Name Ascended Weapons

Is it hard to add a slot to "Name" an item?We do it for ranger pets can we do for ascended weapons? These are special enough that only one rarity would be affected.Make it an optional part of the crafting process or buy a naming contract from the BLC.They are account bound so the name could be set or (like pets) able to be renamed.

Why? It won't be seen by any one unless you're going to ask for that "clutter" to be on the screen too.

Not to mention the constant potential for abuse. Aside from having next to no practical use, its comically ripe for the psychological/ego stroking you wouldn't want to encourage in private either.

As long as it’s completely private and no one can see the name. I’m not interested in seeing what some kid names his Greatsword as I’m sure it will either be disgusting or an eye roll.

@"Game of Bones.8975" said:Is it hard to add a slot to "Name" an item?

Since you ask, it depends a little, but ... generally yes. At the very least it involves:

• create a UI for setting, and displaying, these names in the client
• update the server to handle all the backend stuff for getting and setting the name
• update the network protocol to support that extra information and operations
• update the storage systems -- saved games, essentially -- to save the names

If you want the names, like pets, to actually be visible to others, each of those steps gets vastly more complicated.

I wouldn't mind seeing this added to the game, as long as the names stay hidden to other players.

When the game launched, rangers could only remember the names of their active pets. If you regularly swapped between a drake, lynx, and moa (and wanted unique names), you'd have to micromanage that. The developers described why changing that wasn't on their priority list, pretty much along the lines that @"SlippyCheeze.5483" lists above. The biggest problem: creating a robust-enough name-storing system that performance wouldn't be affected. It took years before they addressed this "obvious" QoL issue.

Naming pets affects only rangers and a limited number of unique pets (i.e. the ranger can only have one brown bear). For naming weapons, the system would have to be able handle an arbitrary number of weapons of the same type (e.g. speedclearing players use multiple weapons), for every character in the game, and for every weapon type.

Given that the number of Quality of Life improvements we request, it seems hardly likely that ANet is going to put all that energy into something that only the player sees.

@"Game of Bones.8975" said:Is it hard to add a slot to "Name" an item?We do it for ranger pets can we do for ascended weapons? These are special enough that only one rarity would be affected.Make it an optional part of the crafting process or buy a naming contract from the BLC.They are account bound so the name could be set or (like pets) able to be renamed.

How would this work? I mean a Ranger's pet is an entity in the game world so other players will see it and displaying its custom name rather than just Juvenile White Moa, for example, makes sense but no one can see your weapon names but you. What practical effect will this have?

Anyway, probably not a huge effort (please note: size of a task is relative) but it seems to serve very little purpose and adds an additional data storage cost to weapons.

I can't see why anyone would want it, but I also can't see any reason why they couldn't implement it.

But let's be honest folks, it will be something like "weapon naming contract - 150 gems", only available for 10 more days!

I'm not opposed to ANET making money off the store - I'm happy to support them - but there are times I think they go a bit far :)

the only question i can think

Why?

its not rare.what use would it be.you can't sell it.only you could see it.every kid and there grandma has ascended what point would it be to link XxXXXXX Dragon Soul XxxXXxx Slayer XXXXX in chat, cause thats the only use i can think of naming weapons

If one could link the 'named' weapon in chat, they would need to add filters to the naming feature, and then there would likely be posts lamenting that practice, and asking for it to be removed because only 'they' could see it...or some such, I'm sure. Lol.

Why would I want to name my weapon?

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

• create a UI for setting, and displaying, these names in the client
• update the server to handle all the backend stuff for getting and setting the name
• update the network protocol to support that extra information and operations
• update the storage systems -- saved games, essentially -- to save the names

And if you want to drink cold water you have to:

• Find an empty bottle.
• Open the lid of the bottle.
• Open the tap.
• Fill the bottle with water.
• Close the lid of the bottle.
• Open the fridge.
• Put the bottle inside.
• Close the fridge.
• Wait for the water to get cold.
• Find a glass.
• Open the fridge.
• Take out the bottle.
• Close the fridge.
• Open the bottle's lid.
• Pour the water into your glass.
• Pick the glass of water up.
• Bring it close to your mouth.
• Drink the water.

Wow, drinking cold water is harder than I expected!

I do not think this is necessary for Guild Wars 2. The weapons already have very interesting names.

@Eme.2018 said:

@"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:

• create a UI for setting, and displaying, these names in the client
• update the server to handle all the backend stuff for getting and setting the name
• update the network protocol to support that extra information and operations
• update the storage systems -- saved games, essentially -- to save the names

Do you have some meaningful critique of the comment I had, or just snark?

Because those are the major high level areas, at about the level of "drink some water", not at the level of enumerating every step required to implement that result.

@Eme.2018 said:Wow, drinking cold water is harder than I expected!

