I saw folks bringing up the issue of how having a lot of pets can cause lag for areas of the site, like training, loading the pets page, etc., due to the amount of queries being sent to the servers to load that info.

What if there was an option to group pets into different roles to limit the number of queries being sent? For example, battlers could group pets into a "warriors" category, pets who are relevant for collections (such as treasure chests, readers, or gourmets) could be in another category, and there could a category for "showoff" pets who are just there to look pretty, or who the owner considers "finished."

I'm more or less envisioning a checkbox system with a radio button for the "showoff" pets who otherwise aren't trained or used for collections. That way, a pet who is a warrior and a reader (which is probably a pretty common setup given the influence of intelligence on battling) could be in multiple categories. Categories could obviously be shifted and changed around, so there's no need to worry about changing your mind later. In my case, this would be helpful to avoid putting items in the wrong treasure chest, feeding food to the wrong pet, etc., since I prefer to focus on 1 or 2 pets at a time when planning and developing their profiles.

When a user goes to train their pets or selects an item in their inventory, in the back-end, the site would first check to see what category pets fall into. After confirming which pets are relevant to the site feature, only then will the system create a query for hunger, intelligence, stats, etc. Hopefully the more targeted queries creates less of a load on the system. I'm also not a programmer, so I'm not sure how feasible this is or whether it would make that much of a difference.

Potential issues I can see arising:

• It'd rely on users to be proactive about what pets go into certain categories. Otherwise, the site would be sending yet another type of query to the servers when pulling info.
• Admittedly this is very fiddly because of the degree of overlap between pet hunger/intelligence and battling, so the majority of "warriors" are likely going to be in the same category as gourmets and readers anyway. The biggest impact this could have is on training/battling pages, however.
• I have NO clue what sort of fun and unique bugs could result from something like this lol
• It might be more of a bandaid solution, since fundamentally the site's programming is notoriously noodle-y, and it might not be worth the extra time and effort.

Still, wanted to put this out there--if anything, maybe it's something that could be pondered as Kumos continues its development!

The only issue I would personally have - idk about anyone else - is that most of my pets don't have a category. They're not battlers or gourmands or readers or showoffs or anything, really. I have those pets because I loved a pet color, and could think of a TC theme and character for them, and....that's it. I may read to them and train them a bit in order to advance them in a job (that I picked because it matched their character), but they're not a dedicated reader or battler.

So unless there's a miscellaneous or "none of the above" category (which...what would be the point lol), I couldn't really make use of this.

I like the concept, though.

Yep, there would be a category for pets who won't ever be called up for battling/training/etc. - the majority of my pets would fit into that category, at least at some stages, depending on whose profiles I'm focusing on!

This may be useful for some people but all 60+ of my pets are battlers. Only 5 are just under the cap and even then I want to see them on the training page to I know they stay under the cap. Being uncapped means they can still get intelligence from the Job Agency and experience from battling in case I every want to leach and re-stat them. If they changed those things maybe I could use this. As it is even my pets that seem done would lose out.

This is a creative idea and I like how you're thinking! Keith discussed a concept he's working on for Kumos to resolve the issue without limiting pets. Essentially users will have "active" and "inactive" pets and the site will pull the list of active pets, not all pets. If I'm understanding correctly it sounds like all of a users pets will be in their "home" (like our current user pet page) but users will be able to select pets to be "active" and those pets will show up on drop downs onsite such as reading, training, etc. I believe the active limit was proposed at 100 per user (a more modern and streamlined code makes this possible) but total pet number won't be limited and you can certainly have less than the 100 active!

I could see how your idea of being able to group / list pets in a certain way could enhance this concept further when it comes to user ease, but I'm not sure what that looks like coding-wise. I do agree with the others that I personally wouldn't use the feature much or at all because I do the same things with all my pets (and have 1 "battle" pet) but I could see it being helpful for users who do have different goals or activities for different pets. Maybe just being able to organize our inactive pets into groups within our "home" and we can label the groups ourselves..?