Guild Wars 2

9/10 rangers I see running around the world don’t seem to care to rename their pets. Most of the time I see “Juvenile Brown Bear”. Often times I see entire groups of rangers exactly like this running around and scratch my head.
While this may be nitpicking doesn’t it seem rather silly that you have the ability to give your pet a cool/funny name but don’t.
As a necro I would kill to be able to give each of my minions names, what gives rangers?

Because the names keep reverting to the original and it gets tiresome renaming every time it reverts. This bug has been from the start and they still haven’t fixed it.

Welcome to the Ranger forums, necro. You may not have heard, but we’re a profession with a plethora of bugs. One of those bugs is our pets reverting to the “Juvenile” default name whenever we switch our pet slots to another pet.

After the 1000th time doing this, most rangers just give up.

Thanks, ArenaNet! <big 1950’s smile!>

This is a combination of data issue decision on Anet’s part and a bug.

The numbers of pets available plus the numbers of rangers equal a lot of storage so the defaulted to only being able to name the current active pet slots (2 land+2 Water). Then the current slot name can be reset to the default when selecting a new pet or taming a new pt.

There’s very little reason to name the buggers. I used to constantly switch out my pets depending on the situation and they always reverted back to ‘juvenile’.

The reverting bug is one reason, the other reason I don’t name pets is if you name one pet and switch to another pet then that pet will have the name you have given the first pet.

I think you ran across a group of botters, by the way.. (the group of rangers with juvenile brown bears)

p.s. I seriously doubt it’s a data storage issue: say you have 50 different pets across 1,000,000 rangers, each with 16 character names. That’s 16 bytes * 1,000,000 * 50 = 800,000,000 bytes, or 781,250 kb, or 763 MB of data.

Which is trifling compared to the data required for other attributes – and in terms of disk space I can only imagine what the servers have to cope with to populate the world with players and NPCs.

well, i agree that there is a “problem” with the pet names saving. but i REFUSE to call it a “bug”. bugs are when things don’t work as intended. in this case, they did not put the feature to save the name into the code. therefore, there is no code to be bugged.

the name saving feature is not “bugged”; it simply doesn’t exist…

@capnflummox:
I agree with you that saving names for each individual pet might not be a bug but the game does save petnames. If the game wouldn’t save petnames then we wouldn’t be able to rename pets and petnames would revert immediately to it’s original name the moment you press “Accept” when trying to rename a pet.

I still name all my pets every time xp I love my pets. But this bug sucks. Also make sure they aren’t bots of course. Lol entire groups sounds like bots to me

Because the name isn’t remembered. It’s insane that the game will remember the location that I charmed my pet but it won’t remember the name I gave it. I get incredibly annoyed by having to rename my pets every time I switch them in, to the point that I either don’t swap them out despite having content which really benefits from a different pet, or I simply don’t change their names.

It’s also annoying that I have to have the pet active to name it, especially with the new cooldown when swapping pets out of combat (an incredibly lazy fix that hurts more players than there were exploiting the problem it fixes).

Qaletaqa Hania.2598:

@capnflummox:
I agree with you that saving names for each individual pet might not be a bug but the game does save petnames. If the game wouldn’t save petnames then we wouldn’t be able to rename pets and petnames would revert immediately to it’s original name the moment you press “Accept” when trying to rename a pet.

… your semantics on the word “save” are sketchy. What is in place now is nothing more than a “clipboard” form of saving the name. When you swap a pet, the name goes away.

There is no save feature for the pet names.

capnflummox.3082:

… your semantics on the word “save” are sketchy. What is in place now is nothing more than a “clipboard” form of saving the name. When you swap a pet, the name goes away.

There is no save feature for the pet names.

A “soft save” is still a save. If there is a “hard save” feature then it’s bugged.

“A “soft save” is still a save. If there is a “hard save” feature then it’s bugged.”

There is no hard save feature. It isn’t a bug. The “soft save” is for the slot of the pet. Not the pet itself. Essentially, you are naming the slot. There is no save for pet names.

Knock off the bullcrap.

I feel it’s somthing the devs could very easily fix or add if wanted. It just another small annoyance—but those small annoyances are adding up.

