Basic premise: Give pets stats and make them upgradeable and re-engineerable.
Possible extra: introduce different versions of all the pets that have different weapon types, allow players to choose which version of the pets they want to buy.
And if Cryptic want to make some money off of this. Make the amount of upgrade points higher than normal items, And make them only upgradeable with Phoenix upgrades.
Why phoenix box upgrades? Well for one, people buy zen to convert to dilithium, so this would encourage more zen buying. Two, unlike lockboxes, phoenix upgrades are something a player is guaranteed to get if they open boxes, so no gambling which players HATE.
Or make a new tech. something like Hangar Upgrade Tech that you can only get from phoenix boxes.
Cryptic makes some money. Players don't have to gamble. Pets and carriers become more popular. Everybody wins.
I find it more likely we will get something akin to Guild Wars 2's pet storage system. Every minipet you get in GW2 starts off as an inventory item. From your inventory you can right click it, and add it to your minipet list. Once added it stops being a physical inventory item. Instead, every character has a minpet tab on their character screen that you can go to, that opens up a window with every minipet in the game listed. Every minipet you have collected is freely available to summon from that list at any time. With no need to claim a physical item to summon it.
FF14 has a similar system, only instead of it being a tab on the character screen, there's a whole separate menu that kinda functions a bit like the "spellbook", and said "pet book" can actually be placed on a power tray for easy access.
Now... STO already does something similar as long as you have the Pet item in your inventory, as it adds the summon pet power to your ground "spellbook", but its only there as long as you have the item in your inventory. If there was some way to modify that to make it a permenant thing by using the item... it might help. However that would also necesitate a revamp to the "spellbook" to add a Pet page so your normal abilities don't get swamped with pet summon abilities. And if they do that... they could even program in a "summon random pet" ability for people who collect pets. Might have to revamp space pets because ground can only have one at a time, but as far as I know you can summon ALL your space pets.
The only issue I see with this is that it is deep core programming since this was an established system from day one. No telling what will unravel if that code gets poked. But honestly this is a QoL improvement we are in desperate need of by now. There's god knows how many pets in game, and that's a LOT of inventory storage.
I wonder if Cryptic is trying to figure that out, hence why the Pet Tab is on the whiteboard.
God I wish I could be a fly on the wall with them talking about it...
Comments
Cirran
FF14 has a similar system, only instead of it being a tab on the character screen, there's a whole separate menu that kinda functions a bit like the "spellbook", and said "pet book" can actually be placed on a power tray for easy access.
Now... STO already does something similar as long as you have the Pet item in your inventory, as it adds the summon pet power to your ground "spellbook", but its only there as long as you have the item in your inventory. If there was some way to modify that to make it a permenant thing by using the item... it might help. However that would also necesitate a revamp to the "spellbook" to add a Pet page so your normal abilities don't get swamped with pet summon abilities. And if they do that... they could even program in a "summon random pet" ability for people who collect pets. Might have to revamp space pets because ground can only have one at a time, but as far as I know you can summon ALL your space pets.
The only issue I see with this is that it is deep core programming since this was an established system from day one. No telling what will unravel if that code gets poked. But honestly this is a QoL improvement we are in desperate need of by now. There's god knows how many pets in game, and that's a LOT of inventory storage.
I wonder if Cryptic is trying to figure that out, hence why the Pet Tab is on the whiteboard.
God I wish I could be a fly on the wall with them talking about it...