In reply to: Anet and hackers

Someone got their account hacked and he lost all his characters. Considering that he has been playing for three years that is loosing huge achievements in game that required him for playing thousands of hours probably. ANet said they could do nothing to restore his account. Community replied that it is his fault and it would be "too hard" for ANet to restore his account.

Or is it? I am a software engineer myself and I work in a heavily web based company as well and wanted to share some thoughts about it.

First of all, it may or may not be his fault but that is besides the point. Even if the account wouldn't have been hacked, I have friends and guildies that accidentally deleted a toon and wanted it back but they couldn't undo their change.

So would undo deletes be a cool feature for ANet to implement?
You bet!

Should they have a backup system that is able to restore accounts to previous states?
- This is most shocking news for me as a software engineer, are you telling me they don't? Are you saying that the engineers that work for ANet didn't foresee a need to restore accounts that mean thousands of hours of game play, time invested by their fans in their game! Because if so then I can make some assertions about the skills and quality of the engineers they have hired. And this is nothing personal, this is the professional opinion of someone in the business.

Even if they hadn't provided for that situation and nothing is implemented, claims that doing this is impossible because it would require an entire SQL table to be restored, and even so it would take them a lot of time to do as people replying to the original thread suggested
- well I don't buy that, even if they have to run manual SQL commands that would not take that much, and most importantly it would not take thousands of hours which is what the affected user lost!
- and if they manually restore one or two then maybe that's an incentive for them to implement it right
- and lastly I can't imagine this being such a horrible task to implement that would take a single developer more than a month's work, unless they really did really bad with their server code, and as bad as it can be it is still doable

The bottom line is: they don't want to do it, they don't want to spend that one or two months of a developer's time on this, because that would be far too expensive, they obviously can't afford paying a developer implementing this right.

To that, I had my fair share of contact with customer support of ANet and I can add that it was not a pleasant experience at all.

And to the community: ANet is not perfect and they have plenty of room to improve, when someone does constructive criticism it does not mean they unleashed a personal attack to all members of the community that like this game.

I like this game too however that doesn't mean there is no room for better and improvements. It is *because* we like this game that we make constructive criticism of the game. Yes there is a lot of crappy criticism, but with the situation at hand I can't really find any excuse for ANet not implementing something as essential.

I don't know what other games do or don't, but other games not implementing this is definitively not an excuse as well.

PS: On a somewhat related note I've definitively seen other games being able to sell you back items you mistakenly sold to the merchant, and that is also about undoing mistakes. I would also like to see that!

PPS: And again, think about how would you feel if your account was taken over and deleted? And then think about when was the last time you changed your password? When was the last time you logged in from a friend's computer or another computer? Did you know what software was running on that computer? Do you know what software is running on *your* computer? Are you sure you have absolutely no virus/spyware? Are you sure the last site you've visited searching information about guild wars didn't install any harmful software on your computer? How many of you have used TexMod for cartography? Are you sure that was safe???

No you can't be sure. Things like this can happen unfortunately. And ANet should help you if it does not put further blame on regular users.

Even if they did put something like a backup system in, people would just abuse it and use it to make gold.

Again, that is no excuse for not helping out users in trouble. You can't build your software assuming all of your users are "criminals" trying to abuse your system!

I never said that it shouldn't be put in, maybe if they put in a system where you get your character plus skills,titles, and armor but lose all you're gold and weapons so people can't abuse it, but I know nothing about 'engineering' so I don't know if it's possible. I was just pointing out what people could have done it.

@OP

Extremely well said. I don't think I would have been able to say it as well as you did.

I am not a software engineer but I do not agree with your suggestion. Re-rolling accounts will lead to a precedence. If they do it for one they will have to do it for many others. Every time it will be a manual job. Since you do not pay monthly fees I do not think you can just demand stuff like that from them. Mostly if it involves significant costs. You should know better that they cannot just hire a new developer which will immediately start programming. In some cases it may take months till dev appropriately learns the core system. Their developers are busy with GW2 and only one is still with GW1 and I am sure he is busy as hell already.
If you buy a non-online game where all your save games are on your disk and something happens to them will you then bother game distributor to help you? Just because data is stored on their servers does not make them responsible for all the changes done by the users. I would understand your claims if it was Anets fault. But it is not. It is user/hacker who deleted them. Your suggestions are nice and welcomed but I do not like the attitude. Their customer support is another story...

I can see your point of view and i sympathise with the guy who has lost his account but the simple fact remains ,if he was''hacked'' its almost certainly 99% his own fault,we all know that the vast majority of people who get hacked ,keylogged etc etc are people who have tried to download illegal programmes to cheat.I have seen it on every single MMRPG i have ever played, from the free ones right up to final fantasy and guild wars.Will these people ever learn ?, probably not ,so why should arenanet come to the rescue when its almost certain this guy lost his account in the first place because he was downloading illegal cheats.And in reply to your final point Test Me the fact is ,it is the users responsibility to be sure the computer they use is safe and free of malicious software , not arenanets,i agree , there is always room for improvement in any game but i think as far as refusing to help ''Hacked'' players out they have it right .

