Addon Rematch

[Gello]

How does one tell the difference between the pet below the top pet and the next pet? I didn't notice a visual indicator of the next pet as all I can see is the list as Rematch is displaying it (which is not the order it is selecting pets). The next pet can be anywhere in my queue of 20 pets, but I can't tell what that will be until Rematch auto chooses it.

It's supposed to be the following displayed pet in the queue.

Pet A
Pet B
Pet C

If Pet A gains xp, Pet B swaps in; if Pet B gains xp, Pet C swaps in; if Pet C gains xp, Pet A swaps in.

For unsorted and descending sorts it should always behave that way. The next displayed pet will load.

However, after some testing I see that in a descending sort, there's an issue.

If pets start this way:

A(lvl 11.5) -> B(lvl 10.3) -> C(lvl 10.2) -> D(lvl 9.5)

If C gains .3 lvl (30% xp), it dutifully sorts and now the next displayed pet is B:
A(11.5) -> C(10.5) -> B(10.3) -> D(9.5)

And it will swap to pet B instead of D, and if pet B gains .3 lvl:
A(11.5) -> B(10.6) -> C(10.5) -> D(9.5)

The next displayed pet is C, and B and C swap places in the queue until one of them is above A and then A will get in the mix.

So that behavior is unintended. I'd like it to traverse down the queue like it does on the unsorted queue. It's fixable but the code is being deleted so it's not a high priority. However with pets moving as they gain xp, it may not be obvious which pet is next. So it may make sense to disable auto rotate for descending sorts.

But I would very much like to keep that behavior for the unsorted queue. Auto rotate is intended to cycle through pets in the queue. The only time I personally use auto rotate is with an unsorted queue.

The hard part about this is I can't see where the <- and -> effectively move the pet through the list since the displayed list doesn't match the select list. When my level 24 waterfly levelled to 25, for example, it randomly picked a level 1 soul of the forge which was 2/3 of the way down the list (not even near the waterfly). I had no indication the soul of the forge would be next. From the displayed list, I expected my 24 moonshell crab to be picked next but it wasn't. That make sense?

I'm afraid I don't understand this. The <- and -> buttons don't move pets within the queue. If it's not going to the previous/next displayed pet in the queue, then that's a bug.

If a pet levels to 25 and it's picking something unexpected from the queue, that's a separate bug. (Pets leveling to 25 and auto rotate don't have any relationship with the <- and -> buttons.)

That said, the entire queue backend, including how leveling slots are declared for loaded pets, is being rewritten. Like, the code totally removed and replaced. The queue code as it exists was written before auto rotate and sorted queues were a concept. The new queue will be written with auto rotate, sorting, min hp/max xp and multiple leveling slots all kept in mind.

TL;DR: Don't sweat existing bugs in the queue. The offending code is going to be gone soon. I'm still very much interested in how people feel the queue should work. I can disable auto rotate on descending sort, but it will remain for an unsorted queue since I use that myself.

[Jerebear]

Sounds good. I believe you understand all the bugs I was seeing, though for some reason I thought the unsorted also acted wonky (I'll double check that though). Sorry for the lengthy post before. I was trying to be very thorough with info but overdid it.

I did find it unintuitive that for ascending/median that auto rotate only changes the list if the ascending/median criteria change while descending/unsorted it changes pets after every battle battle regardless of the descending/unsorted criteria or the level. I was expecting auto rotate to work the same way for all types of filters, which is where my confusion came. I understand the desire to have it do something though (though technically it would do something in descending if you are like me and add pets to your queue as the days progress...I get a lot of new pets lately so I am always adding to my current queue...Son of Sethe is being added to it today).

Thanks for all the insight and answers!

[Gello]

In redesigning the leveling slot/queue, I thought it worthwhile to post the present plan to find out if any existing leveling methods would be lost/inconvenienced or if there are suggestions to make it better.

The three big goals of the queue revamp are:
- Make the leveling slot/queue easier to use and understand, with no surprises about what pets will load.
- Support multiple leveling pets at once, so teams can have multiple carry pets.
- Support "skipping" pets in the queue, for instance to skip pets that don't meet a minimum health or maximum level/xp.