That might very well be relevant to someone in physical therapy: turns out things we take for granted are, indeed, harder than expected.But, as @"SlippyCheeze.5483" mentioned, the list of steps described to enable gear to have a player-chosen pet name are equivalent to "drinking cold water." The list of steps equivalent to "find an empty bottle" are the actual programming details, which weren't mentioned above. (And, if you want to take the analogy farther, there's actually a design decision: decide whether to use: an empty bottle, empty glass, empty mug, disposable cup (paper? or plastic?), etc.)

The point is that it's not free to add this. It costs something. Even if it were cheap (which it is not), there are lots & lots of cheap-to-design suggestions out there and plenty of not-cheap-to-design ideas, too. ANet has to choose some to consider and some to leave alone. Of the ones under consideration, some will reach the concept stage, and some of those will get design resources. And then some of those will end up getting cancelled in favor of other stuff (sometime more important, sometimes more urgent, sometimes just because).

Some people won't care about any of that: as humans, we want what we want and practical considerations are someone else's problem. But choosing to oversimplify won't make it more likely to happen.

@"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:Do you have some meaningful critique of the comment I had, or just snark?

Because those are the major high level areas, at about the level of "drink some water", not at the level of enumerating every step required to implement that result.

You are right, it is just a snark. I don't have any idea about how time-consuming those steps are, but I have a strong feeling that you are overestimating the difficulty of this implementation. This MMO was not made by one person after all, there is a whole team behind it.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:That might very well be relevant to someone in physical therapy: turns out things we take for granted are, indeed, harder than expected.But what I'm saying is, in fact, exactly the opposite. You can make everything sound difficult by over-analyzing it into steps. Also, I don't get how physical therapy has anything to do with this.

@Eme.2018 said:

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:That might very well be relevant to someone in physical therapy: turns out things we take for granted are, indeed, harder than expected.But what I'm saying is, in fact, exactly the opposite. You can make everything sound difficult by over-analyzing it into steps.

One can also make everything sound too simple by under-analyzing. It's not free to add this feature. It's not "easy" because it requires new mechanics, each of which comes with its own set of headaches. One can't simply state, "it's just a name, so it should be simple to add" and assume that's actually true for programming generally or this game in particular.

Also, I don't get how physical therapy has anything to do with this.While getting some water seems simple to you, it isn't for people who have just had complex surgery. All of those steps you mentioned... people actually have to relearn them. People who get hip replacements, for example, have to relearn how to walk, which can be broken down into a list of steps that are so simple to you and I that we never think about what's involved.

There's nothing wrong with saying you really want to see a feature. There's nothing wrong with saying it's more important than anything else you've seen proposed or that you're willing to give up 83 other ideas to see this one happen.But it shouldn't surprise anyone that there are objections when part of the rationale is: "I can describe this easily, so it must be easy to implement."

tl;dr Explain why the feature is important to the game or the community, instead of attempting to justify its inclusion by assuming the amount of effort to be minimal.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781My objection was on the format of @SlippyCheeze.5483 's post, which I find misleading since most people of the people reading this do not have any frame of reference to assess those facts pointed out by @SlippyCheeze.5483. To put it simply, merely stating the steps in order to fulfill an action, doesn't make the action itself difficult.

I am not really convinced by those points he is making. (@SlippyCheeze.5483) Wouldn't you have to update some (if not all) of those things with ANY update to the game? Well, it surely depends on the type of the update, but those are some pretty basic things you are pointing out.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:While getting some water seems simple to you, it isn't for people who have just had complex surgery. All of those steps you mentioned... people actually have to relearn them. People who get hip replacements, for example, have to relearn how to walk, which can be broken down into a list of steps that are so simple to you and I that we never think about what's involved.

I appreciate the explanation. Though, I don't think it is relevant to the point I made.

@Eme.2018 said:

@Illconceived Was Na.9781My objection was on the format of @SlippyCheeze.5483 's post, which I find misleading since most people of the people reading this do not have any frame of reference to assess those facts pointed out by @SlippyCheeze.5483. To put it simply, merely stating the steps in order to fulfill an action, doesn't make the action itself difficult.

It depends on the update. For example, adding new gear is mostly a matter of adding the model and texture assets, and then adding them to whatever database / index the game client uses to load them when required. So, most of the work is omitted. Skill changes, I assume, are mostly static data changes, unless it is literally "rework the entire skill." Even skill visual changes will mostly be asset updates. Currencies and map specific items like diflourite crystals are just entries in a table, too, with attached models. Nothing fundamentally new about them, vs all the existing ones.

Can you think of the last time a fundamentally new UI element was added? I don't recall one since the extra action button, myself. Various things, like the portal scrolls, reuse existing UI for "NPC chat", so are not adding something new to support those. Support for naming weapons, though, would definitely require adding one, or at least extending an existing one.

