- To share knowledge about hunter pets in WoW.
- To foster communication with other people who have the same appreciation for hunter pets that we do.
If you discover something about a pet that you don't want to be public knowledge, then don't post it here. This is a public forum. Moreover, you may want to consider your membership here because we exist explicitly to share information.
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Now I know that I unintentionally misled some people when I declined to post on my blog, Mania's Arcania, about Soriid the Devourer's new look. I am very sorry that my behavior misled.
In brief: Soriid is a tameable purple silithid on the live realms. On the Cataclysm beta realms, Soriid is untameable and shares an appearance with the boss silithid Buru the Gorger.
If you tame Soriid on live and transfer that character to the beta, you end up with an enormous pet that looks like Buru. If that behavior holds until Cataclysm launch, it means that any hunter who tames Soriid before Cataclysm will end up with a very unique and retired pet. The same situation also applies to Haarka the Ravenous and possibly other silithids.
When the information on Soriid was posted, I jokingly asked if I should post about it on Mania's Arcania ... and then wandered off the thread. The implication was that I supported the effort to keep the general WoW population from finding out about Soriid, presumably in an effort to keep Blizzard from finding out about the bug and fixing it. That was a valid conclusion to take away from what I posted, and I apologize for that because it's not at all what I meant.
So why didn't post I post anything on my blog about this?
- Since we started this forum community, it's taken the place of the blog for the more transient pet information. In other words, I know the members here understand that stuff posted here - in any of the sub-forums - is likely to change. This is a forum - it moves fast. The blog, however, gets visitors for months and years after the fact and I rarely have time to go back and comment a blog post when things change. Now the beta tends to blur the lines quite a bit, but my expectation is that this behavior won't last very long even in the beta, and so it didn't seem like a good candidate for a blog post.
- On the flip side, the blog is a great way to highlight exciting news, and Soriid's new model is a certainly exciting news. But given the previous relationship between Blizzard and the hunter community where unintended pets are involved - namely the Grimtotem Spirit Guide and Garwal - I expected this situation to stir up some deep emotion. I was trying to balance the act of sharing exciting news with a wider audience vs. the deep emotion and bitterness it was likely to stir up. I think now that I made the wrong call.
More to the point, I think it would be a very bad idea for Cataclysm to launch with the current behavior. This is my personal opinion, but I'll give you my reasoning here as part of my explanation as to why I didn't post on the blog - which is part of my apology as to how I may have misled you about the purpose of this forum by my own behavior.
In the best case, the grandfathered boss silithids would remain as unique, retired pets - much like the Grimtotem Spirit Guide. In the worst case, and I believe the more likely given the size and boss nature of the model, Blizzard would change previously-tamed Soriid's back into plain purple silithids, much as they did with the Garwal worg/worgen. Both cases would leave the hunter community as a whole even more splintered and bitter than before. And we don't need the help.
In addition, my personal opinion on retired pets is well known: I want all hunters to have access to all pet looks. Lots of members here don't agree with my opinion, and I respect that. We've had some good discussions here about the topic and I am sure that we will continue to do so. I look forward to it - so long as the discussions remain respectful of other posters.
So there you are - a clarification of official forum policy (we don't hoard information) plus an apology from me (I'm sorry that I behaved in a way that may have made you think we do).
Feel free to respond in this thread, or via PM, or via e-mail (mania@wow-petopia.com). Just keep the thread respectful, please. (You can be as disrespectful to me as you like in PM or e-mail.)
~ Formally known as Royi ~
