Rematch 4.0

[Jerebear]

On the topic of Squirt. Squirt acts like a tamer and is clickable. In addition she gives EXP like a tamer (the challenge post gives poor EXP). I would vote to treat her like a tamer.

I didn't even realize we could no longer set our teams for the individual pets (I made all mine before that change). Does clicking on a pet load the challenge post team (I know you said it saves to the challenge post, but checking)? I don't do load on hover, so I always need something to click on to load my team.

Regarding the preferred pet level: I can't check at the moment but do you even offer a "at most level x" option? Maybe I'm missing something but I can't really think of a situation where that is actually necessary - as in what benefit does it have. Perhaps you don't even need it at all?

If you right click on a team and choose "Set Preferences", it brings up a dialog where you can set mins and maxes. Gello already highlighted the need, but I wanted to also chime in: If you are going full buffs, you can waste a lot of EXP on higher level pets. This doesn't seem so bad at the time, but over a larger timeframe of levelling, it can adds days or weeks of additional levelling that you wouldn't need to do. Generally, you finish off the higher level pets with stones or a couple wild battles on an offnight. This effect is even bigger on the Pet EXP bonus weekend (coming up soon).

[Gello]

On the topic of Squirt. Squirt acts like a tamer and is clickable. In addition she gives EXP like a tamer (the challenge post gives poor EXP). I would vote to treat her like a tamer.

I didn't even realize we could no longer set our teams for the individual pets (I made all mine before that change). Does clicking on a pet load the challenge post team (I know you said it saves to the challenge post, but checking)? I don't do load on hover, so I always need something to click on to load my team.

Yeah loading teams does the redirect too, even for auto load on target only. (Specifically, when Rematch fetches an npcID it looks to see whether this pet should redirect to another, and that no team is already saved for the real npcID. It will use the redirected npcID if both conditions are met. So old teams that target a specific pet will not redirect; and teams imported/received with a specific npcID won't redirect either.)

This is only for the challenge post pets (and Squirt until tonight's small update). It doesn't affect other tamers like Ashlei or Aki the Chosen or anyone outside the garrison.

[Aranesh]

Going back to the import/export business then.
Do I assume correctly that all options you posted are one suggestion just with different settings in them, depending on what information is actually present in the teams setup?

I have to say I do like it. There is not much to say because it is a very legible display and it's also among the most commonly used ways to display pets on the internet in my eyes.
Regarding the preferred pet level: I can't check at the moment but do you even offer a "at most level x" option? Maybe I'm missing something but I can't really think of a situation where that is actually necessary - as in what benefit does it have. Perhaps you don't even need it at all?

If it's required, how about... "Level pet Minimum level X and maximum level X" ?
Or you could phrase it depending on what information is available:
"Level Pet should be higher than level X"
"Level Pet should be lower than level X"
"Level Pet should be between level X and level X"

Just some ideas.
And one question: The export using IDs (team:123:456:789:0123:etc") - will it also include the notes and the level pet min/max instructions? Would make a big difference for the rematch strings generated on my page and I'd absolutely love to include that info!

Yeah the four examples posted are using the same export algorithm and the import would be able to create a team by lifting out elements of the text.

There is a maximum level preference. There's two common uses of a maximum level:
- To prevent wasting xp. If a tamer would give more than enough xp for a 24-level pet to hit 25, then that little extra xp is wasted. So if a team has a max level of 23.5, then it would prefer pets below level 23-and-50%-towards-24 so that the full xp from the tamer is given.
- To prefer low level pets. Ashlei, Mo'ruk, Thundering Pandaren Spirit and likely others are very good for level 1 pets because they don't take any damage. If you set a max level of say 5, then as you do your rounds it will prefer those low level pets from the queue so they'll be more durable when it comes their turn again to fight something that will inflict actual damage to the pet.

The next update will have a maximum health too, which I personally think is kind of wasteful. There's only one tamer where it matters (Lil' Oondasta) and that tamer typically isn't used to level pets. But it only took a few lines of code to add it so it's not a great burden to everyone who uses this addon and won't use the preference.