One big change is the current leveling slot will always be the top slot in the queue. This means:
- Double-clicking a pet in the queue or the "Start Leveling" menu item on a pet will move/add that pet to the top of the queue.
- If the queue is sorted, choosing a pet to be the current leveling pet will turn off the sort.
Why: I think this will help simplify expectations of what pets will load. Especially with the possibility of more than one leveling pet on a team, this will make it a lot more obvious: Two carry pets? Top two pets will be loaded.

Another big change is the Auto Rotate option will always be on when the queue is sorted. This means:
- "Auto Rotate" as an option will be removed.
- Anytime a pet moves to the top spot in the queue, it becomes the current leveling pet.
- You can still "Add to Leveling Queue" to add pets to the queue without interrupting the sort; remember "Start Leveling" to set a current pet will disable sorting.
- Those who don't want the queue to automatically swap pets before 25 can choose unsorted and move pets around to their desired order, or choose descending sort which won't change order unless you add a higher level pet.
Why: Even if this feature had no bugs in its current version, it's not always obvious what will happen, as evidenced by an experienced users/pet battlers in this thread being confused on how it works. Making it obvious that "pets at top of queue are leveling pets" and "if queue is sorted and other pets go to top of queue while you battle, you're choosing new leveling pets as you battle" will make it simple to understand with no surprises on what will swap in.

Some other changes:
- Any pet in the queue will have a gold border in the current pets area while loaded. Saving a team with multiple leveling pets will reserve all gold-bordered slots for future leveling pets.
- When more than one pet needs pulled from the queue, it will choose the top 2-3 pets from the queue.
- If a team is saved with min health/max level defined (the ability to save those settings may not make 3.2.0 from the start), it skip pets that don't meet the criterea. The current leveling pet (top-most pet) won't change; it will just pull from deeper in the queue.
- If not enough pets in the queue meet the criterea, it will pick the top-most pets to fill all leveling slots.

I'm not totally married to any of these concepts. Only days ago I said unsorted auto rotate was staying, but in working on this it occured to me that I could just sort by ascending or median and accomplish the same thing really. And standardizing the top-of-queue behavior will simplify things tremendously (for users and for me).

I may also add other criterea too besides min hp and max level/xp. Like choosing type(s) your team will be fighting, to have it skip over vulnerable pets. These will be saved on a team level. Some stuff (like the moonkin hatchling on wrong faction or revoked pets) will be native.

Let me know if you have any thoughts, questions or suggestions!

[Jerebear]

Some other criteria for levelling pets:
for some battles, as long as the pet can take a single hit they will work. Families like magic and mechanical are very good for those scenarios and will work regardless of their health weakness to attack. To an extent if it is the final round, an undead pet will also work. So someway to say pets of family X are always ok as carry pets might be something to consider.

I like a lot of the ideas you are posting so far. I still need to reread through a few of them to see if I understand them correctly though.

[Iibis]

If sorting the queue automatically auto-rotates, can I still sort the queue using a preferred sort method and then click unsorted to disable autorotation? I.e. it won't revert to an unorganized queue? edit. Actually, I would prefer if I could still use an active sorting method without having autorotation enabled. I'm not sure if that's just because right now there's no max xp rule, so I'm switching to another pet once my active pet dings 24. But I still like that my unrotating queue automatically moves lvl 24 pets to the bottom.

Actually, it would be nice if we could sort the queue by pet families too, and by ascending or descending levels within families.

I think the new features sound great. Especially health rules per team and max XP, and even better if it's possible to also implemenet Jerebear's suggestion to also allow pets from certain families despite the health.

[Gello]

for some battles, as long as the pet can take a single hit they will work. Families like magic and mechanical are very good for those scenarios and will work regardless of their health weakness to attack. To an extent if it is the final round, an undead pet will also work. So someway to say pets of family X are always ok as carry pets might be something to consider.

That's a good point. And it wouldn't be always, if the opponent uses an aoe it'd kill even those. Maybe a checkbox beside the min health criterea: "Allow magic and mechanical"? Or something.

