Many of you know we’ve been working on a way to improve the combat log merging. It’s been live for a week and we’ve got some fancy new updates incoming!

The challenge: Easy-as-pie merging!

That can’t be so hard, right? Well… there are a few big hurdles:

Time zones: everyone needs the right one (you’d be surprised how often someone chooses the wrong one, myself included *blush*)

1. Extra ‘stuff’ in logs gets ‘false positives’ on raid matches, especially if you have extra players in your log from pre-operation questing or battlegrounds.
2. Concurrency issues: what happens if 2 people upload their logs at the same time and want to merge? Giant Robot explosions, that’s what happens.

There are a few easy ways to fix this, but Mr. Robot doesn’t EVER take the easy way out… silly robots… but here’s what was on the drawing board until Mr. Robot fed it into the industrial cross-shredder…

1. He could have 1 person upload all of the logs, then time zones can be offset, Mr. Robot wouldn’t have to look for matches, since you just made them for him… it solves all of the above problems. Conclusion: too inconvenient for humans.
2. He could require a guild setup, where you make a guild and drop combat logs into a ‘dropbox’ of sorts. But then you’d need guild management controls, the ability to add random puggers, as well as a login. Conclusion: too cumbersome.
3. He could require a ‘raid tag’ of sorts, a tag you type in that tells Mr. Robot it’s ok to merge other logs with this tag. Conclusion: not too bad, actually, but he still really wants to avoid this if possible.

So, what amazing setup did Mr. Robot hold out for, and achieve? Friday’s launch will update the merging logic as follows:

• Any user can upload logs and add to a merged group (logged in or not) – this is unchanged from how it works already.
• NEW: any user who is logged in can unmerge any other log in their group-merge. Let’s say Johnny5 (not logged in) uploads a log with the wrong time zone and messed up the merge. BurnNotice (logged in) is also a part of the group-merge, he can kick Johnny5′s merge out until Johnny5 fixes his log. The reason behind this: we need some permission setting (attached to a logged in user) so that random strangers don’t go messing with your merged logs. Can you imagine the griefing if someone randomly unmerged all of your logs? So in reality, only 1 person in the group needs a login in case something in the merge is messed up.
• NEW: Logs with bad time zones can now be edited!
• NEW: If someone unmerges your log, you can still see your individual log, it will not delete the log.
• NEW: Smarter merging logic to fix the concurrency issues. So if you and your friends all upload logs at the exact same time, hoping to make Mr. Robot’s head explode.. you’ll be disappointed… because starting tonight, it will be a piece of cake for our favorite combat-bot.