I was just doing a trade and decided “Hey I'll just play with them before sending them off!” But completely forgot, that this would lock the companion in and prevent me for trading for an entire hour.

If the point for the lock is so you don't cycle through companions for loot, which is the only reason I can think of, can I suggest instead of locking the companion in, locking the companion out making it so you can't add another companion until the cooldown is finished.

I do not want to get into whether there should be any lock between swapping companions at all and the like here, if you have any suggestions about this, I ask you make your own thread and not discuss it here.

I definitely like the idea of locking out rather than in. I don’t play with my companions specifically so that I can switch them around for my convenience with hunting (though I know I lose a lot of EXP and items while doing so).

Please do the lock out rather than in. I traded some KS companions after I played with them and had to wait 12 hours for them to be ready to go. It was pretty inconvenient!

It think this is just a logistical issue. Companions on LW work a bit differently. Each one is its own entity with its own level and you can equip multiples. The timers are the trade off for this.

In Beta and EA they actually did try a couple ways that wouldn't lock the companion to the wolf. One of them being, applying the cooldown to the wolf and allowing the companion to be taken off, as is being suggested here. This didn't last more than an hour because it was quickly realized that this method allowed users to take a companion and attach it to a wolf, play with it, then remove and attach to a different wolf, and repeat. Allowing for people to farm rewards, especially from rarer and higher lvl companions. So the change was reverted.

At this point, I'm not sure there's a way to make it work. The only one I can see is if the timer is attached to each individual companion even as they are in the inventory, but if that's the case how would the site keep track of all that?

@vihuff Thank you for bringing this up, I didn't know this

Though, while Flight Rising has a bond once a day rollover system, it still keeps track of which ones have been bonded and have not no matter how many times you move it around. Flight Rising and Lorwolf are obviously different games, and just because something that may be viable there doesn't mean it's viable here. I'm just mentioning it, because it the fact that there's no problems there indicates that it's probably not entirely impossible, but I wouldn't know.

Another solution then, this would be toggleable, and toggled to the current system by default. you can toggle between the system it has now, where it locks the companion to your wolf.

Or you can toggle to another system, where when you bond with a companion, it doesn't let you add or change a companion to any wolf until the cooldown is up, and this would jump to highest cooldown. It could only be toggled if there are no companions on cooldown.

Wouldn't it make more sense to lock the cooldown to the companion? Like, say I play with my Kuzma and then decide to put it on another wolf. This would allow me to, but I would still be unable to play with that Kuzma again until the timer was up (I can see how this could become a real snarl on the back-end if you had multiple of the same companion, though; maybe as a workaround, the game keeps track of how many companions out of a stack are on cooldown and then assumes that once they all have a cooldown, if any came out of the stack with a cooldown it would be the same as the companion with the highest cooldown? I don't know if that makes sense, and I can also see it leading to bug reports, but it's a way to do things differently)