I have a character named Shendare. They have a mercenary I have purchased a potion to rename Shenda. It is impossible for me or any other player to /target Shenda or /assist Shenda. The commands appear to reach Shendare as they're going down the list of nearby names and decide that since the name starts with what was asked, they stop looking further, meaning they never reach the intended target or assist person, Shenda. I have tried surrounding the mercenary's name with quotes, or trailing the name with spaces, commas, and other non-letter characters hoping it would stop at the first non-letter character, but no joy. If I want to target Shenda in a macro for buffs, heals, messages, or anything else, I have to use something like /target group3. However, the group listing can be different from login to login, requiring that I change all such macros to point to the new group slot number. I can set an xtarget slot to "My Mercenary", but no one else nor my other boxed characters can do that for targeting my mercenary in their buff, heal, etc. macros. It can be quite maddening. Eventually I'll probably have to spend the Daybreak Cash to buy another potion to change the mercenary's name to something else, but I shouldn't have to spend money to get around this unintended and undesired game behavior. And it must be happening to other players, who don't go through the extra effort of coming to the forums to post a bug report about it. Request: Commands like /target and /assist that pick out a target by name should remember the best partial match as they iterate through the nearby entity list, but should continue searching for an exact match. If no exact match is found, they can use the closest partial match that it came across in the list. Alternatively: If the command is issued with the name enclosed in quotes, only use an exact match. No partial matching. Thank you.
The other players that need to target your mercenary could also manually target your mercenary and assign one of their extended target slots to "current target." Then /xtar would work for them, too. If they're in group, they can also use the F2-F6 keys to target group members (F1 should target themselves). But I'd think that would get as confusing as changing the /target group# you mentioned. For assisting the mercenary, I can't remember if you can assign them the group assist role, but if you can, you can use the /assist group command or set an extended target slot to group assist's target. As for changing your mercenary's name, you could try petitioning saying something like you didn't realize the game would have problems by naming the mercenary a subset of another character's name and ask if they could please change your mercenary's name to <insert desired name>.
The fix for this (and may require changing your hotkey everytime you zone but in your case it should work fine if it is another name that is longer but the same so not exact match) is all eq names end in 2 numbers (I am not 100% sure if they start 00 or 01) but if you do /target a_spiderling01 vs /target a_spiderling02 it will always target the correct npc. So change your /assist Shenda to /assist Shenda01 or /assist Shenda02. I don't know the logic for how it decides the number but my guess would be it is based on their creation order. I would try that if you are having issues and it should fix the problem for you. If it is starting the wrong npc from not an exact match the number should work. The same goes for underscore although it is rare and normally only old school titles that showup sometimes with underscore instead of a space but the meaning is the same so the underscore shouldn't affects /target or /assist.
I kind of like the greedy match for things such as re-using hotbuttons. For example I can have my box set up to follow "legolass", and if I have an alt "legolasss", the hotbutton on the still works. There should be an option for doing an exact match though for commands, such as quotes, equals, or some argument.
There is an easy way to fix this - don't have a mercenary whose name is a shorter version of yours. Any code fix for this would be troubling and could produce other side effects, as it digs into choosing targets by partial names. Were I a dev, I'd choose not to address this, instead just advising to change your merc name.
This is simiilar to the bug affecting my Shaman. She is unable to target her pet unless specifically clicking on the pet name. Typing /target Puddin does not work where it used to. I petitioned this but was told to bug report it here.
