The recent change to the follow command to allow following by name has broken the Follow Target feature. I'm not sure if this was intentional but I can see no reason why the %t mechanism should have been deleted. It's not a big deal but will require everyone redoing their hotkeys to just say "/follow" while having a toon targeted.
Its not a bug, because /follow never had any parameters, anything after follow was just ignored. Follow only ever worked on the targetted PC, so %t would have been useless. Since the patch, follow optionally takes a parameter of a PC name. %t is not a PC name. It will still work as normal without any paramters by following the target.
Prior to this patch "/follow %t" would have worked because the %t would have been ignored since /follow only worked for the targeted PC. It should work after the patch, although it's basically pointless since just /follow would do the same thing to follow the targeted PC. %t should translate to the name of your target, so if you have a PC targeted it should work.
I posted this earlier and got the same response. In theory, it should still work; however, it isn't. It did before. I added a /follow Scila (I know shouldn't have to) after the /follow %t command and it worked. While I understand the logic of just a /follow and whomever you have targeted should work, the day of patch it wasn't working. Adding the name to my hotbutton on the second line fixed it.
It only had the appearance of working, because all slash commands ignore positional paramters they are not coded for instead of throwing an error. Probably if you asked 99% of the userbase about "/follow %t" you would get a "huh, what?". Despite people inserting %t after the follow command, it was only ever executing "/follow" against the targetted character. Just "/follow" worked before the patch, and it still works after the path. Using an unknown parameter in a slash command has never worked, and now the first paramter is used so anything else there wont work. Based on there being slash commands that do interpret % replacements (not all do), that would be the theory, but not all commands respect replacement parameters. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/game-update-notes-september-20th-2023.292661 - The /follow command now supports the name of another player, as an argument, in place of targeting that player.
Not to give the devs a hard time on this, but if it appeared to work before, and appears not to work now, that's a UI change which will impact people who now have to a) recognize the issue (like when they leave their boxes behind in a zone) and b) figure out the fix and delete the %t. Ta.
I believe the above statement is incorrect. And hopefully so. If you mouse click on a toon, then type "/follow" you will still follow the mob, as it should be. If you type "/follow Burt" and Burt is in range you will follow them also, as stated above. So it's a an alternate way of doing it, and does not replace targeting a toon (thank god.)
BTW I would imagine similar thoughts/discussions would relate to /assist. Right now /assist (name, %t, target) all seem to work equivalently.
Right now, if you tap twice on your steering wheel while pressing on the car's accelerator pedal, your car will go faster. Then a manufacturer adds some buttons to their steering wheels. Oh no! Now you can't speed up the car? You were doing something irrelevant before and weren't made fun of for being silly. That was a version of kind, but now that something has actual meaning. Only, your input is still nonsense. The correct resolution is to stop doing the irrelevant thing you were doing before.
Despite it previously being unnecessary, I've made a ticket for us to fix the %t handling on /follow. Thanks
This isn't a bug, your previous "/follow %T" was just you adding %T when it did nothing. Just change it to "/follow" and it will be exactly the same as before. There are actual bugs that need addressed instead of fixing something that isn't broken.
I'm so confused by this "bug." "/follow" (without anything added) just means "follow my target." This reported "/follow %t" also means "follow my target." You're literally adding 0 functionality by adding "%t" to your command. "%t" on its own does nothing unless you have someone targeted. (Prior to this patch) "/follow" did nothing unless you had someone targeted. Why would you ever do this? You don't do "/pet attack %t", you just do "/pet attack". Sure, feel free to update it so that the command just translates "%t" to "target," but it's such an non issue caused by misunderstanding the command system.
This ticket was written as part player request, and part training (it makes for a good learning experience for new engineers). Fixing the %t argument makes it even better for teaching.
Except % parameters are for output, never input. Having the server side process a % parameter can open up security bugs. (like buffer overruns)
Where was that written? Not trying to be snotty, your comment sort of makes sense, but I've never heard of this before.
It's implied in the command. %t is always used for output - we want the client to tell us something - in this case the %t command returns the name of the person targeted. You appear to simply have misunderstood how /follow %t is interpreted by the server. The %t was never needed. Since this latest patch, /follow now looks for an argument after the command. The server is treating the %t as an argument to /follow. And the reason it was throwing an error was because the %t was an invalid argument for /follow. This was fixed. So feel free to %t your /follow. Just know that using it that way is redundant and unnecessary.