If sorting the queue automatically auto-rotates, can I still sort the queue using a preferred sort method and then click unsorted to disable autorotation? I.e. it won't revert to an unorganized queue? edit. Actually, I would prefer if I could still use an active sorting method without having autorotation enabled. I'm not sure if that's just because right now there's no max xp rule, so I'm switching to another pet once my active pet dings 24. But I still like that my unrotating queue automatically moves lvl 24 pets to the bottom.

Would you be ok with the ability to sort the unorganized queue, but not have it active?

Instead of sorting=always-on rotation, rotate and sort are kept two separate things. Sort would simply do a one-time sort of the unorganized order, so the unorganized now has an order until you level or add pets. Then Auto Rotate would do its thing on the unorganized list which happens to be sorted.

So the queue menu would have:
Auto Rotate -> Ascending, Descending, Median
Sort -> Ascending, Descending, Median, Type (can do that too)

An active sort without auto rotate means we can't use the top-of-the-queue concept. If a level 18 is at the top of the queue and a level 5 is next, the queue can't be allowed to sort or the 5 goes to top.

edit: How about this compromise: Sort is a one-time sort of the unorganized list. (Is it ok if the original order is lost?) When you manually choose a new pet to be the current leveling pet, it will move that pet to the top and then sort the rest of the pets in the chosen sort order.

[Iibis]

So the queue menu would have:
Auto Rotate -> Ascending, Descending, Median
Sort -> Ascending, Descending, Median, Type (can do that too)
--
edit: How about this compromise: Sort is a one-time sort of the unorganized list. (Is it ok if the original order is lost?) When you manually choose a new pet to be the current leveling pet, it will move that pet to the top and then sort the rest of the pets in the chosen sort order.

Sounds cool!

[Rendigar]

Actually you can't even assume that a mechanical or magical will survive 1 hit, because multi-part attacks count individually (so a 3-hit quills will likely kill even a magical lvl 1, for example). Not saying it's not a cool feature to allow a checkbox for ignoring the min HP or what not, but it's not foolproof and you don't want users yelling at you because they ran into that one opening enemy pet that CAN 3-shot a mechanical or magic. And your point about AoE is just as valid - but if you make it a per team checkbox and you CYA with a tooltip on it it's a good idea.

I personally like the idea of being able to click something and just have the current pet list sort in whichever order I choose and then having auto-rotate switch between them. Of course right now I am levelling 21 pets from 1 using Rematch and haven't had an issue with what it picks next so I'm not a good example for suggestions. I have not watched closely enough but they are all now level 10 or 11 and it always seems to go to a pet with a lower level than whatever the current one just gained. So that means I like your suggested compromise.

[Iibis]

Actually you can't even assume that a mechanical or magical will survive 1 hit, because multi-part attacks count individually (so a 3-hit quills will likely kill even a magical lvl 1, for example). Not saying it's not a cool feature to allow a checkbox for ignoring the min HP or what not, but it's not foolproof and you don't want users yelling at you because they ran into that one opening enemy pet that CAN 3-shot a mechanical or magic. And your point about AoE is just as valid - but if you make it a per team checkbox and you CYA with a tooltip on it it's a good idea.

As it's team based, I'd assume that the user would know or check what kind of team they're facing before determining the carry pet limitations (I mean, since the user needs to know the min hp, the user also needs to know what damage the carry pet will take). I don't think Gello receives any yelling from the fact that currently the queue can keep a pet with too low hp since those features aren't yet implemented. It's entirely up to the user (or a guide author the user is following) to make sure their carry pet won't die. Since Rematch won't itself suggest anything and any rules are up to the user, not sure how the future features would result in yelling.

I personally sometimes don't use auto-rotate because I want to see a couple of pets to actually hit 24-25. I might not get any to lvl 25 in one day if I kept rotation on. Feels nicer and might need those leveled pet in the near future, eventhough in the long run it doesn't make much of a difference (or in the long run it would be more efficient to auto rotate by median). But it's nice to be able to choose.

