There have been numerous updates recently designed to improve the FTUE, most of which I think have been very successful. After these updates released, some friends of mine joined the game and I joined them to get a better perspective on this updated FTUE. The early quest to give players a teen pet, the addition of 4 pet xp per quest completed, the greatly reduced pet hatching costs with younger pets as well as the ability to instantly hatch an egg have all been great. All of these changes make pet hatching much more approachable by newer players.
However, I still think the pet hatching system has some problems that make it really difficult for newer players.
Pedigree is essentially a useless system that just misleads newer players. Currently pedigree is the sum of the rarity of the talents the pet has, and higher pedigree makes a pet more expensive to hatch with. This implies that higher "rarity" talents are also better. In most cases I would say the opposite is true. Additionally, the term "rarity" naturally implies that the rarer the talent, the harder they are to obtain, which to my knowledge is also not true.
Adult pets are much cheaper to hatch with, and therefore ideal for newer players to hatch with in order to save money (especially because it's probably all they can afford). But there is currently no way to find those adult pets easier. I suggested to my friend who was a life wizard to hatch with a kookaburra in order to get the leafstorm spell. Kookaburra is a very common pet, so he had to click through all the older kookaburra's for about a half hour before he even found pets he could afford to hatch with. I think this is not only very unintuitive for newer players, but unnecessarily time consuming and tedious. Giving players an option to sort by age would make this task much more reasonable to do.
As a followup to the previous point, most players won't even know to look for an adult pet to hatch with. A quest that actually explains how to hatch and what to look for would be very beneficial for newer players. Explaining what talent rarity is, but also mentioning that rarer talents aren't necessarily better; explaining how the hatching cost is calculated as well as the benefits of hatching in person; explaining different options for what to look for in pets; etc.
In conclusion, the FTUE for pet hatching specifically is significantly better than it was in the past, but it still has a lot of room for improvement. Pet hatching should be easy to begin, but very hard to master - the latter is true, but the former is not quite there yet.
