Is There Anything Worse

...than unsorted lists.  Of course there are, but unsorted lists (including, if not especially, multi-column "lists", aka "tables") are one of my (many?) pet peeves (maybe it's the engineer in me [*burp* - 'scuse me...], but unsorted lists just grind my gears [pun intended].  And what does one feed a pet peeve anyway?  "Peeve Chow"?).  How hard is it to sort - or at least allow to be sorted - a list (in this post "list" also refers to "tables")?  And yet, it seems that unsorted lists are on the rise.  Are today's coders just lazy?  Did no one ever bother to teach them about sorting functions?


Neverwinter (NWO) is notorious for unsorted lists.  The worst offender?  The completed quests log.  The completed quests are completely unsorted; not sorted by level, not sorted by name, and not even sorted by 'completion date-time'.  And as far as I can tell, no way to sort it either.  Ay-yi-yi!  Want to know if you've already run a quest?  You'll have to search the entire list until you spot it; might even take you multiple passes.  (Now, I have not bothered searching the completed quest log in some time, so I suppose it is possible it might be sorted by now - but I wouldn't bet on it.)

Of course Turbine has its own bunch of unsorted lists, too.  Note that I said "Turbine" and not "DDO".  That's because LotRO (Turbine's other* MMORPG) has similar issues with unsorted lists, as well.  The one that immediately comes to mind is the server list in the launcher. Though to be fair, it is "semi-sorted" as it 'tries' to sort by "last played".  Generally speaking, the very last server you played is on top, but after that, the sorting fails, miserably (which did not used to be the case, but only since a few updates ago).  I won't mention that the 'timer' function that tells you how long ago you played on a particular server is also somewhat borked, now, as well.  But I digress...

In DDO, the Adventure Compendium somehow got borked a few updates ago; it used to be sorted, by default, on descending level - meaning the highest level dungeons were listed at the top, and lowest level dungeons at the bottom.  Now, as far as I know, there was never any "secondary" sorting (i.e. those of the same level were/are unsorted past level; that is, not secondarily sorted alphabetically or anything) - but I could be wrong on that.  However, currently, the default sorting has vanished and when first opened, it is completely unsorted.  Fortunately, you can at least click (or double-click) one of the columns to sort (in ascending/descending order), but it doesn't hold through zone transitions.  Kind of frustrating (at least, it is for me and my engineering-ish ways).  It's a non-critical bug that, well, bugs me.

Ah, if only pet peeves fed on bugs...that would take care of two problems at once.  Either that, or make things worse.

With my luck, it'd make things much, much worse...


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* Yes, yes - there is "Asheron's Call" (AC) and AC2 - but they're...un-dead?  That is, Turbine is looking for "people" willing to take the responsibility of operating the servers off their hands, and there are no more updates from Turbine, but you *can* still buy and play them (see the AC fora [sorry, "forums"] for more info, if you're interested).  But "Infinite Crisis" is not an MMORPG.  It is a MOBA (that's "Multi-player Online Battle Arena" - aka PvP "only", so far as I know).