As you may have noticed, Petopia had a period of unexpected downtime earlier today when our host suspended us for overloading their servers. (Generally speaking, I’m pretty satisfied with our host, but it’s not their fault when all you people flock to Petopia during scheduled maintenance two days before a new expansion. Bad people! *grin*)
Patch 3.0, with its very pleasant most-pets-are-really-pretty-good changes plus five new pet families, brought a flood of new pets. And the Wrath of the Lich King expansion later this week is going to add another 115 or so tameable pets, including two completely new families and a whole bunch of completely new pet looks.
All these new choices — plus the extra stable slots we have now — mean that lots and lots of hunters are picking up new pets. And those pets need names. And that means another round of Name That Pet! But … I’m having some problems with the Name That Pet feature.
A number of people have posted or e-mailed to let me know that Petopia is currently down. Initially, it looked like an unrelated network problem with our host. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that Petopia itself may be the problem — the unprecedented traffic we’ve been getting the past few days was causing problems for other sites hosted on the same network.
We are working now with our host to get back online as quickly as possible. However, we may need to disable some features temporarily. Thank you very much for your patience and understanding while we sort through this!
Patch 3.0 launches tomorrow, but I’ve gone ahead and updated Petopia early so that all us eager hunters can have the new info at our fingertips as we plan tonight.
(I apologize for any hunters who are desparately trying to find out which pet they need to tame today to learn Claw 6, but dude, just wait a day!)
In addition to Patch 3.0 information, there are some new features scattered about as well. And doubtless some bugs! So please let me know what you think and if you run across anything that isn’t working quite right.
In unrelated but very good news, someone has hacked the WoW Model Viewer into a state where it mostly works with the new WotLK/Patch 3.0 file formats. (It still lacks particles, I believe.)
That means that I was able to get nice model pics for a bunch of pets up on Petopia last night, including our one and only spirit beast, the rhinos, and the bone spiders, among others.
Okay! I finally got all the pet talent changes for build 8820 uploaded to Petopia. Like pet skills, a number of talents had their focus costs reduced or removed. I wanted to get this done so that we can look at the focus changes across the board as a consistent whole.
Of course, there are quite likely quite a few more things to discover about this new beta build. So if you see something I’ve missed, please let me know!
I still haven’t gotten the new focus numbers for talents in beta build 8820 up, but at least I have wasps and rhinos posted! The WotLK New Pet page is now autogenerated, as are all the Wrath family, skin and pet pages, which should make everything easier to update. Not everything is quite in place yet, but it’s getting there.
I also updated a whole bunch of previously untameable beasts that can now be tamed. My favorite (today): Bjomolf, the brown saber worg. (Thanks go out to a hunter named Bartarus from the WotLK EU for that good news!)
This most recent WotLK beta build included a lot of updates to focus costs for pet abilities. I’ve updated Petopia with the focus changes for pet skills, but not for pet talents. (I’m still working at moving those over to a nice auto-generated script system that will let me update faster.)
Likewise, although family information has been updated and the new families added, new pets have not yet been added. There is a wasp page, for instance, with no wasps on it. So Petopia is in a weird halfway state between builds 8788 and 8820. But it’s almost 7 am here and I need to go to bed. The rest will wait until … later today, anyway. *grin*
Thanks to an extremely generous set of screenshots submitted by Warhammer this morning, I now have most of the silithids up on Petopia, on their very own Silithid family page.
(I’ve moved the new WotLK families onto their own pages because otherwise they bloat the WotLK New Pet page too much. But there are links to the family pages from the top of the pet page, of course.)