[Rendigar]

Oh, certainly, Ibis, I agree with you that it IS the responsibility of the USER to determine the survival requirements and not Gello. But we all know that whiners gotta whine, and it takes a couple words in a tooltip to get them to STFU rather than bombard the forums with complaints. Gello does amazing work, I can't say enough good things about Rematch (I will just need to figure out how to best add it to my rebuilt guide when I do it - it's that good!).

When I want a pet to hit 25 I just turn off the auto-rotate myself (especially when my queue has 21 lowbies in it).

[Gello]

It will probably be something like this tho this is kinda ugly so it will probably change but it's the basic idea:



Also that new bit will initially be hidden with a button in the lower-left when a team has a leveling pet. Then clicking the button will expand the save/edit dialog and show those leveling options. (And keep it open when editing other teams.) Putting editboxes right in a user's face will make them wonder what to put in there, when they don't need to put anything.

And yeah a tooltip on the checkbutton will explain what it's for, like "Magic and Mechanical pets can often survive a round of hits and live through the whole battle. Check this to allow magic and mechanical pets that don't meet the minimum health to load for this team." or something less wordy.

Thanks guys for the feedback. The coding part is often easier than the planning so this is a great help.

[Morlis]

Is there any real benefit to leveling two pets at once? The exp gets split between the two and therefore you are leveling twice as long. I have never considered doing this, it is long enough to get one pet to 25. I can think of only 1 time I used a set up like this. Both pets were at level 24.9 so one wild kill was going to be way over kill, so I created a group with both, then both leveled to 25 on one wild match. So I guess I can see the potential, but likely I will keep my teams to two 25s and the leveling pet.

I do like the idea of the Max level being added. I have a bit of a collection of those random one-level-up stones and plan to just us it on pets that hit 24 but don't get to 25.

Another thought, not sure if it has been mentioned, but I would like to see a way to save search setups so I can look for the same thing over and over. I can give an example. On my main account I am trying to level Non-tradable pets first. Since I have 2 accounts I sometimes have my second account run some of my tradable pets up to 25 on Tamers then trade back. So I am often searching for just the tradable, non 25, rare quality pets. Conversely I sometimes want to look at the non-tradable who are not 25 yet and of rare quality. So saving the search layout would be handy for quick switching back and forth. (if this is already in the game OOPS I missed it some how)

PS Your addon is one of my favorites in the game, very handy in a variety of ways. Huge fan of the Leveling Queue, set it and forget it!

[Rendigar]

You're welcome. And there is a reason why companies like Microsoft and Apple have entire departments dedicated to "Look & Feel" testing and the like. Of course they are still a bunch of idiots, but hey you can't have everything. And I don't think that window looks bad at all. I know you've gone for the minimalist view, but a little larger wont hurt.

Oh, and while I am thinking about it on the look and feel department - when you pop up a menu of any kind, in "normal" applications clicking outside of a pop-up menu causes it to close. In Rematch you have to click "Cancel" which is actually counter-intuitive as that means "Undo whatever I just did and cancel the change". Probably been discussed and I just missed it though.

[Rendigar]

Is there any real benefit to leveling two pets at once? The exp gets split between the two and therefore you are leveling twice as long. I have never considered doing this, it is long enough to get one pet to 25. I can think of only 1 time I used a set up like this. Both pets were at level 24.9 so one wild kill was going to be way over kill, so I created a group with both, then both leveled to 25 on one wild match. So I guess I can see the potential, but likely I will keep my teams to two 25s and the leveling pet.

That's exactly the reason to do so and if this option exists I'd probably create and save a team JUST for that purpose. Because when I have to do it on the fly it's just one more step. Actually means I could just sort my list to work on the lowbies and then when I know I've thrown a bunch of 23-24's in there (or levelled them) I can reverse the sort and pop over to the 2-levelling pet team (so my Feline Familiar and 2 empty slots ).

