I pet battle PvP’ed for a while. I think I’ve won a little over 170 level 25 battles. With a ridiculously horrible win-loss ratio. I gave up pretty much a year ago. I think the PvP system is basically completely broken. I really would LOVE to PvP more, given the right conditions, and I believe there are a LOT of potential pet fanatics out there who either got discouraged early on, or won’t try because they know the system is broken. I give you the popularity of Hearthstone – and confess that most of my points below are stolen almost directly from that system.

1. 1. There HAS to be a ranking system for random battles. One level 3 pet is not like just any old level 3 pet. Most of the newer and rarer pets are FAR stronger than for example the mouse found in Silvermoon city.  When you are just starting out, or dabbling, or seeing what all the fuss is about, it’s almost impossible to win against some more seasoned teams. Even when you are a serious (obsessive) collector, and a pro at figuring out strategies for beating tamers and achievements, the PvP scene is completely different. It’s hard to compete, for example, against a team of undead cats, when Hallows End has been active for 2 days, and someone already got all the pets while you’ve been doing, well, other stuff. I believe the solution to this HAS to be a ranking system. JUST COPY IT FROM HEARTHSTONE – you must win a certain number of battles in a rank – say at levels 1-5, 6-10, 10-15, 15-19, 20-24, and finally 25. So, brackets with ranks.
2. There are so so so so so many pets. A serious collector has well over 600 unique pets. I believe for PvP purposes, there should be a limit to how many can be active a certain week (or other time period). Kind of like a mixture between Hearthstone and Garrison Followers. In HS you have a limited amount of cards in a deck. I get that that’s sort of similar to a team of 3, but work with me. Like the follower system, you could nominate 20 pets to your PvP roster. You can swap out one or two a day for … pet tokens? gold? something like that. This would make it far more interesting, I think.
3. Limit the amount of identical pets on a team to 2. And make them vary in at least one of their abilities.

Easy peasy. And a lot more fun!