I had my using the experiment and calculate emotes earlier, I put them on passive first, since that stops them from cycling their force fields, and used /petsayall <em none> then did the emote I wanted them to do and it was working fine.
though I rarely play my masterminds, haven't played around with emotes ever on my necro mastermind so I don't know if it was just specific pets that were having issues or if it was MM pets across the board.
Are you using a bind or manually typing them in?
A change went into effect a few patches ago that won't allow clients to send <> tags through binds, they have to be sent through the chat pane. You can use a beginchat bind to make it so you can juts hit enter and send, but you can't use a bind to automatically send them.
there ya go, thank you both. I was using binds (master of any and all binds here, lol) so that's why they weren't working... perhaps we could brainstorm a new way for pets to do their emotes in a bind? Perhaps change it so to do a pet emote, you type the following...
/petsayall (em victory)The mastermind we work for has a decent idea... Hooray!
parentheses could make a good substitution, or even brackets [] or... whatever these are, lol {}, could work. One of the main reasons I played my mastermind up to 50 and took him around afterward were the pet binds involving emotes. Since they broke the commands though, my mastermind has been collecting dust in sorrow with pets who no longer have personality (yes, my zombies had it :P).
I'm not saying I want a petition or anything, but I am proposing a fix for the pet emotes so I can once again bring life to the undead. A simple change in the icons used in the pet emotes commands would do wonders... lest of course the change to chat was made due to MM pet emotes being some sort of exploit, if that's the case, then I fully understand. But I couldn't think of a possible thing having a zombie eat a donut by pressing the "P" key could be damaging...
The problem is, <> tags are specifically checked by the game, and there were some cases where people could crash other people's clients by sending certain <> tags through a bind system.
While it may be possible for them to change the tags for pet emotes, and only the pet emotes, so that the other tags still couldn't be used in the binding, it would require somewhat considerable time and effort for a change that is extremely far from game-breaking, and thus, sadly very low priority.
Couldn't hurt to bring it up in the suggestion forums though! 
I just logged on to my necro/dark mastermind and even though it mentions in the patch notes that they should be able to, my pets still do nothing when I try to use pet emote commands other then say "<em (whatever emote I'm trying)>" in the pet channel.
Did they change the commands to do pet emotes and not place them in the patch notes? If so, can someone link me to where I can find the changes or new commands?
Thank you in advance to anyone who can actually answer this. I'm sure other mastermind players who have had the same trouble would like to know as well.