Guild Wars 2

naphack.9346:

you’d have to include that database part into the actual game code(storing pet names does nothing, if the game client doesn’t receive the actual names, so another 1-2 hours of work)

If they’ve coded efficiently, then they should have to change only a single reference, way, way back where the data layer interfaces with the business layer. Still, not difficult to do. But with testing, yeah, maybe one more hour. So we’re up to 2 1/2 hours, including testing. Fair enough.

naphack.9346:

and, most importantly, have the whole database update to the new tables with an additional entry and create a new patch for the game(for a database of that size, probably 5-10 minutes downtime and another hour of work).

Provided you’ve tested the tables in your testing environment, you can actually add them to the game while it’s live, so no downtime.

And as for the patch, they patch the game every month anyways. Acquiring patches is—or hopefully is—an automated process. They are probably running a continuous integration system. Every time someone checks in their code, the build server acquires the code, compiles it, notifies anyone if there’s problems, and keeps a record of what changed from the previous build. So there’s no extra work there.

So, we’re at 2 1/2 hours, but that’s actually really, really cheap in developer time (and that even includes documenting the changes). So it’s still an easy fix. ANet apparently just doesn’t think it’s worth even that minimal effort.

After picking on this so much, I feel I should add that I do really respect ANet as a development team. I think they’re smart, competent people who’ve done a fantastic job on the game overall. But I also think they’ve made some less-than-stellar choices in some areas, particularly in the small-but-significant details, like this one. But making those choices is just part of their job.

And pointing out our dissatisfaction with them is part of ours. :-)

I fully agree. I like to name all my pets individually, and I have to keep their names in an Excel file and rename them whenever I swap them out. It’s ridiculous I should have to do something so cludgy for something so small in a game of this caliber.

You want to know what’s really ridiculous though? My wife’s a programmer and DBA (database administrator), and I was defending ANet to her on this whole issue, the usual arguments of, “Well, maybe it’s harder to do than it seems, or maybe the storage space is prohibitive.” She just scoffed.

I don’t remember all the technical terms she used, but basically, just looking over the interface, she figures ANet stores all the pets in one main relational database and then has “linking tables” for each ranger which tell which pets the character hasn’t unlocked yet, so you can’t equip those pets. Apparently, all ANet would have to do to fix this is insert a single text field into the linking tables. According to my wife if they allowed 50 characters per pet name, it would only take about 3K of storage per Ranger. That’s nothing. And setting it up would take one moderately skilled database person about an hour and a half (plus time for testing, which will vary depending on their testing practices). And there’d be pretty much zero maintenance once it was set up.

So minimal effort to fix, negligible storage space consumed, and no maintenance after the fact. The only reason I can see that ANet doesn’t fix this—or that they didn’t do it right in the first place—is because they just don’t think it’s important enough to bother with, despite all the feedback they’ve gotten on it.

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.

I think part of the idea is to give as many players as possible a chance to experience it fully. Not everyone can play every day, or even every week, depending on RL commitments/schedules. So while you’ve already completed the content, there are players who haven’t gotten a chance at it yet, and might not for another week or more.

It also gives the team plenty of time to identify and quash bugs, so we don’t have another Lost Shores experience, where several significant bugs blocked progress in the content for almost the entire event.

All in all, I think it’s a very positive change.

It’s pretty easy. Not like the dungeons. I just wanted to take a look, so I went in solo on my Lvl 18 Necro (not even a full bar yet, and badly undergeared), and I was plowing through stuff.

Not to say it’s easily soloable. Mobs are pretty close together, and there are Skritt wandering far and wide, so it’s very easy to get overwhelmed. But with 5 even mildly competent people, you should just chew through. Which, to my mind, is the way a Holiday event should be. Light, fun, kill stuff, earn fun little rewards.

At the end of the Lost Shores Survey, in the section “rate the following statements from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree,” we were basically given the option between, “Should the final battle with the ancient Karka occur only once? Or should it occur multiple times?” Having to choose between the two, I favored the battle occurring multiple times, but that really isn’t my favorite option.

What I would prefer to see is the event occurring only once for each player, but with a window of opportunity (say 24 hours) where players can choose to participate in the event. So you could get some of that “world-changing, one-time event” feel while making the event more conveniently accessible to a larger portion of the playerbase.

Of course to do this, you’d probably have to instance the event. But with the horrible culling issues and lag most of us experienced, I’m not really seeing a negative there.

Also, thanks to ANet for sending this survey out. I appreciate you guys taking our feedback seriously, and your willingness to change to make the game better.

I feel like I should hug you now. But I won’t. Because Colin Johanson’s beard tickles.

