Newsforum 20010624news2

Message 3 on news:
From: Japes
To: news
When: 3:47 pm, Sunday, June 24, 2001
Subject: Pet Introduction

Introductory Guide

  1. Pet Skills

Though a pet trainer is not yet available in the gameworld, there are some basic tricks that your pet starts off knowing. These tricks depend on vocal or visual triggers for the pet to respond.

'Follow'
Directions:
1. Gesture at yourself
2. Say to your pet "follow" or "come"
This command will tell your pet to get up and follow you.

'Stay'
Directions:
1. Say to your pet "stay" or "sit"
This will cause your pet to stop following you and stay at that particular spot. Of course, whether or not the pet is willing will depend on its mood, personality, and loyalty to you.
Sometimes, if a pet becomes frightened or agitated, it will act on instinct and disregard any command given to it. In the future, pet skills will include such tricks as scent tracking, fetching, danger sense, and guarding.

  1. Pet Moods

Pets react to the environment around them. As animals, they will become agitated, uncomfortable, frightened, or angry when put in a dangerous or unpleasant situation. They also tend to react to friendly and hostile e-motes both to itself and to its master. Sometimes pets will grow hungry or sleepy
depending on their needs. By watching a pet closely, you should be able to tell what kind of mood its in.

Not only does the environment affect the pet's mood, it will also affect its personality. Pets develop a 'personality' depending upon the surroundings they are raised in. Violent or dangerous surroundings will cause a pet to grow in a much different way than a quiet, secure home.

Loyalty to the master is an important part of a pet's personality. Abuse or mistreat your pet enough and eventually it will abandon you. Good loyalty takes a long time and effort to build, but creates a lasting bond between master and pet.

  1. Maintaining your Pet

To feed a pet, you simply 'offer' it the food. Some pets will appreciate certain types of food more than others. Whether or not a pet is hungry contributes in a large way to its mood.
Naturally, most players can't be logged in every hour of the day to tend to and feed their pet. To take care of this problem, we've put into place a dynamic holdings system that will cover the costs of feeding and maintaining your pet when you're not around.

This system is basically an added weekly expense (check the 'holdings' command if you purchase a pet). The actual expense varies depending on how much you've fed your pet the past week. So if you've fed your pet five gametime
days out of the past week, it will only account for the remaining three gametime days in determining its expense.
These expenses will come off of the master's bank account. Failure to pay them means the pet isn't fed, and takes a major blow to its health and loyalty.

Important Note:

Whoever buys the pet will become its master automatically. There's no way to 'transfer' ownership of a pet. A pet may sometimes treat people that its on good enough terms with as another master when its real master is not around.