Character Backup

My idea for a character backup was inspired by this thread. One of the assumptions I make is that each character has a unique hidden ID of some sort. I think this is true because if you make a new character, put a piece of armor in storage, delete the character, and create a new character with the exact same name and properties (profession, gender, hair, etc), the new character CANNOT equip the armor that was placed into storage.....despite having the exact same name. With that said, here's how I would envision a character backup mechanism:

When a character leaves the GW world (through logging off or disconnect), the server would save a backup of the character. The saved backup would have the following three properties:

1) It would store all information about a character EXCEPT the amount of gold and any items the character might be holding (weapons, armor, runes, materials, etc.)
2) Storage, faction, and unlocks would NOT be backed up as they are tied to the account, not the character
3) A saved backup CANNOT be deleted by any player logging into the account

Since items and gold would not be saved, you would not be able to move those things to another character/account, delete, and restore to dupe them. In addition, there would be a button added to the lower right corner of the character selection screen labeled "Restore". Like the "Create" button, the "Restore" button would only be active when an empty character slot was selected.

Now, here's how it would work: When a character is deleted through the character selection screen, the character name and unique ID are reserved for a period of time (2 weeks? month?) and flagged for permanent deletion. This is to prevent someone else from making a character with the same name right away so that the player has ample time to restore their character. Should the time period expire without the character being restored, then the backup is automatically deleted and the character is lost forever.

Example: Say someone breaks into your account and decides to steal all of your items/gold before deleting your character(s).....but they were nice enough to not change your password so that you could log in to GW and find out that you've been looted. All the hours of work that you spent doing missions and quests, getting titles, and capping elites for your character(s) has now been a waste.....not so fast! A character backup system is in place and the thief was unable to delete your character's backup file. So you push the wonderful little "Restore" button and (after some sort of confirmation dialog) your character appears on the selection screen. You select that character and open the hero window to find out that your character is almost exactly as you left it. You still have all of your titles (including whatever progress you have made on unmaxed ones), skills, and elite caps in addition to your current progress on quests and missions. The only damage that has been done is in the form of missing items and gold.

I'm sure that the idea can be revised and improved and clearly, I have no clue about the inner workings of the GW database or servers.....but I don't think that this would be terribly difficult to implement and it would help those that get struck by this sort of e-thuggery.

-Tom

It would be a really big suprise if Anet would not backup the content of their servers, so technically, they are allready doing it.

Whether they are willing to restore the backup, i.e. rollback all data on your account to the status before the intrusion is another question. On the other hand, if e.g. some servers would go off in flames, or a major software error would corrupt all accounts, Anet will definitely restore the backup.

Character restorations minus the items/gold would not be easily exploitable. Sounds like an excellent idea, though I'm fairly sure that full system backups would already have this information captured. The only problem is manually digging up a single character's record for restoration from DASD tape drives.

Of course the database is backed up. Anyone thinking otherwise is retarded. Does no one recall the rollback a few months ago? Did Anet just make up all the numbers and randomly assign stuff to account? No.
Why this won't happen:

How will you prove your account got hacked, and that you didn't give your password to your buddy from school/work/wherever?

The database is live, and changes every second. To do what you propose would require a snapshot taken, and stored someplace, of the exact state of an account at every logoff. This is completely unrealistic. Or would you rather have the entire game shutdown for 10 hours again to restore some asshats missing ecto because they got "hacked".

Huh? Most modern databases have no problems with restoring individual records so long as they are not presently being accessed and locked out.

Clearly they do back-up as roll backs are a possibility.

Oh and i like this diea, even if it did keep characters gold / items it doesnt matter, as it records on d/c // log-off, so if you move gold or items into storage when you log off it would still recall the new amount not the old.

I dont care that you loose all your cash etc, but ive put alot of effort into some characters and would be upset if my account got hacked.

This was kind of why I thought of the idea. They're already backing things up as it is, so creating this file shouldn't be too much more overhead for the servers. Also, this solution would avoid the need for ANet to do anything to restore an account.....it would be up to the player to do so with the mechanism provided by ANet.

-Tom

If you re-read my proposal, you would see that I said that item/gold data would NOT be saved. It would be too easy to dupe them if that were the case. So if someone hacked your account and took all of the ectos before deleting your character(s), you would not get your ectos back upon restoring your character as the backup would NOT save information about any items or gold that were either on your character or in storage.

-Tom

EDIT: Just thought of something else. If you're worried about the servers saving the state of a character (not account as you said) at every logoff/disconnect, then ANet could just add a field to the database that acts like the deletion flag I proposed in the OP. I think that might even be good enough as you would get the same effect of not saving items/gold (since the hacker would have taken them), but still keeping all of the other information.

In my solution, it would matter if the backup saved gold/items because it is not saving the state of storage. So if the backup saved gold information for a character, a player could dump his/her gold into storage, delete, restore, and have just doubled the money on his/her character. Same thing could be done with items. So it's essential that gold/item data is NOT saved in this backup system in order to avoid problems with duping.

-Tom

I found two threads that basically label this suggestion as impossible:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10052318
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10052299

Oops. Didn't think to look at the Game/Dev tracker for previous responses to this type of thing. Thanks for pointing out those threads.

-Tom