong activities. There's an excellent article that goes over the basics of selecting an activity here:

Basically, if you know you'll be able to start an activity immediately after your current one is done, you should always pick a low level Skull Island activity. If you won't be able to do that (maybe because you're sleeping or otherwise occupied), pick the highest experience activity that will be completed by the next time you get on. This will allocate your time the most effectively.

So, if you do things properly, you'll be able to get pets with relatively low effort (remember, it only takes a couple of minutes to log into pirate, feed a pet, start a new activity, and then log back off) at a not-completely-unreasonable pace. I don't see how that's not family friendly. Sure, it's slower than wiz, but there's a lot less effort involved.

However, I agree that some people (myself included) would enjoy the option to be able to train pets in a couple of longer in-game sessions, similar to wiz's pet minigames. I'd love to see that option added in Bestia (the zone could use a little extra love, as well) without changing the current system. And I'm sure that some wiz players would enjoy the lower effort methods of pirate training (this isn't a bad thing), so giving both games a shorter, higher effort and a longer, lower effort method of training would be welcomed.

Willowydream on Jul 17, 2019 wrote:

I guess I don't understand why a month is too long to train a pet up to max level. Maybe it's because I have been playing so long I have a number of fully maxed pets, I forget how long that actually is. It doesn't seem like far too long though. I don't think I have ever set an alarm to get in game and re-task a pet either.

Managing pets does take patience and planning, and some players just don't seem to have that. The maxed pirates you see with "junky" pets may simply not care. They probably have low nautical levels, and companions they never train, also. They are blazing their way through the game with three favorite companions and Fast Combat turned on, ignoring companion tasks and anything else that isn't based on the battleboard.

Rather than change the existing mechanic, which works pretty well actually, I do like the idea of pet jewels or accessories that would allow pets to gain experience from joining battles. That way, a favorite pet could be trained while farming.

Comes down to a lack of end game play. You can max out a character in three weeks time, but a pet takes over a month and you need to hatch several generations deep against almost perfect pets just to get a pet to turn out with any sort of chance of being good. Since the only thing you have to really do in this game are quests and farming for the best equipment there is absolutely no need to train such a pet as once you do have it there is nothing remaining for you to do in the game with it. If pets are going to be this insane to level up to max and make decent or good, then there had best be something to do with them once you do max them out. With such vast amounts of time between game updates, future releases aren't a reason to max out a pet unless you plan to be playing this game on a time scale that measures into decades (if the game is still around in decades).

This means to justify such long pet training real life time there had best be something like pvp and clans to justify it. There is some pvp but its hard to find ranked pvp matches and the only way to resolve that which makes any sense to me would be to make pvp free to play so those with max level pirates and/or other level pirates and no membership will use their time to play ranked pvp giving those with memberships people to actually go up and play against in ranked pvp. Clans would also be a reason to make such pets, but so far clans and clan wars do not exist in this game.

I can only dream that we will someday be able to train pets to those levels, but you do have a point that if the time factor progresses as current levels it will become absurd. Perhaps, they will adjust current levels so that the current maximum time will remain the maximum, and all prior levels will be achieved more quickly?

Takhethis on Jul 24, 2019 wrote:

That is my point exactly, but I already flat out state that it has already become absurd and therefore the amount of additional time needed per level up ought to either be lowered or capped at most likely level 30 pet activity return times. 30 to 40 is a real gruel, 40 to 50 is bad, 50 to 60 is absurd, 60 to 70 is you have got to be kidding as it now takes days (plural) to train up a pet just one level and you need to train them 10 levels from 60 to 70. This is not family friendly, and as I already said no responsible parent that knew the amount of time this game requires their kids in real time would in their right mind let them even play it. Pet training needs to be fixed to something that is reasonable.

