Guild Wars 2

Please, some of us with Rangers actually put a LOT of thought and creativity into selecting names for our pets, and almost ALL of us use more than two pets every day.

Why can’t the game “remember” our pet names?

Even worse, when I swap out one pet for another into one of my two “ready” pet slots, why does the game think my newly-selected pet has the same name as the pet I just removed from that slot? It’s infuriating, but hilarious- I swap out (for example) my pig (Boar) named Porky for a Spider… named Porky? What sense does “Porky” make when applied to a spider? I swap out my Dog named Scooby for a Drake… and the Drake is named Scooby? Really?

Please, guys, this isn’t rocket science. Give us a game that remembers the names of ALL of our pets, not just the most recent two, and ties each name to the PET, not to the last SLOT it was in.

Thanks-

Let me say that, while not a ranger, I support this to be fixed, though it may not be for programming-related reasons (i.e. you’d have to keep a table of all the pets + names, as opposed to just per slot)

But more importantly, you say:

Please, some of us with Rangers actually put a LOT of thought and creativity into selecting names for our pets ….

but then:

…my pig (Boar) named Porky … my Dog named Scooby

That’s not what I’d call “a LOT of thought and creativity”. :P

ZenonSeth.5739:

But more importantly, you say:

Please, some of us with Rangers actually put a LOT of thought and creativity into selecting names for our pets ….

but then:

…my pig (Boar) named Porky … my Dog named Scooby

That’s not what I’d call “a LOT of thought and creativity”. :P

LOL. For your information, I don’t actually use Porky or Scooby- although I do use Snidely Whiplash. I deliberately used names in my post that would make it more obvious how inappropriate (for example) a spider named Porky and/or a drake named Scooby are.

Nobody would “get” Lycosidae, one of the names I really use…

…although, I must admit, if I had a black duck for a pet his name would most assuredly be Daffy….

:)

I support this.

This has been brought up before on several threads. On one of them at least, the answer was given that they decided it would take up to much data space to store all the pet names.

From that thread:

MokahTGS.7850:
This is actually not a bug, it is working as intended. It is not optimal, but to save the names of all of your pets (read: all of everyone’s pets) would require another large name database that ANet did not create. Currently the pet name feature saves the name in the slot, not the pet, so changing out the pet type resets the slot name.
Perhaps someday they will change this, but it is not a bug.

Jason King
Live Response Embed
This is pretty much exactly what’s going on.
Tl;dr: we may change this some day, but it’s not going to happen in the near future, and it’s not a bug.
ArenaNet Community Team
— Live Response Embed —

This is nothing more than short sightedness on their end.

First of all, the pet names can be stored client side as a pet name table. They then make use of the name associated to the pet slot like they do now. When you assign a new pet to that slot, the name would be changed automatically. This would save them space as the names are using the clients hard drive instead.

Second is the size of the table itself. I figured that they would need a unique ID code and I went with a random ten digit number. Then they would need a name to go with that identifier. I went with my fern hound’s name of “Nightshade”. I made use of 10 columns and 54 rows which would be 270 pets (far more than what you can have). I over did it on purpose to compensate for info that I could possibly have missed, like a unique ID code for the player character to tie in the pets with your character. 21kb was what it came to. If we assume that 10 million rangers exist and are saved (again, an excessive number) then that ends up being roughly 200GB of information. I can buy a 500gb hd for $50.

Well, I didn’t say I agreed, just that that was their answer. :-) I know in Guild Wars 1 we saved builds on our computers. I had numerous builds saved and I’m sure I wasn’t an exception. I agree, I don’t know why they can’t do the same with pet names. Maybe some quirk in the programming for this game? They did make some odd design choices on a number of subjects.

Astral Projections.7320:

This has been brought up before on several threads. On one of them at least, the answer was given that they decided it would take up to much data space to store all the pet names.

From that thread:

MokahTGS.7850:
This is actually not a bug, it is working as intended. It is not optimal, but to save the names of all of your pets (read: all of everyone’s pets) would require another large name database that ANet did not create. Currently the pet name feature saves the name in the slot, not the pet, so changing out the pet type resets the slot name.
Perhaps someday they will change this, but it is not a bug.

Jason King
Live Response Embed
This is pretty much exactly what’s going on.
Tl;dr: we may change this some day, but it’s not going to happen in the near future, and it’s not a bug.
ArenaNet Community Team
— Live Response Embed —

Wow.

This has been asked for since day 1—but it’s a no go.

Astral Projections.7320:

This has been brought up before on several threads. On one of them at least, the answer was given that they decided it would take up to much data space to store all the pet names.

From that thread:

MokahTGS.7850:
This is actually not a bug, it is working as intended. It is not optimal, but to save the names of all of your pets (read: all of everyone’s pets) would require another large name database that ANet did not create. Currently the pet name feature saves the name in the slot, not the pet, so changing out the pet type resets the slot name.
Perhaps someday they will change this, but it is not a bug.

Jason King
Live Response Embed
This is pretty much exactly what’s going on.
Tl;dr: we may change this some day, but it’s not going to happen in the near future, and it’s not a bug.
ArenaNet Community Team
— Live Response Embed —

They don’t need another large name database for it to work. They can use a Client-side data base for this relativity easily.

Create a small Database in the Client Files to store user Pet names… this of course would mean renaming your pets if you change computers or reinstall though.

When a ranger changes their slotted pets the client should either detect the change or receive data from the server about the change (no new information would be sent from the server, this information should already be present in the programming). That data would be utilized to trigger a client-side database query for pet names, once the proper pet name is located that data is sent to the server to replace the stored pet name data for that character.

Either a use a Client Side Pet Name Database Table or make the Pet Slot Names Persistant, i.e. changing to another pet type does not change the name back to “Juvenile <Insert Pet type Here>”.

While not Ideal, Programmatically the latter suggestion is very easy to implement.

Bashing our heads against the wall for this option is getting a bit tedious. You’d think presumably easy fixes such as this would get fulfilled fairly quickly, especially given the frequency of complaints about it. C’mon anet, just friggin implement a client side database already.