The GTN was already tedious enough, but now they've made it 100x worse by not allowing search terms shorter than 3 letters.

No more searching for "Armoring 27" as 27 is too short, instead you have to search for armoring and get all armorings on the GTN, and if you filter to purple and level 50 (which is extra clicks not needed before) you get all the rank 23, 24, 25 & 26 armorings on the GTN as well.

Whoever made this change did not think it through at all. This is a poor design decision for both crafters trying to sell items and consumers trying to buy them.

EDIT: Fixed in patch 1.7.1 - Thanks BioWare!

Multiple threads about this both here and on the Customer Service forum.

My guess it's not in the Patch Notes because it's a bug, not a feature.

Multiple threads about this both here and on the Customer Service forum.

 

My guess it's not in the Patch Notes because it's a bug, not a feature.

I'd be inclined to agree with you except for the fact that if you mouse over the Search text field in the GTN it says all words must be at least 3 letters long, so it was an intentional change at some point by someone at BioWare.

I think what the intention was that you must have at least 3 letters in the box, not that every world must be 3 or more letters long. Probably a minor programming slip up, that can hopefully be quickly fixed. It makes no sense to limit it in this way and I hope they fix it, whether it's a bug or not.

This is what happens when a company who lost most of their QA department refuses to take advantage of the test server. I'd be surprised if this was the only bug that comes with 1.7.

I'd be inclined to agree with you except for the fact that if you mouse over the Search text field in the GTN it says all words must be at least 3 letters long, so it was an intentional change at some point by someone at BioWare.

All words, yes. I imagine that some harried or inexperienced programmer unintentionally changed whatever regular expression is used to validate the input. It would be easy to screw this up so that strings of numeric characters are treated the same as strings of alphabetic characters.

Proof of sloppy coding and even sloppier QA, probably. But not proof that 'Bioware hates crafters'.

The GTN was already tedious enough, but now they've made it 100x worse by not allowing search terms shorter than 3 letters.

 

No more searching for "Armoring 27" as 27 is too short, instead you have to search for armoring and get all armorings on the GTN, and if you filter to purple and level 50 (which is extra clicks not needed before) you get all the rank 23, 24, 25 & 26 armorings on the GTN as well.

 

Whoever made this change did not think it through at all. This is a poor design decision for both crafters trying to sell items and consumers trying to buy them.

or you could just search for "Armoring 27" and solve all your problems in less the 1 second

or you could just search for "Armoring 27" and solve all your problems in less the 1 second

That's the whole point of this thread. Today's patch broke that and you can't do a search that includes a word/number less than 3 letters/digits long. Even with the " " the search doesn't work.

or you could just search for "Armoring 27" and solve all your problems in less the 1 second

As the OP said, the problem is you can't search on 'Armoring 27' anymore. If you type in 'armoring' the (Search) button at the bottom turns happily white/active but as soon as you get to the '27' part it greys out/goes inactive.

its a crappy bug. temp solution for it though is to limit your level. like say with armoring 27 - limit it by lvl 50 to 50 usable. you'd still get all the lvl 50 armoring, not just highest end ones, but at least it will shrink down the results a little.

I hope they fix this bug soon, because it makes comparing prices before listing crafting stuff extremely tedious

or the bug when posting items to sell and 0s in the price get wiped out when its a leading zero. I like to let it auto fill the sell price but then change around the leading number. When i do that to items with 0 as the 2nd numeral it wipes it out. Ive accidentally posted things in the hundreds rather than the thousands that way a few times. I reported the bug within days of the games launch direct as an in game bug.

Buying and selling on the gtn is by no means a clear cut affair. I just wish they would fix it so you didn't have to select such a finite set of options when searching for things. I don't always know what category somethign is in or don't want to limit my search to a sub cat so instead i have to keep drilling into things searching and searching.

Looks like we're off to a good start for 1.7.

Seriously. How do you even screw the programming up like that.

Did Bioware hire some kiddies who took CSIII or something? Ugh.

Seriously. How do you even screw the programming up like that.

Did Bioware hire some kiddies who took CSIII or something? Ugh.

I keep hearing theres quite a shortage on devs, especially good experienced ones. However i have yet to see the market open up for me to make a vertical move!

To keep profit margins in the red i imagine they preferred to hire most of thier devs as code monkeys with no experience so they could pay less. That being said even the best of us fall prey to accidental bugs often enough. You would think it would be easy to catch, but when your tasked to jump into thousands of lines of code you didnt write it does not take much to change a variable you didn't realize had that global a scope of reliance. 90% of my job as a web dev is going into other devs code and cleanign up messes or updating obsolete code.

As the OP said, the problem is you can't search on 'Armoring 27' anymore. If you type in 'armoring' the (Search) button at the bottom turns happily white/active but as soon as you get to the '27' part it greys out/goes inactive.

yeah, my fault misread the OP. This is bug is lame.

I keep hearing theres quite a shortage on devs, especially good experienced ones. However i have yet to see the market open up for me to make a vertical move!

 

To keep profit margins in the red i imagine they preferred to hire most of thier devs as code monkeys with no experience so they could pay less. That being said even the best of us fall prey to accidental bugs often enough. You would think it would be easy to catch, but when your tasked to jump into thousands of lines of code you didnt write it does not take much to change a variable you didn't realize had that global a scope of reliance. 90% of my job as a web dev is going into other devs code and cleanign up messes or updating obsolete code.

Oh, I know. I'm in web dev, too, and I know that my experience is obviously a bit different than game dev, but I have definitely had times where I fixed something without knowing how, or broken something and having no idea why because I swore I didn't change anything, let alone when I have to work on some legacy code that's a complete mess.

My issue is that SWTOR seems to have these sort of issues after every patch and they are SO SLOW to fix them, which really speaks to some sort of incompetence rather than an occasional mistake.

