Pet Score Rankings

[Dragonwizard]

Maybe I have missed it but a ranking list for the new petscore system on the site would be a great feature. Something like the Top 50 Collections but personally I would like it to be more like the top 500 or something as people like me probably won't ever make it into the top 50 due to not haveing the CE, event pets or the really rare TCG pets. But I would still love to see where I rank compared to others.

[Breanni]

Nope -- you didn't miss a thing. We wanted to take some time to evaluate the new pet score mechanic and also allow our regular users some time to log in and unlock their scores before we begin ranking by score. We're thinking in about a month we'll begin ranking according to pet score.

In addition, the pet score will likely be shown next to a user here in the forums and underneath all pet and wall comments on the rest of our site.

I do like the idea of expanding the list from the Top 50 to the Top 500. Glad you suggested it.

[Dragonwizard]

I didn't think about how new it was so waiting definitly makes sense. Thanks for the fast response.

[Ylvelill]

Been almost two months, is there an update on this?

[Breanni]

Been almost two months, is there an update on this?

Indeed! We just set the update live today -- here are the details:

Rankings by Pet Score, BattleTags and Other Updates

And note the addition of pet score in the left sidebar under your forum avatar. Nice, right?

[Ruzgofdi]

"We've implemented corrected base qualities to all non-battle pets. This update will increase the pet score for many of our users."

Bwuh? I think this may have been how I saw an 8 point jump in my score without having done anything, but I have no idea what this means.

[Breanni]

"We've implemented corrected base qualities to all non-battle pets. This update will increase the pet score for many of our users."

Bwuh? I think this may have been how I saw an 8 point jump in my score without having done anything, but I have no idea what this means.

Before today, our Armory Import feature would only import non-battle pets at the "common" quality. This was due to a bug in the Armory. So we developed a workaround. As of now, all non-battle pets are factored into pet score using their actual rarity:

• Alliance Balloon - Uncommon
• Argent Gruntling - Uncommon
• Argent Squire - Uncommon
• Chi-ji Kite - Uncommon
• Darkmoon Balloon - Rare
• Guild Herald (Alliance) - Uncommon
• Guild Herald (Horde) - Uncommon
• Guild Page (Alliance) - Uncommon
• Guild Page (Horde) - Uncommon
• Horde Balloon - Uncommon
• Yu'lon Kite - Uncommon

Does that make sense?

[Ruzgofdi]

Yeah. I didn't actually know there was that problem. Thank you for the explanation.

[Tahsfenz]

Awesome job!

[GilroyKilroy]

When viewing My Pet Collection it should show your ranks, top collectors and realm. Right now I have to search for where I am.

[Breanni]

When viewing My Pet Collection it should show your ranks, top collectors and realm. Right now I have to search for where I am.

Good suggestion -- we can add the same realm/rank shown in your profile to the collection page. But what do you mean by "top collectors"?

[GilroyKilroy]

When viewing My Pet Collection it should show your ranks, top collectors and realm. Right now I have to search for where I am.

Good suggestion -- we can add the same realm/rank shown in your profile to the collection page. But what do you mean by "top collectors"?

Isn't that what you called your main top 500 list? I would want to see where I stood in that list and where I stood in my realm list.

[Aislinge]

Awesome work guys! I jumped from 40 something to 20 something and while I'm sure some people will be upset, I've always maintained that it should be about quality over quantity.

It's great to see that being recognised and I hope that it'll drive people to want to spend more time on the depth of their collection

[Raelbo]

As a newcomer to the site, I was rather interested to see how you calculated rankings - especially having seen how sites like wowprogress and guildox calculate it.

Now while I think it's great that each site has it's own measure for rating pet collections, and I like the philosophy that warcraftpets has of "Pet score is a numerical assessment of your pet collecting efforts", I can't help but notice how underrepresented pet level is.

I agree with the relative weighting of pet quality (2 points for a poor quality, 3 for a common, 4 for uncommon and 5 for a rare). Unfortunately average pet level is almost entirely arbitrary. Considering the effort involved in levelling pets, I think that levelling up, for example, getting all your pets to level 25 is a far more significant achievement than capturing 25 uncommon battle pets. Yet numerically, the ranking would place the latter of equal value.

Personally I would suggest finding a way to make average pet level count a lot more. Maybe scale the entire collection by the average score

For example: multiply by the score for the number of pets by (X + (25-average score)/Y)).

By playing with the variables X and Y you can change the relative weighting of levelling pets vs collecting them. For example if X was 1, Y was 50, then one third of the score would be represented by the average level, while 2/3 would be just having the pets. If it is felt that this gives too much emphasis on levelling, then increase Y to 100, which would make level count only 20%, etc.

Either way, I think that pet level should be able to count more than 100 points out of the theoretical maximum of around 2815 (current maximum for Eu) which is less than 4%.

I realise this would probably mess up the rankings for some, but I would think it would better fit the philosophy of finding a numerical representation for the effort put into our collections.

[Darqueshadow]

I love everything you have been doing for the site, i've been trying to get my friends to join so we can see each others missing pets so we can help each other. Keep up the good work!

[Dearth]

I like that now that "My Pet Collection" page has the Realm & Rank listed, but I don't like that it list my rank according to my pets levels not what I've collected. Can you add another line showing this or make an option to display that instead?

[Breanni]

Either way, I think that pet level should be able to count more than 100 points out of the theoretical maximum of around 2815 (current maximum for Eu) which is less than 4%.

I realise this would probably mess up the rankings for some, but I would think it would better fit the philosophy of finding a numerical representation for the effort put into our collections.

Very intelligent feedback, Raelbo.

We've talked a little about this before. The main reason we opted to make the level of your pets a much smaller percentage of overall pet score is twofold:

1) Our site has always been about pet collecting. Before battles and leveling were even part of the picture, we focused on rewarding the act of collecting. Therefore, in keeping with our site's mission, we felt that the score should reward collecting above all else. That's why a pet's rarity factors into the score so heavily.

2) During the early stages of testing various pet score formulas, we realized that with pet levels weighing more heavily into scores, people could game the system without leveling a single pet. This could be done by selectively collecting pets that were available at the highest levels. This marginalizes the efforts of those people who are working to collect rarer pets and more pets. So we choose to make pet level more of a tie-breaking aspect of the formula -- a bonus, if you will.

In other words, your argument might have more pull if everyone had to level every pet from level 1 on up. But that isn't the case due to all those high level pets in the wild.

We played around and tested various formulas for 6 weeks before settling on what we're using today (which seems to be working nicely). While the "4 times average pet level" may appear arbitrary, we did try other values and felt that "4" worked best to represent the majority of our community.

[Breanni]

I like that now that "My Pet Collection" page has the Realm & Rank listed, but I don't like that it list my rank according to my pets levels not what I've collected. Can you add another line showing this or make an option to display that instead?

Your rank is shown according to your pet score, which is a numerical representation of all the pets you've collected and the average level of those pets. Both aspects play a role. Everyone is ranked in this same fashion.