Moar Pet News, or "Why They Gotta Make My Posts Useless?"

So I linked to Warcraftpets in my recent fishing poles post, but I'd only skimmed the news. Tonight, after a very productive RL day writing stuff that might actually make me money, I took a closer look and saw some great changes for 3.1:

• CLUCK! for a Westfall chicken is now available to horde (used to be the chicken would turn hostile even if you managed to get the feed through a neutral AH), making this post pointless.
  
• Sprite Darters in Feralas may now drop a Sprite Darter Egg (formerly an alliance only quest pet). This forces me to go back and add "stay in Feralas and farm a Sprite Darter!" to the horde section of this post.
  
• Emerald Whelplings now fall off of Adolescent Whelps instead of just Dreaming Whelps in southwestern Swamp of Sorrows.

Argent Tournament News: Alongside the dumb-looking kids Dustfire is looking forward to abusing, if you champion a city you can buy from their vendor (tabard, pet, mount, etc). Warcraftpets.com says the pets are not currently BOP, which means cross-faction selling and sharing.

Let's hope and pray they keep it that way. With the CLUCK! and Sprite Darter changes, I think they might. They seem to be trying to provide enough pets for everyone to reach the collection achievements without pulling out a RL wallet. I predicted new pets when my friends bemoaned how few pets there were when the fawn took 100 instead of 75 pets -- I told them that if there were not enough pets, Blizzard had to add more to make the achievement viable! And here we are.

One thing you want to hope for (if you enjoy looking nice as much as I do) is that they'll keep upping the ante for mount and pet collections -- because that means a wider variety of mounts and pets to obtain and choose from.

One thing I'm not thrilled about with the mount collecting is that it makes people greedier for mounts they don't actually want, particularly rare-drop mounts from raids and instances. I have to admit, I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to difficult-to-obtain mounts -- if you just want to collect it but not use it as your main mount, pass to someone who will get the proper milage out of it.

For example, there are some really nice kids in our guild (14-16 range), but they've been bitten by the mount collecting bug. It makes them desperately want things they don't particularly like and won't use -- like the Azure Drake from Malygos. One of them said in guild chat the other day during a raid he hadn't been rostered into, "I'm going to be so mad if the drake drops off Malygos" and proceeded to say he wanted the Twilight Drake more. I mentioned that if he wanted the twilight one more, he should probably pass on the azure if it dropped even if he was there, and he agreed (though reluctantly). He's a good kid, just caught up in this unpleasant collecting frenzy.

To me, the fun of mounts is using them, not having them (plus, it's SO expensive). And if you aren't going to use something rare, you should pass it to someone who will. Like rolling on a Warglaive on your rogue when you're about to switch your main to priest. It just doesn't make sense.