Guild Wars 2

My names for my Ranger’s pets reset whenever I switch 1 of my 2 active pets with a different 1 from my pet window.

Same thing happens to me. Also when charming new pets and selecting “yes” to make them active will sometimes name the new pet with the name of the old pet.

Happens with me as well

When naming a pet, and swapping him back to something else and recalling him back out, the names are getting reset back to “Juvenile whatever”.

I’ve bugged this in game, and nothing is being discussed about the issue.

Since this is a merged thread, should I surmise that this is a known bug?

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.

Well is that’s the case, it needs to be fixed. You can name every pet in every other mmo, this is a very basic part of an MMO that should be available to a player.

noticed this aswell and i’m displeased :/ takes something out of the immersion, i can understand though, that there are more pressing matters right now – hope they’ll improve this eventually.

Along the same lines, the “Juvenile” should be removed from the default pet name once a pet is tamed. It causes a lot of confusion when players see it and try to charm a pet which actually belongs to a ranger already.

I am going to add my support for fixed names. I find that with the number of pets available (and thus the amount of swapping), the names should be remembered or just scrap the naming feature altogether. I understand this is a low priority request, but it would be nice if it could happen.
Please help out my pets, “Salad” the Fern Dog, “Sushi” the Shark, and “Bobert the Majestic” Eagle (among others).

I too have had this issue. And no disrespect intended, but why on earth would you code something that lost it’s personalization every time you changed it? That really seems wasted and nonsensical to me. I’m sure Anet has other folks who play Hunter/Ranger classes I can’t imagine this being what they intended with hunters being the way they are with their pets (i.e. attached). Hoping this is a glitch, even if you can only name the two swap-outs at a time

I can only add my support for this.

My ranger is my main character, and collecting pets is something I enjoy immensely… having their names reset (intended, bug or otherwise) each time I swap them out is quite frustrating.

Submitted a /bug a while ago. As many of us seem to be perplexed by this issue, hopefully it will get addressed eventually.

This has been frustrating for me as well. Please allow fixed names for our pets.

I am not sure if this is bug or not, but it seems I cannot keep my ranger’s pet names. What happens is I will name my pets then when I change them from the 2 active pets I have, they will reset. For example, if I have a bear and an owl that I am using to swap between their names will stay if I just swap out these two pets. If however, I change over to a wolf and a raven instead, both names reset back to “juvenile such and such animal”.
Is there any fix for this?
Thanks in advance.

Having the Same Issue

Same issue here, most names are resetting when swapping out pets!

Ran into this the other day. Submitted a bug report in-game.

Interesting thing about it: if one of your pets is both terrestrial and aquatic, and you exchange it in only one slot, it retains its name. So let’s say you have a bear named “Butternut” in both a land and water slot, and you trade him for a Raven in your land slot but keep him in the water slot, he’ll still be named Butternut when you bring him back up in the land slot.

Annoying, but not game breaking. I get the feeling this one won’t be fixed for a while.

Interesting catch, i’ll check it out next time I play my ranger. But this was an issue in the beta weekends too, so ya, probably will be a while before they fix it. Just annoying

The game is currently storing the names for the slots not for the actual pets. In other words, if you name your pet “Fido” and he’s in the top slot, and then you tame another pet, and set it to active, the new pet will be named “Fido”, and the old pet will go back to your pet list and lose its name.

They need to re-code the pet management system to store the names per pet, and not per active slot.

Also, there’s currently no way to rename pets that aren’t active, so the only way you can rename an aquatic pet is to go underwater, which is a bit silly.

And, even after you click on the icon to rename a pet, you need to click in the name field again to be able to edit it (i.e., one extra click that shouldn’t be necessary). The whole “pet management” window seems to have been put together in a rush.

Not quite that simple I think Al Zheimer.
I find that if I swap slot 1 Bear “Fozzie” for an un-named other it shows as Juvenile xxxxxx. When I bring Fozzie back his name is there. So it does not behave like the slot is named in all cases.

I have also found that if I swap Fozzie to slot 2 it forgets his name.
I have also found that if I have Fozzie active and tame a new pet and chose to use it now (that option you get after every tame) the new pet gets named Fozzie and the bear is back to Juvenile xxxx when I load him back in to slot 1.

It is very inconsistent, and certainly isn’t doing what we’d all expect i.e. keep a name with a pet regardless of where you move them around.

Looks like another merge needed, thread about same thing:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Ranger-Pet-Names-Reset

The pet names are definitely messed up. Sucks because I had a really cool name for my dog that I can’t remember for the life of me. The names for the pets need to be coded in a way that it’s remembered per class of animal, not per slot like it currently is.