For cleaner parsing I was wanting to get the X within the text and not at the end ("something X"=bad "something X something"=good) due to the decimal business. ([%d%.]+ will capture "23.5" and "23.5." and the latter isn't a valid number.) But I've since realized this is an unnecessary consideration since the final period can be simply dropped or lifted out early.

For the "name of team123:etc" business including notes and preferences also, maybe, maybe not. My hope is that plain-text imports will become more commonplace than the strings, which may or may not get encoded into a compressed format. This string format is changing too (to account for eventual inclusion of breeds) but the old format will continue to be supported on import.

Unfortunately as I suspected this part of the addon (including notes in that string for cross-client or multi-team purposes) is proving a lot more challenging than all other parts of the addon. There are some limitations that it has to contend with:
- Blizzard has removed file i/o from addons so every export/import has to be from the clipboard via copy/paste in an editbox.
- WoW editboxes are not meant to handle large amounts of text. The client literally locks up.
- You can't transmit long strings from one addon to another.

So some compression has to get involved. Especially when exporting a whole tab's worth of teams. And said compression must handle UTF-8+BOM (Rematch has always worked in all languages, even Russian and Chinese clients which don't use standard ASCII characters). I also worry that the plain-text localized patterns may not translate well, but that's a major reason the string format will still be supported. Unfortunately every localization effort has died off so I'm not going to stress over this one too much.

So...I may drastically scale back the intended plan. It may be that notes and preferences can only be exported/imported in plain text for single teams. And the "name of team123:etc" format will not include notes and preferences. So exporting a whole tab of teams or sending a team to another will drop notes/preferences. I may even drop the new string format and go back to the old while researching the problem areas (compression/UTF-8+BOM). Just to get this addon live and out of beta this month instead of several months from now.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I didn't think about the wasted XP to be honest, because when adding level pets manually I usually don't care that much, but when it's combined with the automated levelling queue it makes sense.

One question: You say there will not be any localized versions of rematch (which is perfectly fine imho). Say I use the .. French client, and your addon in English. If I use a rematch code with English pet names in it and import it, will your addon be able to parse that into pet IDs from english and then choose the correct pets although the client is in FR ?

I'm asking because I'm looking mostly towards my own code for generating the export strings. If this cross-language importing does not work, the ID strings are the only option for me. I'll have to see how that works out with additional info then, because I already have min / max level in my database and could easily include that into the rematch string. Same for notes - for people using my page AND rematch it could even be a nice addition to add the URL to each fight as a note, so when approaching a trainer you could just click on the link and are pointed directly to the correct strategy guide. Just an idea, could be nice, we'll see!

[Gello]

You say there will not be any localized versions of rematch

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo lol

Sorry for giving that impression but it's absolutely, completely and totally opposite of my intent.

I WANT to have fully localized versions. Every piece of text is prepared to be localized. Extraordinary effort has gone into making it work on other languages: When dealing with the toy safari hat, secure buttons can't use an item:id and have to use an item name so it does a GetItemInfo on the item id and uses the localized name; For the lore text on the back of the pet card some languages don't use skurri so it uses alternate fonts for russian, korean and both zhTW and zhCN clients; The import/export is taking a great deal of planning to handle UTF-8+BOM compression.

The plain-text export/import will require a bit more language-dependant parsing which is a concern (I want it to be localized!) but as the translation from others has faded away and I'm not adept at the nuances between languages, it's not something I can stress about like I do every other part of the addon that has the potential to hit a language barrier. So yes the string format will be there. They will be necessary to send teams across languages (so someone on a frFR client can send a team to a deDE client). And it may be necessary if the plain text doesn't parse for other languages. But within a language it may be fine (I can't know without knowing when it doesn't). Pet names being in plain text is not an issue. The import working right now (on my copy, it's not posted) does a reverse lookup for a pet name and get its speciesID in the language of the user's client. So a deDE user should have "Plüschelekk" translate to speciesID 1426 just as easily as "Elekk Plushie" will translate to speciesID 1426 on enUS clients. The preference stubs may be an issue. I've had to go back and rework some strings in 3.x because when the words were put together it was nonsensical in German. There may be other pattern matching issues too but each is intended to be localized.