So, in general, I don't think the vast majority of things in that list are required for the vast majority of updates. Material Storage changes are probably the most frequent of those.

Anyway, you are right that I was pointing out some pretty basic stuff. The OP asked how hard it would be, and I felt that outlining the number of major things touched would be more informative than simply saying "hard" and leaving it at that. My aim was to balance "too much detail, especially speculative detail", with "not enough detail, so it seems an unreasonable answer." :)

@"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:Anyway, you are right that I was pointing out some pretty basic stuff. The OP asked how hard it would be, and I felt that outlining the number of major things touched would be more informative than simply saying "hard" and leaving it at that. My aim was to balance "too much detail, especially speculative detail", with "not enough detail, so it seems an unreasonable answer." :)

Firstly, it doesn't matter if it is more informative if someone cannot evaluate the information. Secondly, to be useful and not misleading, you should have noted only specific points that make this kind of implementation hard, not the basic difficulty of just any update. Also I don't think you should have mentioned the word "hard" because 1) you don't really know how hard it is for the devs 2) you don't know what OP meant with the word "hard" 3) you don't know what other people understand by reading this word.

OP asked with a somewhat innocent and rhetorical way. Needless to say, that was not really a question but still you chose to answer. And you didn't even remain neutral, in spite of not really knowing the answer (partly because a correct answer does not exist, how hard something is, is vastly subjective and partly because you are not a dev) .

Wow, you seem to want him to preface his post with a lot of caveats.

@"Game of Bones.8975" said:Is it hard to add a slot to "Name" an item?We do it for ranger pets can we do for ascended weapons? These are special enough that only one rarity would be affected.Make it an optional part of the crafting process or buy a naming contract from the BLC.They are account bound so the name could be set or (like pets) able to be renamed.

Throughout this thread there have been many point put forward why it's not really viable and the issues which may arise. I agree that straightforward naming weapons is not something I think is necessary.Taking from my experience in an old MMO I played before GW2, there may be room for a variation of this idea. A major difference with crafting was the RNG aspect (not looking for this implementation) whereby a player knew which weapon they were creating, but the stats were randomized (could be crit, health, power, mana etc). So to craft a decent weapon to use or sell, you'd try multiple times, often getting unsuitable or trash stats until you (by random luck) hit that stat combo which you wanted.Here's the part which could be implementedEach time a player created a piece of gear (wep or armor) it would have in the description "Crafted by playerX". The other part of that was if you were very lucky you could, by chance, craft epic gear with higher base stats and have your name on it.The major difference in GW2 is that ascended gear cannot be traded so it's not quite the same concept, however, it could be an option to have your personal weapons labeled with "Forged by X" or "Constructed by Y".It's not a massive change, and not one which I think is even desperately needed, but just an alternative idea with potentially less work needed to be implemented.

@Eme.2018 said:

@"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:OP asked with a somewhat innocent and rhetorical way.

If that was their intent, I missed that, and took it as a genuine question which I answered in good faith.

Needless to say, that was not really a question but still you chose to answer. And you didn't even remain neutral, in spite of not really knowing the answer (partly because a correct answer does not exist, how hard something is, is vastly subjective and partly because you are not a dev) .

I'm not an ANet dev on GW2. I do have a reasonable degree of relevant, related experience that gives me confidence that I can speculate effectively about the relative difficulty of this task, and the various components involved in the update.

Given I took the OP to be asking a genuine question, and knowing that most people don't have the background to make a good assessment of how difficult this would be, I thought it would be helpful to explain a little about what the challenges involved are. I have found that consistently helpful to people over the last few decades, as it gives them a much better sense of perspective on why something that sounds "easy" is actually hard.

I do appreciate your feedback on the subject and style of my approach, however, and I will take it into consideration, and factor it into future responses to similar questions.

First, and for the record, I am not for or against this idea. I don't really see the benefit of doing this.

That said, it seems to me it would be pretty easy to implement.

UI for setting name --> use or copy UI for setting ranger pet name.The UI for setting the name would be called up from a right-click menu item. We've seen various items added, such as the Use All on many stackable items.UI for displaying name --> I'd expect the existing item display to be generic enough to handle showing a new attribute with minimal changes.Adding an attribute to the item instance to hold a user defined name should be easy enough. I would hope they designed the game to be able to handle such things easily.Why would network protocols need to be changed. Adding this wouldn't have any affect on the network protocol.The storage systems should be able to handle a minor addition like this.The only way this name might be visible to others is if it's visible when someone links their ascended item in chat.

I'm not a game programmer but I do have plenty of experience with UI design and database schema design. Based on my experience I see nothing here that would be complicated. Obviously it depends on how things are programmed under the hood of GW2. Unless someone here has sufficient knowledge of GW2 programming we can only speculate.