Mania’s Arcania

I finally got the page for pets with special behaviors up on Petopia. You can find it, as you might expect, under the Special Pets menu. Let me know if I missed anything!

Petopia now has a page on Feeding Your Pet for younger hunters or hunters that were curious about the mechanics of Feed Pet. This is the first new guide on a new page called Fundamentals of Pet Care which I hope will eventually have a number of extensive guides. For right now, though, there’s just the feeding guide, the old skill training guide, and some handy links to other sites with more information.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

I had a few moments this evening and a desire to tweak, so I added a shortcut to the Petopia Pet Database that makes it easier to find pets with known skills. Now, when you are using the Pet Database, you can set Known Skills to “Any”. This will show you creatures that know any skill at all when they are tamed.

This is particularly useful when combined with a zone — for instance, you can find any pets in Darkshore that know a skill already so you can see what your young night elf hunter can learn there. Alternatively, if you just hit level 32, you might see what skills are available on level 32 pets.

I get a decent amount of e-mail every week from people who want to know whether a particular creature is tameable — because it’s not listed on Petopia, so they aren’t sure — or letting me know that Petopia is missing a particular pet — usually one that isn’t listed because it cannot be tamed. So I thought it might be really handy to add untameable beasts to the site.

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I’ve said before that taking pics is my least favorite part of Petopia. Thankfully, Brash/Bamoo did most of that work before I got involved with the site. But after putting it off as long as I could, I have finally taken new pictures of the crabs that shows off their fringeless, shiny shells.

I’ve expanded the Pets with Unique Looks (under Special Pets in the navigation menu) to include more appearances that aren’t technically unique (they are used on more than one specific kind of creature) but which are limited to one specific area. Examples include the acid green scorpids from the Barrens and the bright red lynxes from Eversong Woods. I fudged a bit in a few cases: almost all the black hyenas live in Desolace, but there is a black hyena that can sometimes be found in Thousand Needles, the Galak Packhound. … except that I’ve been looking for a Galak Packhound since my main was level 25, and I’ve never seen one. So I threw in the black hyenas as well.

I’ve added another page to the Special Pets section on Petopia: Pets with Unique Looks. For the purpose of this list I went with the idea that a unique appearance is one that only occurs in the wild on one specific kind of creature. I did fudge in a couple of places when the appearance occurs on multiple creatures but those creatures are rare or otherwise special.  For instance, I included the white lion look, which can be found on both Echeyakee and Sian-Rotam, because both of those are quest-spawned. But I didn’t include the red two-headed carrion bird, even though there are techincally only two examples of that look in the wild, because both examples are quite common around Hellfire Penninsula.

Anyway, let me know what you think!

I spent some more time yesterday and today tweaking Petopia in response to feedback. Let me say it again — thank you to everyone who has sent me their impressions of the changes. It really helps me figure out where I went wrong and what needs to be dealt with first. *grin* But here’s a quick rundown of the work from yesterday and today.

• I added another shortcut to the front page to search for pets that know a particular skill. Like the shortcuts for searching by level and zone, this shortcut feeds into the main database so you can refine your search from there as you like.

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I spent most of the day fixing minimum width issues under IE6 (*sigh*) but I did find time to get some new/old info back up. It’s really late and I’m incredibly tired so I’ll just list a couple of useful things.

• There are shortcuts to simple level and zone searches on the front page now, so it’s easier to find those functions. They feed right into the main database so you can start with a level or zone search and then refine by diet or skill or what have you from there. It wasn’t always obvious before that the database had replaced the old Pets by Level and Pets by Zone pages, but hopefully this will help.
• The “Show me the pets!” shortcut on the front page now opens up options for seeing all the pet appearances or just a specific type of pets (damage, armor, etc.).
• I completely revamped the old family stat page (which was just the table of all the stat modifiers) into a more broad family comparison page. It has color-coded tables for comparing diet, skills, and stat modifiers across families. There’s a good bit more to be said about most of these things, and more work to make that information accessible, but these charts will do for now. Tomorrow I hope to get them hooked up to the family, mob, and skin pages.

I got through all of the feedback e-mail from yesterday this morning but I haven’t really looked at it since, so I’ll get through all of today’s feedback tomorrow morning. If I haven’t answered you yet, please be patient – I have a lot to dig through, and I’m making tweaks  to the site as I go. :>

I’ve just uploaded a whole bunch of changes to the Petopia website. Most of these are fairly subtle changes meant to make things easier for me, but some of them are also meant to make things easier for you. :>

Now I should start by saying that, just like a live MMO game, a web site like Petopia is a living, growing thing. And it’s going to go on growing — there’s a lot of work left to do, a lot of small tweaks I want to make, major features I want to add, interesting research I want to host, all sorts of things –  but since there’s just me whacking away at it right now, it won’t all get done overnight. So expect ongoing changes as I continue to polish things up. :>

The flip side of that is that I have a lot of opportunity to evaluate feedback as I go. It doesn’t matter if I am excited about a change if it makes it harder to use the site. So I’m going to be watching all the feedback I get about changes to Petopia very carefully. If you have a comment or a suggestion, please drop me an e-mail! I prefer e-mail for this kind of feedback — I find it easier to sort and track that way.

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