I will be very sad and upset if all this effort is wasted and no localization happens.

[Gráinne]

I didn't even realize we could no longer set our teams for the individual pets

Neither did I when I posted before. Gello, please ignore my confusion in not understanding that.

[Aranesh]

You say there will not be any localized versions of rematch

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo lol

Sorry for giving that impression but it's absolutely, completely and totally opposite of my intent.

I WANT to have fully localized versions. Every piece of text is prepared to be localized. Extraordinary effort has gone into making it work on other languages: When dealing with the toy safari hat, secure buttons can't use an item:id and have to use an item name so it does a GetItemInfo on the item id and uses the localized name; For the lore text on the back of the pet card some languages don't use skurri so it uses alternate fonts for russian, korean and both zhTW and zhCN clients; The import/export is taking a great deal of planning to handle UTF-8+BOM compression.

The plain-text export/import will require a bit more language-dependant parsing which is a concern (I want it to be localized!) but as the translation from others has faded away and I'm not adept at the nuances between languages, it's not something I can stress about like I do every other part of the addon that has the potential to hit a language barrier. So yes the string format will be there. They will be necessary to send teams across languages (so someone on a frFR client can send a team to a deDE client). And it may be necessary if the plain text doesn't parse for other languages. But within a language it may be fine (I can't know without knowing when it doesn't). Pet names being in plain text is not an issue. The import working right now (on my copy, it's not posted) does a reverse lookup for a pet name and get its speciesID in the language of the user's client. So a deDE user should have "Plüschelekk" translate to speciesID 1426 just as easily as "Elekk Plushie" will translate to speciesID 1426 on enUS clients. The preference stubs may be an issue. I've had to go back and rework some strings in 3.x because when the words were put together it was nonsensical in German. There may be other pattern matching issues too but each is intended to be localized.

I will be very sad and upset if all this effort is wasted and no localization happens.

Misunderstanding, sorry. Impressive effort indeed!
I can offer translation to German anytime you want. Happy to help you with the project.
Depending on how much text it actually is I could perhaps also provide KR, zhTW, zhCN and JP (is WoW even localized to Japanese? I don't know right now :S).

[Gráinne]

An awkward case of notes popping up inappropriately.

Do this:

1. Load any team that has Notes.

2. Manually slot three completely different pets.

3. Battle an entirely different target.

The Notes for the team selected in 1 will pop up.

I found this when I stopped for a wild battle in Mistfall after a visit to Aki. Even though I had changed the slots, and was now battling a skimmer, the Notes for Aki popped up.

It's not really a problem, just confusing.

[Gello]

An awkward case of notes popping up inappropriately.

Do this:

1. Load any team that has Notes.

2. Manually slot three completely different pets.

3. Battle an entirely different target.

The Notes for the team selected in 1 will pop up.

I found this when I stopped for a wild battle in Mistfall after a visit to Aki. Even though I had changed the slots, and was now battling a skimmer, the Notes for Aki popped up.

It's not really a problem, just confusing.

Yeah Rematch doesn't know when a user stops caring what team is loaded.

I'll think on solutions. It's actually a very complicated problem.

Probably the "Only Once Per Team" will be made default.

[Aurae]

Just wanted to chime in again. I have been fiddling around with the leveling queue to familiarize myself with it. Should have done that a while ago! Figured out how to get it set up for my leveling preferences and love it! Now shifting around team settings to allow for the "Put Leveling Pet Here" option. Everything works like a charm.

As far as the beta itself, have yet to run into any new issues since playing with it further. Thanks again, Gello!

edit: Something I did notice, is there any way you could allow for two leveling pets on a team? For instance, Ashlei is easily beaten with a single pet and often used with two carries.

[Gello]

edit: Something I did notice, is there any way you could allow for two leveling pets on a team? For instance, Ashlei is easily beaten with a single pet and often used with two carries.

You can drag multiple queued pets to the pet slots and then save the team. When a team saves, all loaded pets that are also in the queue get converted to a leveling slot.