^ exactly. There’s a lot of things that would be easy fixes. That’s the kind of hint iget from them ie fixing an audio bug with darth vader pets on traits and then taking it over the top with a sb nerf for no reason… This is one of those small easy fixes why not get it off the list??

when u take pet out of rotation to try new one the name resets so its annoying and players dont give a F about the names

Batlav.6318:

when u take pet out of rotation to try new one the name resets so its annoying and players dont give a F about the names

If players didn’t care this thread wouln’t exist.

Because it takes 40 ms to name then and well..that’s not fun!@

There is an actual name save function thats bugged, it doesn’t just not exist.

I’ve seen pets retain their names after being switched out of the active rotation. Its extremely hit-or-miss, mainly miss, unless you have the same pet in both aquatic and land slots, then switching it out of one will still let it keep its name every time, but it does happen.

And the fact that the name does save between the land / underwater slots is proof that you’re not just “naming the slot”. If you were, you’d need to name the same pet in both the land and underwater slot individually.

As for the issue at large… I still rename my pet every time it reverts. I want my pet to feel like a real pet even if the game isn’t going to make that easy for me.

I usually name mine as i keep a certain type as the others are useless- my water pets are brown bear and shark / land pets are brown bear and what ever the flavour is of the day- usually the wolf or something for its knockdown ability!

I named my brown bear paw as that’s the tank one i use and its very very handy with its condition remove skill- so that’s my main one for water/land

then the shark is Jaws Jnr as its the best dps underwater one by miles!
The wolf I call Woof- plain and simple:)

It’s also a fact that pets with proper names are 25% more efficient because they feel more loved (*)

(* = not a guarantee)

MaxTwelve.4725:

This is a combination of data issue decision on Anet’s part and a bug.

The numbers of pets available plus the numbers of rangers equal a lot of storage so the defaulted to only being able to name the current active pet slots (2 land+2 Water). Then the current slot name can be reset to the default when selecting a new pet or taming a new pt.

There’s zero reason these pet names couldn’t be saved on the user’s PC.

Its a bug, not some “data issue decision”. World of Warcraft has the same amount of pets and they dont have that “data issue decision”.

A lot of people I know do not name the pet, because they do not even want the pet in the first place! xD

Because ANET can’t seem to understand that EVERY TIME you switch pets, the name goes back to “Juvenile Whatever Pet You Use”.

Jaguar – Mr Boots
Snow Leopard – Snowman
Polar Bear – Booboo

becouse i dont feel any connection with my pet

i cant pet, feed him

hes so stupid that cant hit moving target and die alot

of and its pain in the **** when i try to do jumping puzzles

so he dont deserve a name

Because the developers put as little effort into the pet system as they did the actual Ranger. It’s not surprising, look at the state of this profession and what little is being done about it.

“Dead Again” #1 petname.
“Biting Dust” #2 petname.
“Hit the Floor”#3 petname.

I don’t switch pets so often, except when I get a new one and try some build.

Though it would be nice if the pet names would be saved, but everyone knows that there’s serious ones that require attention…

MaxTwelve.4725:

This is a combination of data issue decision on Anet’s part and a bug.

The numbers of pets available plus the numbers of rangers equal a lot of storage so the defaulted to only being able to name the current active pet slots (2 land+2 Water). Then the current slot name can be reset to the default when selecting a new pet or taming a new pt.

Yet this isn’t a viable excuse for Anet. The names could be stored client side and when you switch to a pet in the pet window (k), the players client just submits that new pets name to the server. The server should only need to store the 4 pets you have selected so switching pets using F4 wouldn’t require the client to send the name to the server.

Also storage is cheap. I’m pretty sure I could store the entire database of pet names for all Ranges playing GW2 on my phone’s 64 gigs of space.

I’m going to assume on the HIGH end here…

UTF-8 with 1 bytes/character:
19 characters/pet name = 19 bytes/pet (very hard math here)
44 pets = 836 bytes/Ranger for all pets.

1,048,576 bytes in 1mb
1,254.2 Rangers = 1mb of pet name data.

This doesn’t include extra space used by whatever database Anet uses to store it’s data.

In the end, I personally find the “it would take too much space” excuse to be a very poor one.

capnflummox.3082:

well, i agree that there is a “problem” with the pet names saving. but i REFUSE to call it a “bug”. bugs are when things don’t work as intended. in this case, they did not put the feature to save the name into the code. therefore, there is no code to be bugged.

the name saving feature is not “bugged”; it simply doesn’t exist…

What are you smoking? They gave us the ability to name our pets. Those names are not retained when swapping pets. In some cases those names are copied to other pets.

