Comprehensive Battle Pet database from Alt:ernative
The Godmother over at Alt:ernative is a collector of the highest order, and so found herself being constantly asked by friends, guildmates, and even complete strangers like the author of this piece how to go about obtaining various pets for the pet battle system. So, rather than rest on her laurels, she went ahead and created the Minipets Database.
What is the minipets database? It's a database of the 500 battle pets, and where to get them from. It also includes information on what type the pet is; so aquatic, flying, critter, beast and the like. And of course, it lets you know the pet's rarity, whether it's tradeable, and whether it can battle!
The Godmother is also in the process of adding pictures and co-ordinates for every single pet in the database, but for now she's included enough information for the would-be pet collector to gather as many pets as they see fit. This is always going to be a work in progress as more pets are added and the Godmother fulfils her Pokémon philosophy and updates the database, but for the keen collector this is already a great resource.
Join us after the break for the Godmother's Q&A about the database!
Q: Both Wowhead and WarcraftPets have perfectly serviceable databases you could use to track pet data: why did you feel the need to make one of your own?
My husband asked this question fairly early on in my reasoning process, and my reply remains the same now as it did then: I wanted to make a particular kind of list. I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked by Guildies "do you know how I get pet X?" and I found myself wanting something I could customise to my personal level of detail. This means, over time, I am likely to do my own guides on locating some of the harder "vanity" pets, but that current list is secondary to the enormous amount of new data I was presented with on Beta. I wanted a way to put that all in one simple alphabetical list, with a way to pass on to other people before Mists went live where to find the pets I know I want to hunt down as quickly and efficiently as possible. I could have just kept all this information to myself, but it occurred to me that if I wanted to do this, other people would too.
Hence the Database was formed.
Q: Can we search by battle pet class, so aquatic, critter, that sort of thing?
Yes, absolutely! My coding wizard is working on that right now, refining the searches. You will also be able to search by rarity, tradeability, that sort of thing. If there are search types you'd like to see do let us know and we'll see if it can be added in!
Q: Hey, the pet I searched for doesn't have pictures and co-ordinates yet! What gives?
Well, give us a chance! The Godmother has to find and screengrab every single pet in the database, then edit those screengrabs and upload them. We thought that getting the database up and useable was more important than getting all the screengrabs first.
Q: How accurate can it be with the constantly changing nature of the game right now?
My final list has already had a couple of pets removed that haven't made the live list. I'll try to be as accurate as possible with all the information I have but as I have found with the list of rare pets Blizzard announced a while ago, some of those have changed already in the transition from beta to live. Three archaeology pets are currently marked as un-tradeable and two aren't, despite the fact the original list has all five as tradeable pets. I'm well aware that I could be doing a lot of work when live finally drops, especially with the issue of rarity value. This I know is of particular interest to the gold farming community, who are looking at Pet Battles as a lucrative business opportunity, so I'm doing my best to keep it accurate and up to date. , so .
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