[Gello]

Is there any real benefit to leveling two pets at once? The exp gets split between the two and therefore you are leveling twice as long. I have never considered doing this, it is long enough to get one pet to 25. I can think of only 1 time I used a set up like this. Both pets were at level 24.9 so one wild kill was going to be way over kill, so I created a group with both, then both leveled to 25 on one wild match. So I guess I can see the potential, but likely I will keep my teams to two 25s and the leveling pet.

Yeah it will have limited uses. Having 3 leveling pets at once will have even more limited uses but it will be supported!

Another thought, not sure if it has been mentioned, but I would like to see a way to save search setups so I can look for the same thing over and over. I can give an example. On my main account I am trying to level Non-tradable pets first. Since I have 2 accounts I sometimes have my second account run some of my tradable pets up to 25 on Tamers then trade back. So I am often searching for just the tradable, non 25, rare quality pets. Conversely I sometimes want to look at the non-tradable who are not 25 yet and of rare quality. So saving the search layout would be handy for quick switching back and forth. (if this is already in the game OOPS I missed it some how)

There's a Save Filters/Load Filters in the menu to save one filter, that was spawned from a "Favorite Filters" idea earlier in this thread. I'll be going back to that eventually but for now you can only save one filter to load at will.

[Gello]

You're welcome. And there is a reason why companies like Microsoft and Apple have entire departments dedicated to "Look & Feel" testing and the like. Of course they are still a bunch of idiots, but hey you can't have everything. And I don't think that window looks bad at all. I know you've gone for the minimalist view, but a little larger wont hurt.

Oh, and while I am thinking about it on the look and feel department - when you pop up a menu of any kind, in "normal" applications clicking outside of a pop-up menu causes it to close. In Rematch you have to click "Cancel" which is actually counter-intuitive as that means "Undo whatever I just did and cancel the change". Probably been discussed and I just missed it though.

True it can afford to have more space.

As far as dismissing the menu/dialogs, it'd be possible to make them dismiss by clicking elsewhere, but it'd be relatively invasive. It'd require hooking protected methods, which is probably why few (any?) addons do it. The default doesn't do it either.

The menus and dialogs should behave very much like default menus and dialogs: esc to close either or by timer on menus and cancel/close button on dialogs.

But look and feel are definitely topics of interest, especially for down the road when I'll be tweaking the UI to make it less dense.

[Iibis]

On the topic of menus, I tend to use Rematch at the right edge of the screen, but menus open to the right, so a sub-menu will open on top of the menu, making it quite tricky to select the right sub-menu http://imgur.com/6WVQ0Ri

[Gello]

Oops that's a bug. It should look like this: http://i.imgur.com/PdFQN6n.png

In poking at around, I'm seeing that too with the "Larger Window" option checked. I'll get that fixed but let me know if that's not checked for you.

[Iibis]

Yep I have Larger Window checked, didn't think to check if changing some options would fix it. :) Off-topic, I keep forgetting I have some WoW UI textures replaced by custom ones and that my Rematch looks a bit different from the default one too.

[Jerebear]

It will probably be something like this tho this is kinda ugly so it will probably change but it's the basic idea:



Also that new bit will initially be hidden with a button in the lower-left when a team has a leveling pet. Then clicking the button will expand the save/edit dialog and show those leveling options. (And keep it open when editing other teams.) Putting editboxes right in a user's face will make them wonder what to put in there, when they don't need to put anything.

And yeah a tooltip on the checkbutton will explain what it's for, like "Magic and Mechanical pets can often survive a round of hits and live through the whole battle. Check this to allow magic and mechanical pets that don't meet the minimum health to load for this team." or something less wordy.

Thanks guys for the feedback. The coding part is often easier than the planning so this is a great help.

one other thought: min health can be off if the carry pet takes extra damage or less damage from the hit in question. Will there be a way to either exclude a particular family type or set an alternate min health for a particular family type (or some other solution)?

For example, I might set a min health for Flowing Pandaren spirit because I know there are no more than X number of tidal waves cast. However, if it is an elemental pet, they take 50% more damage, so the health of an elemental carry pet needs to be 50% higher. Conversely, a magic pet takes 33% less damage so it only needs 67% of the min health.

Not sure of a solution for this at this time, but wanted to at least throw the problem set out.