If I name my black bear Steve and then pull out my Jungle Spider the spider should not be named Steve. But many times it is.

That is a bug.

And don’t even get me started on how my pet randomly runs off and attack mobs…

capnflummox.3082:

Qaletaqa Hania.2598:

@capnflummox:
I agree with you that saving names for each individual pet might not be a bug but the game does save petnames. If the game wouldn’t save petnames then we wouldn’t be able to rename pets and petnames would revert immediately to it’s original name the moment you press “Accept” when trying to rename a pet.

… your semantics on the word “save” are sketchy. What is in place now is nothing more than a “clipboard” form of saving the name. When you swap a pet, the name goes away.

There is no save feature for the pet names.

Then what is the point of allowing us to rename them?

Sundial.9015:

9/10 rangers I see running around the world don’t seem to care to rename their pets. Most of the time I see “Juvenile Brown Bear”. Often times I see entire groups of rangers exactly like this running around and scratch my head.
While this may be nitpicking doesn’t it seem rather silly that you have the ability to give your pet a cool/funny name but don’t.
As a necro I would kill to be able to give each of my minions names, what gives rangers?

You are cute

After having the pets names reverting hundreds of times i gave up too

I don’t understand why there is no option to save a list of pet names in a simple text doc in our GW2 client folder to be easily reloaded should we ever reslot pets. Thats what was done to save skill/attribute/pvpgear templates in GW1.

I don’t name pets in GW2 due to the fact that I have no emotional attachment to them.
There is zero effort needed to tame a pet and there is nothing unique about any of them, as anyone can easily tame any pet with a little bit of exploration.

One of my (few) favorite memories of WoW was running through a higher level enemy zone looking for a specific pet that didn’t spawn in any of my faction’s zones. I spent an hour sneaking through all those enemy areas, trying not to aggro any higher level mobs, or be spotted by players 30 levels higher than me on my way to tame this pet. It was a rush. I used that pet for years because of it. It was cool to use a pet that everyone knew only spawned in enemy territory.

Nothing like that exists in GW2. Here’s what does exist:

1)No sense of uniqueness in pets and no rares
2)No challenge in taming a pet
3)No sense of danger in finding a pet, unless you are running through a MUCH higher zone to do so (the wolf in the Eternal Battlegrounds is the one exception I can think of here, but only when another server owns that area)
4)No need to make decisions on which pets to go for, as you can tame EVERY PET
5)Pets are broken and generally annoy me in GW2.

A day spent running around Sparkfly Fen and all I see is more unamed pets.

Out of the 50 or so “Juvenile Brown Bears” I saw there was one guy who renamed his to “Boo Boo” which was kinda cool I guess.

I really think most rangers just don’t care about their pets enough to put up with the bugs that come with keeping them named, its sad really.

Hostile.4925:

capnflummox.3082:

well, i agree that there is a “problem” with the pet names saving. but i REFUSE to call it a “bug”. bugs are when things don’t work as intended. in this case, they did not put the feature to save the name into the code. therefore, there is no code to be bugged.

the name saving feature is not “bugged”; it simply doesn’t exist…

What are you smoking? They gave us the ability to name our pets. Those names are not retained when swapping pets. In some cases those names are copied to other pets.

If I name my black bear Steve and then pull out my Jungle Spider the spider should not be named Steve. But many times it is.

That is a bug.

And don’t even get me started on how my pet randomly runs off and attack mobs…

You’re clearly and undeniably not paying attention here. My post is painfully obvious in regards to name SAVING. That’s S-A-V-I-N-G…

There is no PET NAME SAVE FEATURE. You are naming the SLOT.

And this isn’t about your pet “randomly runs off and attacks mobs…” This is about the names/saving/lack-of…

I have a raven called Nook and a snow owl called Egg. I refuse to swap them around with others because of the name retention issue. But that’s fine – it’s unrealistic and silly that you’d be able to carry around dozens of young animals anyway, so I only collect them for completion’s sake (or if someone gave me a very good reason to switch to a certain pet for mission).

Pets were the main reason I picked ranger, since the thought of being on my own for stretches of the game was unappetising. I like them a lot, especially their stubbornness when it comes to fighting.

