New Portraits feature makes it difficult to leave commendations

The new system of loading up character Portraits for leaving commendations has made it difficult for me to give commendations to players that I think deserve it.

The current problem is that the player commendations window takes far too long to load on my application due to the game needing to pull and compile the character portraits. This is compounded by the longstanding arrangement of only being able to leave commendations for players still in the duty.

As a consequence, players can leave a duty quickly and I'm not able to give any commendations. Previously, if I saw a player that I had wished to leave a commendation for start making for the exit I could at least make an effort to quickly open the commendations window and click on their name, but now the window takes too long to open.

This has other negative consequences, such as players who wish to get the weekly challenge log entry "Exercising the Right" completed may find that every duty they've gone into that week has had its members all leave before their computer could load the commendations window.

Suggested solutions:

1. Fix the current commendation system.
   
   Its been a longstanding problem that needs to be resolved; sometimes I really want to comm someone but they have already left the duty. Make it so you can still comm someone after they have left.
   
   (and none of this "If they left, they shouldn't get the comm" stuff. no one wants to stick around after a clear, especially if they don't have a lot of time to play the game in a given day and they just need to finish daily roulettes.)
   
2. Revert to the old system in some form or another.
   
   Either bring it back, OR add an option for players with slower machines/connections to not load instant portraits OR load the list of names first, then load the fancy character portraits.

At the end of the day I do like the character portraits, but they shouldn't interfere with gameplay elements like this.

I agree that i never knew the reason why we couldn’t comm someone after they left.

However, I think at this point, you shouldn’t worry too much about commending them, they know that leaving early meaning forfeiting any comms. So if even those players literally just dont care, I think you should not lose sleep over it.

You can turn off portraits for the commendation screen.

I play on PS4 and have no issues.

Uncheck this box:
https://i.imgur.com/yqZQG0H.png

I definitely want to be able to commend someone who has left the instance.

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Originally Posted by Zfz

I definitely want to be able to commend someone who has left the instance.

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If someone leaves the instance before you have a chance to comm them, they either do not need or do not care about comms, and changing the system to allow you to comm people who do not need or care would cost a lot just to add nothing.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

If someone leaves the instance before you have a chance to comm them, they either do not need or do not care about comms, and changing the system to allow you to comm people who do not need or care would cost a lot just to add nothing.

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I'd rather look at it the other way: why should people be forced to stay and wait for commendations, if they want them? And the game doesn't tell you that you have got the commendations or not until you exit the instance. So the best way is to have the system allow giving commendations to people who were present there when the instance was completed. That way, it doesn't matter what people do.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

If someone leaves the instance before you have a chance to comm them, they either do not need or do not care about comms, and changing the system to allow you to comm people who do not need or care would cost a lot just to add nothing.

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They already spent effort adding the system to the game. Spending more to fix a flaw doesn't seem that illogical.

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Originally Posted by VictorSpoils

They already spent effort adding the system to the game. Spending more to fix a flaw doesn't seem that illogical.

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It would add literally nothing to the game. The people who left don't need or don't want the comms. The comms are meaningless to them. Adding the ability for you to give them meaningless points would have the same effect to them as if you just didn't comm anybody. Adding the ability to comm them, therefore, would be a waste of time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rongway

It would add literally nothing to the game. The people who left don't need or don't want the comms. The comms are meaningless to them. Adding the ability for you to give them meaningless points would have the same effect to them as if you just didn't comm anybody. Adding the ability to comm them, therefore, would be a waste of time.

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There's that word again. But nobody "needs" commendations; that's not the point. The power lies with the commender, not the comendee. As pointed out above, the latter leave specifically because of the flaw. This would hardly differ from any of the other minor QoL changes that took 10 years to add anyways.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

It would add literally nothing to the game. The people who left don't need or don't want the comms. The comms are meaningless to them. Adding the ability for you to give them meaningless points would have the same effect to them as if you just didn't comm anybody. Adding the ability to comm them, therefore, would be a waste of time.

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Not at all a waste. There is a weekly challenge for giving a number of commendations. So being able to give to them is a good thing for the giver as well.

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Originally Posted by VictorSpoils

There's that word again. But nobody "needs" commendations; that's not the point. The power lies with the commender, not the comendee. As pointed out above, the latter leave specifically because of the flaw. This would hardly differ from any of the other minor QoL changes that took 10 years to add anyways.

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i think the point they are getting across to is that the people leaving them don't want the comms, not that they are pointless or don't mean anything to anyone in the game, like for example i main a tank, i get a lot of comms i already reached achievement milestones for comms and im only a few hundred away from reaching 5,000 comms as of writing this, now that i got the rewards i don't wait at the end of runs for a com, ill just leave as soon as i can because id rather the comms go to someone else like the DPS who get less of them majority of the time, if you add a system to comm people after they leave then youll be comming someone who no longer needs them opposed to giving them to someone else whos still in there hanging out hoping they may get 1 anything over 3,000 doesn't have any benefits, sure you could tell people not to comm you after, but chances are they already chose before you can let them know, therefore leaving before you can be voted for just ensures that someone else will get it and takes less time than writing out to not give me it, that doesn't mean it couldn't be done though without being a waste, they can just change the system to allow for people to be voted even after leaving but also have a player setting somewhere which you can set to allow people to commend you after you leave or if you just don't want any at all to exempt yourself from them completely, that would probably be a better system.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

If someone leaves the instance before you have a chance to comm them, they either do not need or do not care about comms, and changing the system to allow you to comm people who do not need or care would cost a lot just to add nothing.

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It doesn't matter if the recipient doesn't care about comms. The givers care.

I don't really care about getting commendations either, but I also don't think people should be prevented from giving me one just because I didn't want to wait around for them to watch cutscenes, or whatever.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

It doesn't matter if the recipient doesn't care about comms. The givers care.

I don't really care about getting commendations either, but I also don't think people should be prevented from giving me one just because I didn't want to wait around for them to watch cutscenes, or whatever.

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It matters because adding the ability to comm people who have left the instance already necessitates additional data integrity precautions. That is, whenever you enter or leave an instance, your character data is transfered from the world server to the instance server or vice versa, and comms after the instance server transfers your character data back to the world server have to be dealt with a certain way to make sure that they get counted correctly. In allowing this it's possible to introduce a situation where someone tries to give a comm during the transfer, which can lead to the comm not counting or possibly counting twice, depending on the specific timing of how things get handled.

It's simply not worth the time spent coding and testing this thoroughly when the person who would be receiving the comm literally doesn't care. The people who want to give comms can find other people to give them to.