Anyone know what this is about - just happened PVP_TIER_MAIL_TITLE

Received this in my inbox in the game - seems a but out of place

Never seen that in mail but once or twice itā€™s happened to me with other rewards.

Try restarting the game, Iā€™m guessing the mail title will have returned to normal.

Restart didnā€™t change anything.

Weā€™ll see what @Ozball says - he knows everything (OF Course Wizard of OZ)

1 Like

I saw it this morning. I thought it was a garbled notification that Iā€™d levelled up; however, I do not remember the items that were included in that mail. There were two, though. Might have been event key and glory.

It means the devs screwed up and forgot to convert a localization key to the localized text. Itā€™s a sign of an English-speaking team not used to writing localized code, bad QA processes that donā€™t test each language, and a lack of professional practices like code reviews. Alternatively: ā€œdeadlines so tight we canā€™t follow these basic practices, our leadership understands dollars but not managing development projectsā€.

Iā€™m playing English version :slight_smile: No translation needed

That looks like an unintended side effect of changes to PVP reward collection for the next update. Since we never intended for the current release to get these rewards through the mail, we never put the text in, but it looks like weā€™ll need to change thatā€¦

You have not lost anything, the rewards just came in the mail instead of having to be collected when entering the PVP menu.

Sorry about the bug and thanks for reporting it!

3 Likes

Thanks Cliffy -I think I know why it happened btw. I went from Guild Wars to Dungeon and didnā€™t stop over at PVPā€¦ finished and logged out. Came back an hour later to collect tribute.

Yes, but when you write a localized application it tends to go like this:

You write a localization file that says ā€œPVP_TIER_MAIL_TITLEā€ means ā€œPvP Tier Rewardā€ and save that as the English file. You make a bunch of other files, one for each language, and make sure those know ā€œPVP_TIER_MAIL_TITLEā€ means whatever the correct phrase is for that language.

In your program, at some point you check the userā€™s current language and load the right localization file for that language. In code, when youā€™re getting ready to send a mail, instead of:

mail.Title = "PvP Tier Reward"

You write something a little more complex like:

mail.Title = Localization.Lookup("PVP_TIER_MAIL_TITLE")

That Lookup() function consults the localization file and returns the correct string for the current language. It has to return SOMETHING, so if something goes wrong and it canā€™t find the information in the file, one safe implementation is ā€œjust return whatever the ā€˜keyā€™ was.ā€ Much more work and thereā€™s risk of a game crash so itā€™s a very sensible behavior.

Anyway the point is, ā€œEven if youā€™re an English speaker writing the code for the English game, everyone has to write localized text.ā€ The way an English-speaking team tends to miss these errors is one of two coincidences:

  • The dev only ever tests in English and doesnā€™t notice some languageā€™s file wasnā€™t updated.
  • The dev tries to be smarter than the other dev by always testing in a different language, but doesnā€™t test them ALL and misses a file.

We have a neat process on my team that tends to make both of those mistakes above still manifest in ā€œyou missed a fileā€ bugs being obvious during testing.

Which is more or less the technical aspect behind what CliffyA said.

Looks like theyā€™re changing how PvP tier rewards are distributed in the next release. Somehow, some of that code inadvertently made it into production. But since the devs didnā€™t expect this code to be released, the localization file with the right information didnā€™t come along with it.

(Itā€™sā€¦ kind of concerning code can accidentally get released?)

1 Like

Looks like they got the text updated, a member of my guild got a strange notification in the mail today.