When you switch ranger pets it seems to take whatever pets name was in that slot and replace the pet that you put in that slot with the same name..but then when you switch it back it goes back to juvenile (whatever type the pet is). Idk if anyone has brought this up, but just giving the heads up.

Hey this is just something I noticed, I’m not sure if it is intentional or a bug, I’m just presuming it to be a bug. I have a few pets which I name, and when I switch the pets from the pet slot, like if I switch an eagle I named Fred(Example name) with a Bear Who I named Bill(another Example Name) previously, who was not in any of the 4 slots, the name of the bear would be Juvinille Brown Bear. So essentially the pets names are not saving if they are switched out and not in any of the hot slots.

If this is purposeful then could someone move this to a suggestions forum, because having to rename your pet each time you swap it out of one of the 4 hot slots is a pain and a bother.

Thanks!

Yes, this happens since the first Beta Weekend Event. But I guess now they have more important things to worry about.

The ideal thing would be that the game remembered all the names, even lock them down (not being able to change once you’ve settled it) if necessary.

Another bug I’ve noticed is that sometimes, when you’re a Ranger, getting near another Ranger’s pet will prompt you the “Charm” window; and of course you can’t tame them.

It’s a bit frustrating.

AlphaMuppet.4397:

When I bring Fozzie back his name is there.

Nope. If you do that, the name will revert to the default (ex. “Juvenile Black Bear”).

Any pet coming from your pet list will have the default name.

Any pet that you tame will take on the name of your active pet if you select “make active now”.

And the same pet will have different names in the terrestrial and aquatic slots (i.e., the same pet is treated as two different pets). In other words, the name is being stored by slot (and reset whenever you bring a pet into a slot).

Tintaglia.4762:

Along the same lines, the “Juvenile” should be removed from the default pet name. It causes a lot of confusion when players see it and try to charm a pet which actually belongs to a ranger already.

The game gets confused as well. I sometimes see “charm animal” pop for a second on other people’s pets.

It’s not game-breaking so I’d rather they fix other stuff first.

MokahTGS.7850:

to save the names of all of your pets (read: all of everyone’s pets) would require another large name database

Pet names are 19 characters long at most. Players can have up to 39 pets.

That’s 741 bytes (less than 1 KB) per player, and only applies to rangers (which are likely to be around 12.5% of the entire population). Assuming the game has around 3 million players, that’s 375 thousand rangers, spread across 48 worlds, or just under 8000 rangers per world (and they won’t even all be in the same zone, so they’re effectively in different servers, but let’s pretend).

This means that each world server would have to load, at most, 8 MB of data to store all the names of all the pets for all the rangers (in fact, they wouldn’t even need to do that; they could request only the names of active pets from the database server). The master database server itself would have to store 375 MB of data, which is almost insignificant by MMO standards.

You’re right that Arena Net would have to code it differently, but the current behaviour isn’t due to some sort of hardware limitation, it’s simply because whoever coded it didn’t think it through, and associated the names with the slots instead of associating them with the actual pets.

It’s not a coding bug, but it’s certainly a software design bug, since the game interface clearly says “pet name”, and what’s being stored is actually the slot name, while the pet name is getting forgotten when pets are changed.

spayced.2016:

It’s not game-breaking so I’d rather they fix other stuff first.

It’s not a dichotomy. Arena Net has hundreds of people, working on different things at the same time. The guys coding the pet management system are probably not the same ones coding the trading post or doing the GPU optimizations.

People should always report the bugs they find; it’s up to Arena Net to decide which bugs they assign to each person / department, and in which order.

Annoying but from a programming standpoin, with as much code as there is in this game, it’s probably just a “mundane detail” that got overlooked.

insert pet name into table pet where pet name = $pet name.

or

inert pet name into table petname where pet name = $pet name.

missing a few letters in the code attempts to save the information, but does it to the wrong place, so the expected bahavior just doesn’t happen.

It’s probably a simple fix, but it will be VERY low on the priority list. Or it would be if I was in charge.

In the mean time, my fern dog’s name is “Erm A Berd Derp” even though that’s supposed to belong to, well, my very derpish protection moa.

Any pets I charmed and named during the head start have retained their names, but all other pets are experiencing this bug when being swapped with a new pet from the menu.

Can we please get some feedback, or acknowledgement, from the developers?

This has been irritating me as well. I’d like to hear if this is planned to be fixed or “working as intended” as claimed by another player above (which frankly I find ridiculous, being a software developer myself).

A bit of a pain this, but can survive In the meantime I just keep keep their names on a notepad, so if i activate them i can remember what i called them…

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.

Are you certain, because surely if they can record the pet names of the 4 select pets, that same field in the database could simply contain a long string (seperated by whatever symbol) of names. E.g. “Kitty, Doggie, Spidery, Juvenile pig”, then call the nth position of the list for the nth pet ingame.

