Anyone know if they will add more slots to the stable?

[Nanluin]

I'm just curious.. All those of you that have full stables, and "need" more, how often do you actually use all of your pets?

Recently discussed in this thread:

http://forums.wow-petopia.com/viewtopic ... 34#p280234

Each of mine are up to current level and fully talent spec'ed for each of my hunter's two specializations (unless Exotic, obviously). I enjoy the variety of running with different ones frequently, as opposed to all that time spent previously with only four flavors (soloing tank pet, DPS cat, Fire-resist cat, and Nature-resist cat).

-- Nanluin

[Araela]

i was just wondering if anyone has heard anything about them adding more slots to our stables? with 4.2 i already have almost all of my slots filled in my stable, and i only have one non rare pet (my oil coated wolf for crit buff because its the closest i can get to a rare wolf that i dont have to be BM to use)

Not true- Deathmaw and Old Cliff Jumper both have unique skins and are rare, non-BM specific wolves.

[Morven]

I think telling people they shouldn't want more than the current number of pets is edging into telling people how to play the game and enjoy the game. Blizzard clearly likes encouraging the collector instinct with mounts and companions — if that's not endorsing the basic idea, I don't know what — and likes giving players more challenges than just levels and dungeons. What are achievements for, after all?

There are many ways to find one's fun in WoW, and I'm thankful for that. It means that when I temporarily bore of one, I can spend time with another.

It's equally fine to decide that you only enjoy a few of those ways, and that you will limit yourself to them. You know yourself.

Now, I think the vast majority of hunters will never even fill up their 25 slots. That doesn't mean they can't add more. It does mean, if correct, that putting a huge amount of effort into extending it, or making a better interface to it, might be a waste of Blizzard's development energy.

Pets take up a little more database space than companions or mounts, in that they have individual names and talent trees, but I don't see it as being a major deal, especially since most people are not going to fill them up.

[SgtSplacker]

Considering the amount of money these guys make off of us we should have unlimited slots and some kind of bad ass graphical pet browser.

[Kateri]

sorry, was out of town. i agree with most of the comments made so far, but people saying that they pets would take up too much space, what about the mounts? people (many MANY people i know) have 100+ mounts. wouldnt it be about the same thing? if anything i would gladly buy more stable slots (just like you have to buy your bank tabs) i just think there are many MANY good arguments for and against more stable slots, but i personally would love more slots

[CrystalKitten]

The mounts could probably be done more efficiently than pets. The Pet table for players would probably at LEAST need: The unique identifier, character identifyer, cross reference to the pet table as to which model/family it is, name, and talents. Whereas mounts/companions, (if it's not just a string of characters, or more likely reference numbers, that they explode in the character table) would just be unique ID, character ID, mount ID. It's not the physical space that's the issue, but more the size that the database could POTENTIALLY grow to. Every additional column and entry adds to the search time. And searches are going almost constantly (for example, I would imagine it would happen every time a pet entered an area where it's name, model, owner, etc would need to be known). I'm sure Blizzard has a way to make that more efficient than I can possibly imagine (I've only done php/mysql work), however, it does still have to happen, and eventually, they'll reach the limits of how efficient they can make it. Even if another 5.. 10...20 slots filled for EVERY character wouldn't reach that limit, where do they draw the line? As I said, I wouldn't be concerned at all over another 5 or 10 slots, but unless they announce an absolute max, are hunters EVER going to stop asking for more? heh. (personally, I don't think I need any more slots. I don't even have one page full, and some of those can be released right now. There's a few others I want, but I'll still probably have a near full page left over. And I like having to be very selective in what I chose. It makes the ones that I DO decide to keep even more special.)

[Morven]

Ah, but since a hunter only has five summonables on them at any point, the size of the table for that hasn't grown. All that's grown is another table that's for the stabled pets. This one is only accessed by the stable master code that moves pets in and out of the stable. That number of accesses is going to be low, and it's not called upon in combat or walking around the world -- only when that hunter clicks on the stable master (and by the Armory code, but notice how the Armory only gets updates when you log out? This means it uses a separate database, synced at logout time.)

[CrystalKitten]

My GUESS at how the stable would work is: Please note this is largely speculation based on my moderate knowledge and experience working with mysql databases for php. Reality could be very different

One table with all possible pets, what base abilities they have, etc.
That one table would have ALL the pets.
On the character table, or something similar, there would be ONE "box" so to speak which would have our call pets (or maybe one for each call pet...). That pet would be referred to by the unique ID given to it in the first table.

How I could IMAGINE it would work in game is(assuming we're starting with no pet, and calling one):

Look up the hunter and Check the hunter's "on call pets" (one search here)
Move "on call pet" to "active pet" (modification)
Look up pet in the pet table, join with possible pets table and get: model, name, abilities, talents (another search, this time in a larger database, and searching two at once).

They might use a separate database for stabled pets... but I'm not sure to be honest. That would potentially require a LOT of data changing in the database, which can be pretty intensive too. Especially if anything is getting "deleted", as deleting rows (or entries) from a database still bogs it down. However, considering that pets don't often/usually lose their talents when stabled, I'm not so sure. If there WAS just a stable DB, I'd imagine it would just be "name" "character" "unique ID" "animal Id".

Sorry.. I might be thinking this through too hard, haha. The topic has made me realize how much I miss coding (and figuring out the puzzles of how things work) I should work on my game some more, heh.

But yeah.. in short.. either way, it wouldn't be a problem... until it is. I mean.. I know that I would prefer not to have to have lag when I open my stable and wanna test out many "older" pets just because now blizz allows unlimited pets and there's a band of people who's set out to tame EVERY model there waver was... It's comes down to finding a balance of giving people enough slots to be satisfied, while make sure that it's not too many to cause issues.

I see arguments of both sides, and I DO agree that people should be able to play however they want. But I just don't want that to mess with the ability to actually have the game run smoothly... or have maintenance last twice as long because now the pet tables are 10 times as large (probably over exaggeration, but it could still happen).