Vesania wrote: ↑Tue May 30, 2023 6:48 pm
They removed Garwal because it was a Worgen and the whole slavery-and-sentience thing
They removed Garwal because they were just about to announce playable Worgen. He was hotfixed July 7th, then they announced playable Worgen August 21st, a month later.
It had nothing to do about sentience. It had everything to do about playable Worgen. Last thing they needed was a hunter to retain a Worgen pet. That'd be slavery. Especially problematic if someone had race-changed to Worgen while having Garwal.
There's also a difference between sentience and sapience, which is most likely where Blizzard draws the line. Sentience is fine for tameability. We have plenty of sentient pets. We do not have sapient pets. Worgen, at the point we tamed Garwal, were not known to be sapient yet. However, Blizzard were about to unveil sapient Worgen.
I don't think Blizzard likes the idea of us using baby pets, even though we have caterpillars, which are literally babies. But we also had to fight for caterpillars back in Mists, they weren't originally going to be allowed as pets either. If pet battlers like myself can throw baby pets in combat with each other, why can't hunters tame baby pets to use in battle as faithful companions?
Blizzard has acknowledged hunters want cute pets, but they won't follow through with that acknowledgement. We get thrown a bone every now and then, like with the crystal mice in Zaralek, but overall, most pets aren't cute. They're "Ferocious" because Blizzard likes to make the world look hostile, and it gets annoying, tbh.
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That said, they probably changed this because the size.
The foals are an abnormally large size, and they probably can't get them to shrink back to a normal size, and instead of making it so players have to see hunters with huge baby pets with stretched textures, they decided to take the baby foals away from hunters instead.
It's a sad turn of events, but it's what they decided was in the best interest of everyone, because for a lot of players, seeing stretched textures ruins the game experience.
The baby mammoths are unaffected by this issue, as they are the correct size, they aren't giant. Likewise, the baby direhorns are also unaffected, if I recall. Which would likely be why those two baby pets are still intact.
In fact, I'd wager money the fact the foals are so big is why they're doing this, the devs have gone on record before that stretched textures get removed from the game often because they detract from the game experience.
Instead of throwing vitriol at the devs, maybe try seeing, if this is indeed the reason they are being removed, if we can get them to re-add the baby foals in a later patch in a way that they won't grow, so we can tame them again.