Alternately, you can right-click a pet in the team list and "Put Leveling Pet Here" to convert a slot to a leveling pet after the team is saved.

Maybe the behavior of "Pet Leveling Pet Here" in the loadout slots can assign a second/third leveling pet if one is already in the team. I'll put that in my notes to look into.

[Aurae]

Yeah, I had tried the Right-click > Put Leveling Pet Here, but all it did was swap the leveling pet slot back and forth.

Went back and used the drag-and-drop from the leveling queue and it saved just fine. Thanks!

[Gráinne]

Yeah Rematch doesn't know when a user stops caring what team is loaded.

I'll think on solutions. It's actually a very complicated problem.

Probably the "Only Once Per Team" will be made default.

Yes, I can believe it's complicated.

I wouldn't hold up other work for this; it's quite minor, and not worth a lot of your time.

[Gello]

A new build posted today (beta-20) has export/import enabled. Give it a try and let me know if you encounter any problems.

You can export a single team from it's Share menu in a team's right-click menu; a whole tab of teams from the right-click menu of a team tab; or you can export a select list of teams (such as from a search result) from within the Teams button next to the search box.

You can import a team from the Teams button or via Share within the right-click of any team.

The old rematch had one export format that looked like:

Howl Bomb:0:1238:210:218:321:868:118:513:418:1152:110:362:593:

I've not encountered a lot of these "in the wild", probably because it's ASCII gibberish to anything except the addon itself. So this new version has two options, Export As String (creates a team formatted like above--with preferences and notes included), or Export As Plain Text, which produces something like this:

Howl Bomb

1: Unborn Val'kyr (1,2,2)
2: Pandaren Water Spirit (1,2,2)
3: Chrominius (1,1,2)

This team is best suited for single targets such as Beasts of Fable legendaries. General tactic:

Val'kyr:
- Shadow Slash until Val'kyr dies.
- Curse of Doom in the round she comes back to life.

Pandaren Water Spirit:
- Geyser
- Whirlpool and immediately switch to Chrominius

Chrominius
- Howl (at the end of this round, Curse of Doom, Geyser and Whirlpool go off, using Howl's damage modifier.)
- Surge of Power to finish opponent off if necessary.

It will lift the name of the team from the first line (and its target if an npcID is included), it will lift the pets and abilities from the 1: 2: and 3: lines, and anything following will be added to the notes.

Preferences are also supported in export/import.

Breeds are NOT supported yet. As mentioned earlier I'm waiting to see what Legion has for the API before thinking about the reverse-interpretation of breeds.

However, you can manually add breeds and some text into it. The addon will attempt to interpret around the text:

Howl Bomb

1: H/H Unborn Val'kyr (1,2,2) or B/B is fine too
2: Pandaren Water Spirit (H/S) (1,2,2)
3: Chrominius [6-H/H] (1,1,2)

just avoid adding non-breed text beside the pet's name without including it in ()s or []s.

And if wondering whether a team you see on a forum/blog/guide/etc will work, if it has 1: 2: 3: for pets, it can work (but not guaranteed). For instance this is from [url=http://www.warcraftpets.com/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7556]Rendigar's guide[/url] on this forum:

Thundering Pandaren Spirit - Location: Kun-Lai Summit (65, 93)
Team 1: 17 rounds

• 1: [pet]Rapana Whelk[/pet] [-] (1,1,1) - - Any snail will do here!
  2: [pet]Darkmoon Zeppelin[/pet] [-] (1,2,2)
  3: Carry pet
  Alt1: Any snail

vs Pandaren Earth Spirit

• - Dive > (if dive misses, forfeit and restart) > Acidic Goo > Ooze Touch until Pandaren Earth Spirit dies

vs Sludgy

• - Ooze Touch > Acidic Goo > Acidic Goo (you will most likely die before the second cast of Acidic Goo)
  - Switch to Darkmoon Zeppelin > chain cast Missile until Sludgy dies

vs Darnak

• - It takes 3-4 missiles (assuming no crits) to get him in explode range (Zep explodes for 618):
  Missile > Decoy > Missile x2 > Explode (ideal)
  Missile > Decoy > Missile x3 > Explode -- works if you miss with only 1 missile
  Missile > Decoy > Missile x4 > pass > Explode -- works if you miss with 2 missiles in the first 4 fired, but the fifth better hit
  - If you crit with a missile you can explode early, as long as Darnak has under 619 health.

