Guild Wars 2

To the programmer who was bug fixing the Ranger for the feature patch

Did you by chance fix the pet name reset bug while you were in there?

Also thanks for working kitten pet responsiveness, can’t wait to test it

I think the last official response (over a year ago) was that it would be too memory intensive. I’m quoting someone that quoted the dev so this is a game of telephone, but as much as that doesn’t make sense to me I think that’s the reasoning. Sucks unfortunately.

On a side note, when an expansion finally comes out for this game, I would like to see pets grow older past “juvenile” and maybe get bigger as a result. I want my wolf to be as big as Eir’s wolf, Garm.

Because surely, if I’m to become an adventurer that slays dragons, my pet must be fearsome as well.

The stupid thing with that response is that they could just make a text file on the client’s computer that stores names for the pets. When you change a pet, the file is read and the game automatically changes the name if it is possible. I’ts so bullet-proof that it isn’t even possible to abuse it.

That’s not really bulletproof. In Ultima Online, someone figured out that typing a specific character in chat in a certain foreign language would crash the game on anyone’s computer that didn’t have that language installed. So roving bands of PKers would run around spamming that and crashing people so they could pick up cheap kills.

Allowing the game to read arbitrary data from a text file is almost like opening a website to a SQL-injection attack. Yes you can allow it and still prevent exploits if you’re very careful about how you implement it. But the risk if you get it wrong is so great you’re better off just not doing it in the first place.

Somehow other MMOs I’ve played did not have that issue from day 1 till present day.
If they can’t deal with this problem, how can we even expect anything from them?
Hire back GW1 devs.

I was there when the dev. officially responded to this. He said the names were stored server side and it would take almost an entire server on its own to store every single characters’ pets’ names. They didn’t comment any further on it after that.

^^ Okay fair enough that is a total waste…. But how comes I could save my pet’s name in GW1 then? Is it because the game just recognizes my GW2 pet as a normal mob while GW1 pets were programmed as seperate entities compared to mob AI? If so why didn’t they just do the exact same thing for GW2 pets? GW1 pets worked pretty well.

I think we should select 2+2 pet and use those everywhere. As one build both for PVE and WWW. It works for me, except the fact its underpowered compared to nearly anything. Only reason I don’t just die like “Casual Bob” is the way I can handle my char.
And in a fact, proper working and adjustable pet stats are more important…

So the lack of pet name save isn’t even on my problem list, we have WAY MORE SERIOUS ISSUES here.

WatchTheShow.7203:

I was there when the dev. officially responded to this. He said the names were stored server side and it would take almost an entire server on its own to store every single characters’ pets’ names. They didn’t comment any further on it after that.

Everyone knows that line was utter BS

Say Worse case scenario:
20 exotic UTF-8 characters per name
40 pets per ranger
5 rangers per account
10 million players
That’s 80GB

More realistically
10 common UTF-8 characters per name
5 pets per ranger
1 ranger per account
1 million players
That’s 50 MB

That won’t even make a dent on a cheap usb flash drive, let alone a server.

If I had to take a guess, it’s because pets aren’t persistent objects. What I mean is that every pet swap seems to create a new pet object. Those pet names aren’t getting put directly into the code for the pet object, meaning that when it would go to use a player created pet name, it would have to have a function the retrieves that petname from elsewhere and then apply it to that new pet object, every time a pet object is created.

I mean, at the end of the day, that’s a lot to be asking for just to be able to do something that is purely cosmetic.

Why Guild Wars 1 could store pet names? Probably because only one pet object was created per instance (per player using a pet, obviously), and the game was instanced, and coded differently than Guild Wars 2 really. Even if the names were stored server side in Guild Wars 1, it would take a lot less processing to only have to have the pet object call and get a player created name once per instance than in a persistent world where the pets can be swapped between 2 “active” pets and have the active species changed whenever you feel like it out of battle.

Obviously that’s all just speculation and assumptions. It’s my theory though.

