Feeling let down. :(

[shinato]

As a long time user of the lvling guides i was excited to start using the mounts and pets guide too.

I was disappointed to find that when you click on the pets option under pets and mounts in the main window it jumps to your pet journal, and aside from the waypoint arrow telling you where you [I]might[I] find a spawn there isnt anymore information than the pet journal does when you hover the pet icon. meh i said, when i click on the lil' game hunter achive guide (im also a user of that module) it gives me a nice waypoint system to go into elwyn forest and grab lambs and then to westfall for a little harvester, so it seems it will take me through each world locatable pet. (I noticed it missed some pets in each zone but i assumed that it was taking me to get the zone uniques, or to aquire the pet if that zone was the place you could find it at its highest lvl in the wild)

but after i finished the rattlesnakes in the badlands it says thankyou and then just refers you to opening your pet journal for the other 500 pets. there is no achieve guide for the world safari achieves and there is no nice waypointing system to make sure you get each of the pets in a zone/continent. i was hoping to have a good system in place to use my trusty old zygor guide to get the "thats a lot of pet food" achieve but im feeling pretty left out in the cold. you pay the first time and every xpac after that but I feel you havent got it right the first time.

Do you have plans to upgrade the pathing systems to include zone by zone or continent by continent, or the safari and pet number achieves? If not, How can you justify this guide? you could at least include zone checklists under the pets portion of the pets and mounts tab instead of opening the pet journal. your lvling and events guides are superb and I feel this is damaging the reputation you have worked hard to build.

thanks for reading my semi-essay and I hope to hear from you soon.
Shin.

PS. guys, you should really spend like one afternoon making sure that the tooltips on what each guide does are filled out right. eg. "local pet mauler" and "Take em all on" are blank under the achieve tab, where others, like "thats a lot of pet food" just reads "obtain a companion pet", which is wrong.

[ZG Support 1]

The reason the pet guide is like this is because we wanted an easy way for someone to look up a pet they're missing and go get it. We didn't design it the other way because we didn't want to be like other options out there, we wanted you to have an easy way to get straight to the pet you are looking for, not running you around 15 different zones if all you wanted was a rabbit.

You do have some good suggestions for ways to improve the pet guides and I will make sure the team sees them to consider but I can't promise that we'll make up guides like you are talking about.

[shinato]

Okay, fair point and that is great, but only if all you want is one specific pet. and most people who want one want all of them and by using the pet journal you would start with "A" and go from there. you would fly all over the place to 15 different zones, having to go back to the same zones repeatedly as you learned of new pets that were there, one of your stated goals if efficiency and as far as collecting goes, that is about the most inefficient method i could think of. I have paid over $250 in total over 4 years of zygor and I'm still having to minimize my game to look at wowhead lists of pets per zone. I know its a ton of work. but I also know you guys have the know-how and the patience to do this. the sheer amount of effort in the lvling guides, the unique guides to visit every inn in the game during halloween or all the ancestor locations during the lunar festival. I have to ask if you never intended on that method of pet-guide interaction why did you have the long chain starting in elwynn and guiding you through grabbing pets in the lower eastern kingdoms (which I loved btw) if you never intended on guiding us the rest of the way? It seems like a half begun idea that was abandoned.

[ZG Support 1]

You are talking about two different kinds of guides that have two purposes.

The one with the quest chains is there to take you thru all the battle pet trainers and has you grab some pets for the purposes of being able to defeat all of those trainers. That quest chain guide isn't there for the purpose of collecting the pets, just to get you thru the trainers so you'd be able to do their daily quests.

When we were looking at doing regular pet guides to help you obtain pets (outside the scope of defeating the trainers) we thought of many different methods but ultimately settled on what we have in place. As I said before we chose this method so people could pick and choose what pets they wanted to go after giving the customer more control over what pets they had in their collection.

You're looking at this with a completionist mentality (got to have them all ala Pokémon) while we were trying to create the guides for a casual collector mentality. The method we chose can be used by both a casual collector and a completionist while the method you're looking for would primarily only be useful for a completionist. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting a completionist method, we just focused on the method that would be able to be used by the most people. Like I said, I'll make sure the team sees this so they can discuss the possibility of adding in more guide options that would appeal to a completionist.

I will say that for me personally I would fall into the casual collector category. There's probably a lot more of us than you think. I'd rather not be out running around trying to collect tons of pets but when I see one I like (that another player has out) then I'll pull up that one guide and go get it. That's how I got the singing sunflower, saw someone with it and decided I wanted it so went and got it. At this point I think I only have something like 25 total pets and I'm happy with that. I've never felt the need to have to go get them all. Same with the mounts.

[shinato]

The chain I referenced and the trainer chain are separate, the chain I am referring to is in your achievement tab if you go to the achie which tracks your unique pet collection total (plenty of pets, plethora of pets, lil' game hunter etc.) there is the zygor button to load a guide for that achievement and it starts off very well as i have detailed above (elwynn, westfall, redrige, stranglethorn, etc.) and then stops. If am I to take your final word on this that zygor is aiming at a casual player or not intended for intent collectors, why have you included loremaster or guides for almost every achievement? that is surely aimed at a hardcore demographic. If this isn't included with the pets and mounts guide, shouldn't it be in the achievement guide? or the titles and reputation guide because of the zookeeper title? Taken from your front page "Master Every Aspect of the Game" "to hunder down all the rarest pets " (amusing typo on your front page right?)I'm a big supporter of you guys, i've even recommended my guild of 1000 people check it out, and this is one of the only real glaring problems i've found in your guides, but If you have no intention of addressing this, and i'm sure i'm not alone in my feelings, as i've checked the posts in the forum for the pets and mounts guide and there have been several who have made posts about problems as well, don't you think you're falsely advertising?

[ZG Support 1]

I think you might have misunderstood the main point I was trying to make about the casual vs. completionist. We try to have guides for everyone (casual and completionist), but we must make sure that the most people can use the guides. We just thought that doing it the way we have it would be the best way for the most people to be able to use the Pets guide.

Since you posted in the Pets & Mounts section I thought you were just referencing things for the Pets guides. I didn't know you were comparing it to Achievement guides or looking for a Titles guide. Because of this I was only responding with references to what is part of the Pets & Mounts guide package.

Now we do have a Zookeeper Title guide, but it's small and refers you back to the main Pet guides for obtaining them. Zookeeper requires you to capture every single pet in the world so referring you back to the Pet window allows you to see exactly which pets are missing and going after them. I'm guessing that there was a lack of time when the guides were being created to do both a full blown pet guide for collecting them all (like you're looking for) and the normal pet guides so they put the normal pet guides as the priority.

As I've said a couple times I will make sure the team are aware of your concerns on this. I do not know what they will decide to do concerning this but I'm pretty sure that decision will not be made for a while as they are very focused on creating the WoD guides right now.

And I don't think there's any false advertising because we do have guides that allow you to hunt down every pet. It would be false advertising if we tried to say that you could hunt down every pet with a single guide.