I don't envy the SWTOR devs. I bet it's pretty miserable to be them, especially since by all accounts they are working with an uncommented, unoptimized base engine. I wouldn't do that even if they paid me a million bucks. Not worth the years it'd take off my life.

Having the GTN refuse to search for anything if ANY word is < 3 characters is way different than looking at the total length or whatever. Just seems like a really goofy mistake to make. Then again, after the /getdown bug, nothing surprises me anymore.

Seriously. How do you even screw the programming up like that.

Did Bioware hire some kiddies who took CSIII or something? Ugh.

It doesn't take a genius to figure it out

The search field tokenizes the terms on white space. Searching for terms that are very short tends to be computationally expensive, whether the terms are ANDed or ORed.

Would a more advanced tokenizer be better? Sure. Does this mean that the devs were stupid? Nope. It means they were following the most common implementation of large-set searching for strings. The most common implementations suggest that search keys are limited to no less than 3 characters in order to prevent the search engine from generating an inordinate amount of load per search request. Loads of respected, high-profile software uses this model. Perhaps if you had taken CSIII you'd have known that.

The most common implementations suggest that search keys are limited to no less than 3 characters in order to prevent the search engine from generating an inordinate amount of load per search request.

Ah yes the Ivory Tower solution.

Perhaps if you had taken CSIII you'd have known that.

And then promptly failed your human factors class. A firm grasp of theory is a necessity to begin design but designers should never ever be a slave to theory. Theories are just a simplified model of reality that ignore certain complexities. Usually those complexities have negligible affect on the output, but every so often you get bit.

The engineer's task is to balance the competing requirements. Minimize server load but keep it usable. The 3 character per term limit really pooched usability. High marks for theory, but a big solid F for the project.

Hi folks, I just wanted to step in here and apologize that this change did not make the patch notes earlier today. This was due to a miscommunication and we have now updated the patch notes to reflect this change. Please note that this change was made in order to improve overall GTN performance:

GTN

• Searches on the GTN are now limited to 4,000 results (500 pages). If this limit is reached, players will need to use other search criteria to refine the search.
   
  
• In order to improve overall GTN performance, when searching the GTN, each word must now be at least 3 characters long to be accepted.
  

Please keep in mind that we will be monitoring player feedback and performance with these changes and we will update if we have any new information. Thank you and apologies once again.

Please keep in mind that we will be monitoring player feedback and performance with these changes and we will update if we have any new information. Thank you and apologies once again.

Terrible change. The GTN is clunky enough as it is, and it takes long enough to search for things as it is. It's far quicker to just type "Item 27" than narrow the fields down to item level 50 - 50 and then sort through a few pages of 24s, 25s, 26s, and 27s (which there always are on the Harbinger) to find what I want. This might be a minor change to some, but I do this throughout the day on multiple characters, and it begins to add up.

Hi folks, I just wanted to step in here and apologize that this change did not make the patch notes earlier today. This was due to a miscommunication and we have now updated the patch notes to reflect this change. Please note that this change was made in order to improve overall GTN performance:

 

GTN

• Searches on the GTN are now limited to 4,000 results (500 pages). If this limit is reached, players will need to use other search criteria to refine the search.
   
  
• In order to improve overall GTN performance, when searching the GTN, each word must now be at least 3 characters long to be accepted.
  

 

Please keep in mind that we will be monitoring player feedback and performance with these changes and we will update if we have any new information. Thank you and apologies once again.

WHAT.

So this is an INTENDED change?

Are you TRYING to make me quit this game? Look, BW, I want SO BADLY to like your game, but it seems that you are hell-bent on making me as irritated as possible. Just put it back to the way it was, please. My GTN experience is bad enough already.

I CAN'T WAIT TO FILTER THROUGH ALL THE 50 PURPLE ARMORINGS/MODS/ENHANCEMENTS FOR PAGES WHILE TRYING TO PRICE OUT MY CRAFTED PIECES. I AM SO GLAD THAT INSTEAD OF ONLY SEEING 27 ARMORINGS/MODS/ENHANCEMENTS, I NOW SEE EVERY 50 PURPLE WHICH MAKES PRICING TAKE MINUTES INSTEAD OF SECONDS. THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE /snark

Seriously. I play this and Rift and using the auction house on Rift is like paradise compared to this game.

I CAN RIGHT-CLICK AND IT WILL AUTO INPUT THE ITEM INTO THE SEARCH, IT'S BEAUTIFUL ;____;

YOU MEAN I CAN INPUT THE PRICE I WANT PER UNIT AND IT WILL AUTO CALCULATE THE TOTAL COST OF THE STACK I'M PUTTING UP? HOT DAMN, SIGN ME UP

Too bad the rep grind on Rift is absolutely horrendous or I'd have switched already due to usability alone.

Terrible change. The GTN is clunky enough as it is, and it takes long enough to search for things as it is. It's far quicker to just type "Item 27" than narrow the fields down to item level 50 - 50 and then sort through a few pages of 24s, 25s, 26s, and 27s (which there always are on the Harbinger) to find what I want. This might be a minor change to some, but I do this throughout the day on multiple characters, and it begins to add up.

I have to agree. When looking for specific mods, one typically uses the number designation to limit to those specifically. I don;t need to see, 18, 20, 24 when I am looking for a 27.

Very very ill thought out change.

Hello,

Not being able to search for piece # is seriously affecting my GTN usage. I use it daily and constantly, and this change literally stopped my commerce. I went from having 3 pages of items listed to only 2 items.

Just a suggestion, make the search validation 3 letters minimum if the word is alphabetic, and don't add constraints if it's numeric, so we can do searches like "adv hilt 5". This is very important to us traders!

Please don't ignore our feedback

Regards