Hey guys, this issue is still driving me kind of crazy with my Ranger.
I have more then 15+ Pets now, and i dont wanna rename them all the time.
Also i like to have them named more then just kitty (cat) or doggy (dog), i use to give them referenz to historical figures or something. Shure one can do the “notepad” workaround to keep track of. but really ?

Pls. Check this one out. Thx.

Sooo… pretty much there’s no point in naming your pets even when the game saddles us with them anyway. That is awful.

Jason King.2647:

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.

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.

Seriously …

I’ve got to admit. I’m floored by this one.

For me, this is one of those little things that add up. Certainly not game-breaking. Just another thing that detracts from the play experience in a small but significant way.

At least for me. Obviously there are plenty of people playing and enjoying their Rangers who don’t seem concerned about whether or not their pet names “stick.”

Still, this is very disappointing. In light of all the feedback the team has received, I really hope they reconsider.

Jason King.2647:

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.

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.

I understand the reasoning behind not keeping a name database for each pet but why reset the slot we do have? If I name my pet in the first slot something then pick a different one the name should remain, not reset.

Shinzan.2908:

Jason King.2647:

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.

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.

I understand the reasoning behind not keeping a name database for each pet but why reset the slot we do have? If I name my pet in the first slot something then pick a different one the name should remain, not reset.

Yeah this is what I would like to see. I can understand not being able to make a massive database of pet names for each individual pet, that’s just nonsense. But in GW1 the petname was bound to the pet slot, not individual pets, so when we changed, they had the same name. Would love to see this feature return. I’m not so lazy that I can’t rename a pet like some of these people QQing , but keeping it in the slot itself would make things much more convenient all around.

Tintaglia.4762:

Along the same lines, the “Juvenile” should be removed from the default pet name once a pet is tamed. It causes a lot of confusion when players see it and try to charm a pet which actually belongs to a ranger already.

This, also. I had someone try to charm my polar bear (in Metrica…) and then get mad at me because “you should name your pet so it’s not so confusing!”
Even though my pets have a visible guild tag. Blugh.

But no. It really drives me nuts that I can’t name my pets and keep their names. Makes it a lot harder for me to get attached to them and care about them, as silly and ridiculous as that sounds. I also loved seeing funny pet names in GW1, but it’s rare in GW2 because people hardly bother to name their pets.

Jason King.2647:

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.

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.

Suggestion to this: Make pet name data on user end.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I’m not so lazy that I can’t rename a pet like some of these people

It’s not a matter of laziness, it’s a matter of realism and good design. When you train a pet, that pet (presumably) remembers and responds to its name.

Some interface abstraction is always necessary when making computer games, but when a UI mechanic clearly clashes with the thing it’s trying to simulate, you have to wonder if the people who designed that part of the game understand the kind of game they’re working on. This isn’t some casual arcade game running in a web browser, it’s a top-tier role-playing game. Creating a believable world with intuitive mechanics is (or should be) a fundamental design principle, and pets are a core feature of the ranger class.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I can understand not being able to make a massive database of pet names for each individual pet, that’s just nonsense.

No, it’s not nonsense at all, nor would it be “massive” by any modern standard. Assuming the game lets you give each pet a name with up to 20 characters, that’s 20 × 45 characters, or a total of 900 bytes. That’s less than 1 kB per player, which is insignificant compared to the amount of data the server already stores for each player.

In fact, it’s far less than that, because, as sneakyrobber pointed out:

sneakyrobber.5783:

Suggestion to this: Make pet name data on user end.

In other words, the pet names can be kept on the client, and, when you switch pets, the client simply sends the correct pet name to the server with a “rename pet” command. This would add absolutely no data to the servers, and would be almost indistinguishable (unless you log in from a lot of different computers, in which case it would be up to you to keep the pet names identical on all systems, just as you have to keep your key bindings identical).

And this (the current behaviour) is very much a bug. Not a coding bug; a design bug (because you’re told that you’re setting the pet name when in fact you are naming a UI slot; and even that isn’t persistent). And the fact that Arena Net seems to consider it irrelevant shows just how much (some of) their coders and designers don’t understand what a RPG is all about.

It’s easy to fix, it should never have been coded this way, and dismissing it as “working as intended” only makes it look worse.

As this this topic has run it’s course, it is being closed.

I know this is probably a topic already but i just really want to emphasize how annoying it is to have to rename your pets everytime you log on. I know, it is just a name for a pet, but after spending enough money on the game it would just be a nice fix to touch up for the ranger class. Im one of those people with the pet peeve of having to have names for all my pets haha! I am very sorry for any inconveniences but if this could be fixed as soon as possible that would be amazing!