Scheduling
One thing I think ANet really needs to reconsider with their events in general is scheduling. One of the biggest problems, to my mind, between both the Mad King and Lost Shores is how tightly they scheduled them.

In and of itself, the schedule for the Mad King was good. Two weeks should be enough time for most people to experience the content and have their fun with it.

The problem with the Mad King, of course, was when Hurricane Sandy hit, a lot of people were shut out of the game, and Lost Shores was scheduled so tightly on the tail of MK, there was no wiggle room to extend or repeat the event.

Then we have Lost Shores: three mutually exclusive event phases, each scheduled one day apart, on a weekend. First, this puts a lot of time pressure on people who want to experience the event, which significantly detracts from the experience. Second, it gives no time to fix bugs or problems. Bugs are going to happen. No matter how much you test something, when you throw it out into a live environment and it gets pounded by several hundred-thousand people at once, things are going to go * bloink! *

I think for the future, ANet should consider scheduling their events so that:

1: They have enough time to fix the inevitable problems that crop up.

2: The majority of players have enough time to experience the fixed content.

3: There’s enough time to extend or repeat the event if necessary.

One-time events
Obviously, ANet need to put some more thought into how they handle one-time events, but I think part of that process should be discussing if they even want to continue doing them.

Personally, I like the idea of one-time events. They’re immersive, and they build nicely on the vision of GW2 as a living, breathing world where events actually matter and have world-changing impact.

But I think it’s possible we’ve hit a tipping point where improving immersion actually detracts from the game experience.

I don’t have a good suggestion here. All I can do is give my personal experience. I play for story and content. I really enjoy GW2, and I want to participate in the events and see what happens. But having to choose between scheduling my weekend around a series of one-time events or just missing them … well, it just drags the game experience down, makes it far more negative than positive.

For me personally, I’m more than willing to sacrifice immersion to have a chance to experience event content on a less restrictive schedule. I really don’t care about spoilers being posted on YouTube or elsewhere; if I don’t want spoilers, I just don’t watch. I also like it when people have time to post the details of an event on the Wiki, so if I do get stuck or confused, I can go there and figure out where I’m supposed to go and what I’m supposed to do.

All in all, I hope ANet can come up with a good way to do one-time events—they’re a neat idea. But as it stands now, my game experience would definitely be better without them than with them.

I’m on an overflow server, and there’s no sign of the event at 44 minutes. No construction going on on catapults, not even any of the NPCs from Phase 1. The Consortium are there, as is the gate to the FotM. Other than that, no signs of event.

I’m sorry ANet, I know you guys are working hard, and you’re probably even more frustrated than we are, but I have to call The Lost Shores event a disaster at this point. Particularly considering the whole, “free weekend, invite your friends to come see what we can do,” thing.

Edit: Ah. Looks like maybe it completed while I was writing my post. Now the event assistant says, “Speak to the transport facilitator to board a ship to Southsun Cove,” but there’s no ship and no facilitator. There is a ship shown on the map, but there’s no ship at the dock.

Hey there. Here’s the history of my ticket:

Ticket#: 120902-005577

Issue: Used Tome of Influence but never received the influence.

9/2: created ticket

9/5: received automated reply from support requesting more information

9/6: replied with requested information

9/10: received an automated e-mail from support saying, “Recently you submitted ticket 120902-005577 to the Guild Wars 2 Support Team. In the time since your submission, we’ve addressed several problems that have likely resolved your initial issue or answered your question.” However, the issue had not been fixed, and so I followed the instructions provided to reopen the ticket and submitted some additional information.

My own 9/10 update is the last update to the ticket’s status. If you could look into this, or confirm that a fix for the problem is on the way, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Give it another shot. Was having the same problem on all my characters, but now it seems to be working again. Still seems a little slow to load, but it gets there.

Wife and I both having similar problems. Trying to buy items. Place the order, click “Buy,” the button grays out, but then nothing happens. We can change screens, close out, do whatever, but the TP doesn’t take our money and doesn’t deliver the items (at least not yet—anticipating I’ll log in tomorrow and find I’m out a couple silver and have a bunch of extra onions :-)

TP is definitely getting better. Still needs tweaking though. The devs must just be banging their heads against the wall by now.

Update: wife just reported it’s working for her. Still not working for me though.

Well, I’m not an ANet employee, but it’s late, and I’m tired and caffeinated, so I’ll just pretend I know the answers to your questions.

In a nutshell, something went boom. :-)

As to your second question, I actually saw what you’re talking about in one of the press beta videos on YouTube. There were a couple developers along with the commentators, and the comentators used that trick to separate the lovers. The devs said they hadn’t realized the encounter could work that way—they hadn’t really designed it that way—but they liked the cleverness of the solution. Sounds like they liked it enough to leave it in the game.

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.