Guild Wars 2

I know you guys at Arenanet have stated you want to work on combat log improvements in the future.

In the meantime why can’t we have a way of exporting or saving the combat log to a file? This would mean that we could then parse this information ourselves and get lots of great statistics like DPS, Damage taken per second etc.

As a programmer I know that this is very trivial to add. When teaching someone to code for the first time their 2nd or 3rd program is usually to write data to a file so I know the amazing code wizards at Arenanet should be able to cook something up in a few minutes.

As the game is at the moment it is very hard to min/max a build, you can try and time how long it takes you to kill a certain champion mob but due to crits etc this is not always accurate. Just adding this simple save to file option would open up a lot of further possibilities when it comes to creating and testing new builds.

I’d wish to be able to export chat logs. (This would, indeed, include combat logs, since “combat” is just one of the chat channels)

So yeah, I think this is a good idea (just give the option to add other chat channels too.)
And having dabbled with coding myself, I agree with HTF on this being rather easy to implement.

This is one of the few things I would agree with being easy. There shouldn’t be any way for chat to be printed to the screen that can’t also be set up to be printed to a file at the same time.

Also yes, ALL chat channels, not just combat. To make it more complicated I’d love to be able to set up a separate log per chat tab.

Some people have issues with exporting general chat logs, they feel it can be a breach of privacy etc. That is why in the OP I limited it to just the combat log.

HTF.7602:

Some people have issues with exporting general chat logs, they feel it can be a breach of privacy etc. That is why in the OP I limited it to just the combat log.

I say too bad for them. I can take a screen shot of what they said to the same effect, it’s just not as efficiant. The fact that they said whatever it was is a breach of privacy. If they wanted it to be private they shouldn’t have told someone. They could concider it a breach of confidentiality, but that is only reasonable if the person in question gives the information to someone else, which they can do with or without a log.

So again, too bad for them. They’re not rational to begin with and as such their opinion on the matter is not to be heeded.

I agree with you Kal but others will not. Plenty of other mediums have chat logging too and as you say you must treat anything you say in a game like this as open to public view. Even though this is the case some people do not and it may effect the decisions made during game development. There is a partial solution (the one I suggested) that is fine for both viewpoints anyway so hopefully we can get at least that.

Well, I think that majority of people who want to have logs exported from the game would also want the chat logs.

And honestly, I can not imagine who would be offended from the logs being exported. (Except for some moody drunkard maybe?) since there is really no basis for that.
You said it, everyone heard it. So what if someone has plain text version where everyone else had screenshots?
Only that with plain text version you can always say “Oh, that is forged, I never said that” (which imho is better) where as screenshots are more difficult to temper with (due to the chat background not being uniform in color)
I mean, if someone posts a screenshot of you saying something funny (but idiotic) on reddit, it’s easier to believe. If someone posts a plain text version, you can easily deny ever saying that.
So even for those concerned of their privacy, plain text version should be more preferrable than screenshots.