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Codename Entertainment
Play History - two bug reports, one feature request

15 Posts
Link to post - Posted February 23rd 2019 at 11:41 AM
Last Edited February 23rd 2019 at 11:42 AM
RvW
All of the things mentioned below are regarding the built-in log feature "Play History".

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When I go back a few days, there's an entry which reads:

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Thursday, February 14th, 2019 at 12:46:27 PM
Purchased from Challengers' Warehouse
Cost: 400 Challenge Tokens
New Amount: 951 Challenge Tokens
Received
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That last line should read "Received Taskmaster Scritches" or something along those lines, but the name of what I purchased isn't included in the description.

Just to be clear:
- The purchase itself worked fine and doesn't need any tech support at all; it's just the log entry which is incomplete.
- I don't care about this getting fixed retro-actively; it's fine if my log entry (and everybody else's) stays the way it is. I just think it would be nice to fix this from here on out going forward.

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At the moment, it looks like my first page of history is truncated; there's far too few items listed and there's a big gap between the timestamp of the last entry on the first page and the first entry on the second page. The entry which I strongly suspect should follow the last one listed on the first page (and hence, being the one which causes the error and thus the truncation) is the one about buying Danni's Golden Legendary. Could you have a look into log entries about buying Golden Legendaries, it seems something goes wrong there.

(This is the reason I went back to try and see whether my previous purchase was shown correctly... and since that was borked too (even though to a lesser extent), I figured to make a bug report.)

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Also, while clicking through the play history, it was really annoying there's no search capability and no way to export things (other than reading stuff manually and typing it back in).

Both these problems could be solved very easily with an "export" button, which would save the available play history to the clipboard. Each entry is already somewhat formatted, so simply copying the text as-is would be fine. It wouldn't look amazing, but it would be plenty good enough for the only two goals I can envision: copy-pasting a particular entry into a tech support request and copy-pasting it into Notepad so you can Ctrl+F for a particular keyword you're looking for.

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5565 Posts
Link to post - Posted February 23rd 2019 at 1:08 PM
Raymond
play history is and has always been very wonky. i would not limit it to page one. there are gaps a lot all over the history, some items on later pages appear farther back in time then other items earlier in the history. many times there are only a few pages and other times there are dozens of pages going back a few weeks.
the devs have told me in reply to several trouble tickets years ago, honestly, that it is on their list of things to look at and fix.
i am not holding my breath.

5565 Posts
Link to post - Posted February 23rd 2019 at 1:10 PM
Last Edited February 23rd 2019 at 1:19 PM
Raymond
as for export, they explicitly told me they do not want to provide a text version of history. i will see if i can find their quote.
but that would easily solve many things. searchability, sort order...
but this is a flash game, not a text or html game

here is some of one answer:
I will add your suggestion to see Talent purchases in the play history and we'll see what happens. Having it searchable is probably something that won't happen.

Sometimes the play history can get out of order or not load properly.

and another:
Hi Raymond,

Thanks for reporting!

If you look at the time stamps for those entries, you can see they're not in proper order. They are in proper order on our end. You're silver chests haven't gone missing. I've added this to our todo list to fix.

Sincerely,
Nick

and here is another more important one:
Hey Raymond

Something like that isn't going to be in the game in the future. It's not on the radar. Turning all text points in the game into an exportable text asset would lead to it being just another calculator-driven game and we're not wanting that.

Josh

15 Posts
Link to post - Posted February 27th 2019 at 3:50 PM
RvW
Hey Raymond,

Most of the comments you dug up are not relevant to my suggestion:

> Having it searchable is probably something that won't happen.

I'm specifically *not* asking for a search within the game. Having it exportable would mean it becomes searchable (completely automatically; without spending a single second of dev time for development or maintenance), but only out-of-game.

> If you look at the time stamps for those entries, you can see they're not in proper order.

I don't care about entries being out of order. If I absolutely need them in-order, I'll sort them myself, but for most things, it doesn't really matter, since you're only looking up the one important entry.

> Turning all text points in the game into an exportable text asset (..)

That sounds like it is about descriptions of skills and "lore text" and stuff. My request was just for the Play History log entries. Sure, those will occasionally contain item names, but it's nowhere near a complete export (and it doesn't help in the slightest with turning this into a "calculator-driven game"... whatever that means).

[Besides, that reasoning is pretty broken anyway. All of the in-game text is already on the wiki, courtesy of a few people being crazy enough to manually copy-typing it over. But that's irrelevant; if the devs don't want this game to be "calculator-driven", they should keep the formula's under wraps, not the textual descriptions. Not that that goal is attainable, since there's always going to be enthusiastic players who will find a way to reverse engineer the formulas too.]

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So, in short: I don't see any reason why this is not possible. Nor do I see any reason why it would be undesirable: after all, it was the devs themselves who decided to have a log feature in the first place. What I suggest wouldn't enable *anything* which is impossible today, it would just make things far more convenient than manually copying the text.

5565 Posts
Link to post - Posted February 27th 2019 at 4:01 PM
Raymond
play history IS the one and only text asset that Nick was answering my question about. and if you ask him in a trouble ticket that will be his answer to you.
all i posted is exactly relevant to your comments. sort/display order DOES matter because there is no way to export or search so it is otherwise impossible to find something even if one knows when it happened...

15 Posts
Link to post - Posted March 1st 2019 at 12:58 PM
RvW
> play history IS the one and only text asset

Ehm no, it isn't? There's tons of text in-game: the name and descriptions of items, abilities, missions, challenges, upgrades, ... It's quite a long list really. On the one hand, I could see the devs not wanting this exported (even if it's just for copyright reasons), on the other hand, it has already been "manually exported" (and put on the wiki), so it's a pretty moot point. But anyway, it's almost entirely unrelated to the Play History export feature I requested.

> sort/display order DOES matter

The point I was trying to make is that it doesn't matter whether the export puts entries in the right order or not. Once I've pasted it into Notepad (or whatever), Ctrl+F is going to find the entry I'm looking for anyway, regardless of whether it's in the correct order. In other words, there's absolutely no need to fix the bug you mentioned (where items appear out-of-order), before creating this export.
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