I am “ashamed” and afraid to pull out by bear pet because I might be reported as a bot.
Really, whenever I see two rangers running together I instantly think: “Look, bots again”
I never saw a bot naming his pet so naming your pet might be a good idea against false positive reports

Someone suggested that the name of the pets take too much space
I laughed at first, but given the worst situation, just a pet name in a text file takes 4 KB.
Let’s say there are 1 million Rangers. We have roughly 4 GB for one pet over all player base.
Naming all pets (let’s say 20) will take up to 80 GB.
But then again, I hope Anet is not using plain text files to store the name of the pets

All of you jumping all over capnflummox for pointing out that it is not a bug and trying to argue that it is are simply wrong. ANet has specifically stated that this behavior is by design. In other words, it is working as intended. So you can argue all you want about how it is a poor design decision, and I would agree with you on that, but you simply are wrong claiming that it is a bug. Even if it were not, it is fairly obvious that it is working as intended.

The problem is in your assumption that you are naming your pet when you change its name on the pet interface. That is not what is happening. First, if you look at how the system is designed, you likely don’t even acually have an inventory of pets. In other words, pets are not like companions in a game like SW:TOR where each pet has a record in the database which has its own weapons, armor, etc. Rather, if you look at the pet interface when you go to slot an existing pet, all you are given is a list of all the possible pets you can have, with the ones you haven’t tamed greyed out.

That almost certainly means that there is no record for each pet you own, only a flag on the list of possible pets you can tame showing whether or not you tamed that particular type. That also means that when you slot one of those pets, you are not slotting a specific pet you have been working with, but a generic copy of that species of pet. In other words, it is not that the system has a bug in which it forgets to save the pet name. There simply is no place to save it because you aren’t actually recalling the actual pet (object) you tamed.

In other words, when you name your pet, you are not actually naming that pet. You are simply changing the display name attribute of the pet slot in the pet interface. That name displays over the pet in the game world, but it is still the name of the slot he is in, not his actual name. When you tame a new pet, you can see this in action.

If you choose the option to go ahead and make the newly tamed pet your active pet, what happens? In my experience, it usually replaces the old pet with the new one, but it also retains the old pet’s “name.” Why? Because it was the slot that was named, not the pet itself, and the code to slot the new pet’s attributes does not bother changing the name of the slot, so the pet retains the same name as the previously slotted pet. That is, if the pet object itself had a name attribute, that wouldn’t happen, but the name is the slot display name, not the name of the pet itself.

If, by contrast, you don’t choose to slot the new pet at that time, but, rather, slot it later manually, what happens? The slot name attribute does change. Why? Because the code that loads the slot with the new pet simply grabs the generic attributes from the pet table for that species and changes all the fields for that slot, including naming the slot with the generic pet name for that type of pet.

This is no bug. It is a design decision by ANet. You can argue all you want, and I would agree with you, that it is a bad design decision because it forces us to have to rename pets when we swap them. However, capnflummox was correct. It is not a bug because it is working exactly as intended, and ANet has confirmed this. Those of you who are arguing that it is a bug are simply incorrect.

My Pigs name is Oink Oink my snow leapord is Witty Kitty and my black widow is named Itsy Bitsy.. Those are main 3 i use and yes they always get named. after all they are a rangers best friend.. family..

The best pet name I ever saw was a Pig named “Chauvinistic”.

I personally would love to give each of my pets names, but alas, the game prevents me from doing so. I still have a paper list of names that I keep beside my desk, however, and I faithfully rename my pets each time I swap them. Rangers running around with a “Juvenile XX” make me sad.

My current menagerie:

- Land #1: “Trixie” – Pink Moa
- Land #2: “Rime” – Ice Drake
- Water #1: “Braxis” – Armored Fish
- Water #2: “Zebes” – Rainbow Jellyfish

All of you jumping all over capnflummox for pointing out that it is not a bug and trying to argue that it is are simply wrong. ANet has specifically stated that this behavior is by design. In other words, it is working as intended.

The thing is, I can’t think of a reason why the game wouldn’t save the pet’s name but instead remember the location where it was charmed.

Hence it must be a bug.

I name my pets. I switch pets often to suit exactly what I need though, and that means my pets *never* keep their names. After a few weeks, I decided that it was pointless until A-net fixes it so that my pets keep their names.