Yes, leveling up a single pet by itself takes a long time. Why not level up 3-5 pets at once then (the most effective method, and the one that KI intended for us to use)? Companion tasks and purchased snacks make it very hard to run out of snacks. Furthermore, training multiple pets doesn't slow down the time it takes to get a pet to max. So, you can either get 1 pet to max level every 3 or 4 weeks, or you can get 3-5 pets to max level every 3 or 4 weeks. One of those is clearly better than the other.

Finally, to address the family friendly thing, this game doesn't require a pet for you to complete it. All the PvE content in the game can be easily finished without good pets.

Takhethis on Jul 24, 2019 wrote:

That is my point exactly, but I already flat out state that it has already become absurd and therefore the amount of additional time needed per level up ought to either be lowered or capped at most likely level 30 pet activity return times. 30 to 40 is a real gruel, 40 to 50 is bad, 50 to 60 is absurd, 60 to 70 is you have got to be kidding as it now takes days (plural) to train up a pet just one level and you need to train them 10 levels from 60 to 70. This is not family friendly, and as I already said no responsible parent that knew the amount of time this game requires their kids in real time would in their right mind let them even play it. Pet training needs to be fixed to something that is reasonable.

As a parent, I will tell you that teaching a kid patience and getting them working toward goals is tough. These concepts are difficult for kids to grasp in this electronic age when everyone has the attention span of a sound bite -- responsible parents who let their kids play online appreciate games that aren't just point, click and win, because they help growing minds learn concepts like these, as well as logical thinking and value comparison.

Use what you've got until you get something better is perfectly acceptable for a parent to tell a child playing Pirate101. If that something better takes a week or a month, and some thought and effort on your part, the reward is worth more.

Willowydream on Jul 25, 2019 wrote:

Very true - I think the Pet Wrangling task should also have a chance for a Mega Snack -- especially at Level 70.

I think the true answer is that KingsIsle wants to make pet training as long and miserable as possible so that a tiny fraction of the players who have lots of money may spend a lot of crowns to rush train their pets. These people would most likely do that if pets weren't made to take forever to train.

Another tip: You will notice that sometimes when you level a pet to max that the power stat may not be at max. Well, even after you have maxed your pet you can still increase this stat by feeding your pet the snacks that he loves. Max for this stat is I believe 178. Feeding your pet other snacks or snacks that it likes are not as effective in increasing this stat. This stat will make your pet deliver stronger attacks.

ebnava on Aug 1, 2019 wrote:

Part of the problem with leveling pets too are that many of the snacks that a particular pets loves and likes are hard to obtain even with pet wrangling. A helpful tip I saw online that may shorten the monotony of pet leveling is to stick to using skull island to train them. The tasks end quicker and you are involved with the process more than using any of the higher realms to train them with. That could take days before you can even train again. The suggestion of training more than one pet at time is a great idea. I would train sometimes up to 9 at a time. You can see and compare their progress with other pets of the same breed to get the best epics out of them. Once you get the hang of the system it isn't so bad. Just make sure you find other things to occupy your time like decorating a home or cabin, go after achievements, and seek out sought after ideal gear for your character before the next build.

I know I always enjoy sending my level 70 companions out on pet quests and seeing them all return after a day and more's time with nothing but pet training components. As you level up your companions they take way longer to return and are typically outperformed by companions not even close to their level, especially when it comes to training up stuff like nautical.

Don't agree with this as not family friendly. you can log in train 5-6 pets log out log in later that night or the next day repeat. Also the game can be beat solo before pets even were a thing with powers / grants etc.

I enjoy pet training, and I can do storyline/minigames/ side quests while multiple pets train. Though, the time it requires--I really liked to train at first, but then the training stretched to two hours (sixteen hours for training is the hardest I've seen) and I just...stopped. But still, pet training can be fun...and absolutely family-friendly. I mean, who doesn't like that adorable little ostrich that does a dance when you feed him??

I think Pet Training may be a bit tedious, but absolutely gives you a feel of satisfaction and accomplishment with a reward... Plus, what's a pirate without his/her trusty pet sidekick?

*pet icon*