Drudatz, I think I vaguely remember something about a Blue and Darkness. Do you have a link? I'd love to see the context.
From the gameplay perspective, self-synergy is bad. Self-synergy is the enemy. Self-synergy
delenda est.
Call Darkness->Nocturnal Strike and Sunlight->Photosynthesis are two big example problems of self-synergy. They are problems because they are very powerful, but require no decisions. They're just gimmes.
Call Darkness->Nocturnal Strike was a bit off when it was confined to Ravens and Crows, but at least those were glass cannons that turned into pumpkins after two rounds, when they had shot their nukes and lost their racials, so they did have a compensating weakness. A well-played Bone Serpent can get off two innings, and still win by virtue of its racial.
Nagini, I'm not convinced that people should be rewarded just for entering a battle. That would lead to people just entering and leaving - or, if there was a duration constraint, entering, wasting time, and leaving.
Spinning, what are you thinking with The Pet Brawler's Guild? Just a rep that climbs for PvP won?
I am not, btw, convinced that simple balance is as terribad as it is sometimes portrayed. You can't possibly balance 800 pets, and anyone who has played a bit knows that you can beat a Tier-1 team with a much lesser team. Yes, it's uphill, but it's do-able. I was maintaining a 70%-80% rate during the reign of terror of Graves and the Evul Undead without Graves and mostly without using BS. And the MPD wasn't much use in my meta because of all the bones. But the battles were brain-melting, because I had to calculate every time, while the Graves/BS user just pressed keys in the same sequence every time. That's the evil of self-synergy.
The problem of balance is more complicated; it's about a few pets being just a bit better - and much simpler - to get an effect with.
I get that more rewards leads to more people playing to win, but the lack of rewards at the moment is leading to few people playing. I agree with Nagini that the gap from 1K to 5K, with no watering holes
en route, is just to wide a desert to cross. We need some shorter term goals. Rewards in general are a problem, since almost everything comes down to currency, but PvP rewards in particular could use a buff here.
Oh, and I see we have another YouTube pet PvP channel! They're really popping up recently.
https://www.youtube.com/user/CloseToZero