Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I know it’s a known issue and maybe it’s relativly minor compared to other bugs, but for rangers it is very annoying, that the names you give your pets do not save. Therefore, PLEASE, Arenanet, find some time to solve this known bug!

The Problem
The names you give the pets you have currently equipped stick, but as soon as you change your selection in the pet management window all names you gave your pets are deleted.

Allmost every time if you charm a new pet, it gets the name of your currently equipped pet. You need to delete that (wrong) name and give the new pet the name it is supposed to have. Due to that all pet names get messed up or deleted and you need to rename everyone.

This is very annoying since you need to rename your pets every time you change your selection or charm a new pet. I’m quite sure that’s not it is supposed to be since it doesn’t make sense at all. If you can name your pets, the name should stick.

My character is a level 12 human (noble) ranger with the juvenile jungle stalker as a starter pet.
Server: Dzagonur (DE)
Areas where I encountered the problem: Queensdale, Divinity’s Reach, Lions Arche (I have not visited other areas so far).
I’ve about 4 or 5 pets so far, mostly what you can charm in Queensdale (and one water pet from Lions Arch).

PLEASE, Arenanet: Find some little time once in a while to fix this very annoying little problem. You’ll make all rangers in Guild Wars 2 very happy people!

Thank you!

I’m not sure this is a ‘bug’, so much as a design decision. Pretty sure the Devs said it would be a Feature (to save every name) they might consider adding one day, but not a bug.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I’m not sure this is a ‘bug’, so much as a design decision. Pretty sure the Devs said it would be a Feature (to save every name) they might consider adding one day, but not a bug.

Yes, I know. But for me (and, I’m sure, other rangers) it feels like a bug, since if its a feature, it does not make sense at all. So I’m hoping to get these annoying feature changed one day by reporting it as the bug it feels like….

And especially that the names get messed up/mixed up if you charm a new pet is certainly not a feature, but a kind of wrong programming or whatever. Or at least it looks like. Or is every pet supposed to have the same name?

I main a Ranger, and always have. Regardless, it isn’t a bug, so won’t be seen by the pertinent Devs. It is more of a suggestion. It may be implemented one day, and that would be nice. I doubt it’s near the top of the list, though.

This is the main reason I don’t change my pets from the selected 2 that I’ve named. a llittle fustrating that the names aren’t remembered (unless I write them out in a list of who’s who). It’s not a blow to ruin my day, just annoying if I wanted to swtich out pets for a change.

So we’re calling unfinished content ‘design decisions’ now? Funny, because to me, it’s still a bug.

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 too much data space to store all the pet names.

From that thread: source
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 —

TL:DR
Not a bug. They know about it but it’s low on the list of things they may change.

Thanks, Astral. Great retrieval of Dev responses!

Lol pet system in this game is so poorly implemented I don’t really care about pets not remembering their names. Actually I do, a lot, but seriously pets are like consumables, no connection with the character, no immersion, nothing.

Come on you guys, lol!

This isn’t a bug? It’s intended? Why allow us to enter a pet name then?!

This isn’t even a hard process to fix. Other players don’t even need to see the silly names. Just save them locally for crying out loud! The whole class is at the bottom of ANet’s totem pole, not just this problem.

It’s not a bug. It’s intended— a badly designed and neglected feature, not unlike a lot of ranger things.

Well, I’m afraid this intention isn’t satisfactory enough.

aikatara—Juvenile jungle stalker is an amphibious pet. Try equipping the same as your underwater pet too. The name should stick, even if you change out your terrestrial pet. I’m not at home so I can’t double check, and yeah, it’s a crappy workaround, but give it a try.

P.S. you might need to have the pets in the equivalent slot, so jungle stalker in slot 1 both on land and underwater, for instance. The underwater one should also have the name you want. Checked, no need.

ArchonWing.9480:

It’s not a bug. It’s intended— a badly designed and neglected feature, not unlike a lot of ranger things.

I wouldn’t say it’s intended. I’d say it’s more a quick band-aid they applied early in development with the intent to Do It Right later, but never got around to doing. Yes the band-aid was intended. But losing pet names most definitely wasn’t intended. If they hadn’t intended for pets to keep their names, they never would’ve given players the ability to name their pets in the first place.

Anyhow, it doesn’t affect gameplay or balance, so it’s pretty close to the bottom of their priority list. Other games I’ve played (including GW1) assign one person (usually a new employee) to complete these low-priority tasks – usually as a way for them to learn the codebase without messing with anything critical. But apparently that’s not happening with GW2.

It seems really straightforward technically. The names can be stored on local files. When you log on, and whenever you select a new pet, the client would send the name(s) to the server where they would be validated and then stored in the database. No more server side storage than now. Not much extra processing compared to now. It doesn’t matter if the local file is broken since the data gets validated before use. Easy obvious solution. If that would only work for PvE then it should be done just for PvE.

IMHO there is no excuse for not having pet names stored. Almost every new ranger player expects permanent names and is disappointed they are not there.

I have no issue with an extra file on my computer storing the names of my pets that the server can then access as needed when I’m actually playing my Ranger. This sounds to me like ANet is just being lazy. There are so many easy ways to fix this that don’t involve saving every person’s pet names on a central server. They just can’t be kitten d to do it.

Yes they should keep the pet names tied to slots. So if you replace your brown bear with black bear it’s still called Tanky McSnuggles or whatever. Way better than the current system.
A way to bypass this partially is to name your underwater pets if you use amphibious types.

Annoying… I have wished for this since day one. If i was to add all time i have spent re-naming pats by now (I main ranger) i’ve probably spent some unnecesayr long time doing just that, renaming, renaming again, and some more renaming, oh and dont forget to rename that one again. Please fix this already or remove it altogether!

I remember when I finished playing Pokemon on my ranger (Caught all the pets), I went through the entire list of pets without knowing that names didn’t stick and renamed every single one. Not even special names for the most part, I just took off ‘Juvenile’ cause I didn’t like seeing it. Was rather miffed when I finished, then put on the pets I wanted to run with and it was still there. Now I just never change my pets, so I can not worry about their names not saving.