Note: your carry pet doesn't need to participate, as it will be the only one left alive at the end of the fight and will thus receive XP

You can paste that un-altered into the addon and it should fill in the pets/abilities and add the rest as notes. (Though you may want to edit the name afterwards, your call.)

Play around with it and let me know if you encounter anything weird or any suggestions!

The next step is to get send/receive working (it will include preferences/notes too) and then all major components of the addon will be in place. From there it will be just some touch-ups/tooltips and the addon should go live.

[Gráinne]

I'm just fiddling with this, and it looks crazy-good!

The first thing I notice is that if I export a tamer team, and immediately re-import it, it creates a duplicate (or almost duplicate, if I've edited something) with the same target. Does this cause any complications?

[Gello]

I'm just fiddling with this, and it looks crazy-good!

The first thing I notice is that if I export a tamer team, and immediately re-import it, it creates a duplicate (or almost duplicate, if I've edited something) with the same target. Does this cause any complications?

No conflicts. If you look closely, you'll see at the bottom of the import window two radio buttons:



This appears when the incoming team has a target already used, or (if the team has no target) the name already used.

When "Create a new copy" is selected as you import, if the team has a target it will drop the target (but keep the same name). And if it has the same name as another team, it will add a counter afterwards.

So "Team Name (NPC#123)" -> "Team Name" -> "Team Name (2)" -> "Team Name (3)"

Actually, there's a mild bug right now where importing "Team Name (2)" to create a copy will create "Team Name (2) (2)" but that should be fixed next update. If you re-import "Team Name" when "Team Name (2)" already exists, it'd be "Team Name (3)".

[Gráinne]

Ah. I was sure both versions had the same target. I just tried again, and though they have the same name, the new copy has no target. Sorry. False alarm.

[Darkrose8519]

Is there a simple way to remove one pet from multiple teams... i had a lot of teams set up for the plushie achieve and I'd like to use those same carries for leveling other things but I don't really wanna go through fixing that many teams lol, almost seems easier to just make new ones..

On that note is there a collection of exports around here of the teams people are using for dailies?

[Gello]

Is there a simple way to remove one pet from multiple teams... i had a lot of teams set up for the plushie achieve and I'd like to use those same carries for leveling other things but I don't really wanna go through fixing that many teams lol, almost seems easier to just make new ones..

On that note is there a collection of exports around here of the teams people are using for dailies?

You can right-click a pet on the team list and turn it into a leveling slot ("Put Leveling Pet Here") without loading the team.

But it will throw up a confirmation window each time. I'll see if I can throw a mouseover macro to do it later.

[Darkrose8519]

Is there a simple way to remove one pet from multiple teams... i had a lot of teams set up for the plushie achieve and I'd like to use those same carries for leveling other things but I don't really wanna go through fixing that many teams lol, almost seems easier to just make new ones..

On that note is there a collection of exports around here of the teams people are using for dailies?

You can right-click a pet on the team list and turn it into a leveling slot ("Put Leveling Pet Here") without loading the team.

But it will throw up a confirmation window each time. I'll see if I can throw a mouseover macro to do it later.

Thanks for the quick response! should have figured that out on my own. now I"m trying to import
Cymera Brightblade

1: Anubisath Idol (1,1,1)
2: Mechanical Dragonling (1,2,2)
3: Carry Pet

but the checkbox isn't turning green so I can check it. where did I go wrong here?

[Gello]

The red save button isn't lit up? Do you see pets filled out at all? Or a warning that it's an invalid team? (I don't know what you mean by the green checkbox.)

From that text you should see:


There is no "Mechanical Dragonling". If you had "Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling" it will put a MPD in the second slot. But since it doesn't know what "Mechanical Dragonling" is it puts a ? there.