WatchTheShow.7203:

I was there when the dev. officially responded to this. He said the names were stored server side and it would take almost an entire server on its own to store every single characters’ pets’ names. They didn’t comment any further on it after that.

Wow, that’s a load of bull. I’m sorry, but storing millions of names doesn’t take a full server. Yes, it takes up some storage. This is from a quick search:
http://www.wisegeek.org/how-much-text-is-in-a-kilobyte-or-megabyte.htm

One gig is 500,000 pages of text.

I’d love to actually read that quote from a developer just to be able to soundly refute such nonsense. Names of the pets vanishing is an oversight by the developers. It is FAR from an impossible fix. Yes, it takes data. Lets say that they expand GW2 to allow for 100 pets per person. Lets say that they plan for 10 million players. That would eat up around 25-30 gigs in a database depending on the overhead of the database. The actual name data (with 20 characters) should be 20gigs.

If you expand and allow for a full character set though, that could be doubled. But lets go crazy. Lets say that 100gigs on the server for potential pet names.

However the best suggestion I’ve seen is store the pet names on the player’s computer. Do a check for formatting each time they are uploaded to the game again (to ensure compliance) and let the players store all that. And even let them change the pet names offline. Yes, when a pet is swapped, the name will have to be approved each time, but that could be spun off on a low priority process and the name could just take a little while to update. Since you can’t change pets in combat anyway, it isn’t a huge thing if it takes a couple seconds for the new name to register when choosing a new pet.

Reyck.4508:

WatchTheShow.7203:

I was there when the dev. officially responded to this. He said the names were stored server side and it would take almost an entire server on its own to store every single characters’ pets’ names. They didn’t comment any further on it after that.

Wow, that’s a load of bull. I’m sorry, but storing millions of names doesn’t take a full server. Yes, it takes up some storage. This is from a quick search:
http://www.wisegeek.org/how-much-text-is-in-a-kilobyte-or-megabyte.htm

One gig is 500,000 pages of text.

I’d love to actually read that quote from a developer just to be able to soundly refute such nonsense. Names of the pets vanishing is an oversight by the developers. It is FAR from an impossible fix. Yes, it takes data. Lets say that they expand GW2 to allow for 100 pets per person. Lets say that they plan for 10 million players. That would eat up around 25-30 gigs in a database depending on the overhead of the database. The actual name data (with 20 characters) should be 20gigs.

If you expand and allow for a full character set though, that could be doubled. But lets go crazy. Lets say that 100gigs on the server for potential pet names.

However the best suggestion I’ve seen is store the pet names on the player’s computer. Do a check for formatting each time they are uploaded to the game again (to ensure compliance) and let the players store all that. And even let them change the pet names offline. Yes, when a pet is swapped, the name will have to be approved each time, but that could be spun off on a low priority process and the name could just take a little while to update. Since you can’t change pets in combat anyway, it isn’t a huge thing if it takes a couple seconds for the new name to register when choosing a new pet.

That isn’t what the devs said exactly, he was paraphrasing. The devs said it would take an entire server for the amount of functions it would take for all of the ranger players calling their pets with unique pet names and storing them.

I wish I had the exact quote, but the thread is buried deep in the ranger forums at this point. Paraphrasing, the devs said that you would have to communicate with the server and have the server communicate back with you, and this would have to happen almost instantly on a players screen for the player to happen, and that then you have to think of every single ranger player trying to communicate with the server at once and execute the function the gets the name at once.

In short, it has next to nothing to do with actual storage space.

So saving some Pet name is a challange, but I can store hundreds of contacts in my friend list? Really?

Solandri.9640:

Allowing the game to read arbitrary data from a text file is almost like opening a website to a SQL-injection attack. Yes you can allow it and still prevent exploits if you’re very careful about how you implement it. But the risk if you get it wrong is so great you’re better off just not doing it in the first place.

That is just full of crap.
If you have a text file and read it as a text file, then you make space for a string or array of characters.

There was no reason for you to say “NO THAT WON’T WORK” and the ultimate example is not even close to this. Anet obviously have their encryption algorithm so you could obviously have figured out they would be able to use it.