When the downside of people abusing the system outweighs the possible benefits you should consider disallowing restores.

If you are a software engineer that tenet should be familiar to you, if you design something and you want it as secure as possible then thats the primary concern, not people pleasing. I fully support and agree with Anet's design choices and I'm 15 year IT veteran who has seen what the effect is of putting security and integrity second.

Anet was not hacked, the user computer was and your suggestion is to put the onus of bearing the cost of that (time and effort from engineers to do the restore) on Anet. Thats just plain silly.

It's quite possibly the way the system is built. We know they backup the whole gameworld as there have been rollbacks in GW's history, but if this information isn't stored individually by character/account then it may be - to all intents and purposes - impossible to take one piece of date-stamped data from a backup and insert it into the current database.

Now, you could argue that if they do have *some* kind of backup data, and can see a previous (non-deleted) iteration of your account/character, then they could manually recreate it in the Live database. Do you honestly think they would divert programmer resources to remove your code from the backup and recode it into the current version? No, me neither.

At the end of the day, we can only go by what ANet say. If they say they can't/won't restore deleted characters/accounts, then they can't/won't.

As to buying back items that you accidentally sell to the merchant, that's easy enough *if the system as been designed that way* by just having a 'sold buffer' attached to the character (as in, for example, Tabula Rasa). GW wasn't built that way and who knows how awkward it would be to incorporate one? Something to think about for GW2, perhaps.

On the issue of a precedence:
I am guessing that's the point. It wouldn't become a precedence - it would become normal practice.
On the issue of saving characters:
Maybe they could look into an "Export" function where you get to save your character - name, looks, achievement (in terms of titles, skill unlocked, game completion) - NO money or items nor account wide titles though! - onto your HD. So that if the character gets deleted you can import it.

@Test Me

Since you say you're a software developer, have you actually bothered to do the math involved with keeping a database of all characters including deleted characters?

6 million copies sold, lets say a conservative estimate is 10 million chars currently in existence, then multiply that by X (X being all chars everyone ever made and deleted), let me again be conservative and put X at 3, thats 30 million records in your little database, ok, now add the cost of software, hardware and man hours to create said database and its backup and the running cost of it.

None of the cost mentioned above is recoupable for Anet, this is not WoW where users pay per month, nor is Anet culpable for any of the issues mentioned so far. I'd say thats not a reasonable suggestion then.

This is exactly what I was thinking. And even if they did want to take the time to pull out the character from a backup, it would be exploitable, as that backup would most likely be a few hours old compared to when the character was deleted, which means it could contain money/items you transferred to somewhere else a few seconds before deletion.

I don't think A-net needs character restoration, As much as it sucks if your account was indeed hacked and all your characters were deleted. That is not common, and when it happens it's a pretty safe bet the person tried to cheat by downloading some software that was supposed to give him an edge, but instead stole his account info.

Although the OP is a software engineer (or claims to be, we'll never know for sure) I doubt you've thought this one completely through

How many companies/games do you know of that would restore an account if this happened? Cause I'll be honest. I don't know any. single items, maybe a character, but even that's stretching it. An entire account. I have never heard about a game with that option.

They DO have backups and can rollback server to any recent point in time.

They will not undelete characters because it costs them a LOT to do so.

OK, so you want me to do their job and think about it. Sure I'll try:

- toon gets deleted, by pressing the delete button and entering the toon's name in confirmation
- next what happens? well only they know, they run a DELETE on the SQL db or they mark the toon as deleted in a status field or they archive it somewhere else?
- what they could do: as said mark the toon as deleted in a status field
- to restore a deleted toon: flip a single flag in the db to mark the toon as undeleted

This is all hypothetical as I have no clue about what their system is actually like, but I believe no one actually deletes anything from online dbs... or none that I know of. I think there are even legal constraints about having to store data for a couple of years or so.

I don't see any way the system could be abused if the toon is restored to the exact state it was in when deleted. I also don't see any costs in doing this, it would just be a click of a button in the admin interface.

Stop telling me this is not possible and is hard and is costly to maintain, because it is not and I know for a fact it's doable. It would be just a click in an admin interface customer support may have access to.

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This was about undeleting not restoring your account to the state it was in yesterday. That is a more complex task, but if they wanted to be nice they could even do that. They could restore your toon with all customized items (armor and weapons). I guess restoring gold and any items that you could trade would be tricky and undesirable, but toon + all customized items that you can't trade anyway would be a good start.

Thanks for flagging up the original thread, I enjoyed the ranting especially when he got personal with his old guild. HighlyentertainingAlso thanks for reminding me to do a virus scan and change my password.

However, by your estimate (and I have no idea how accurate it is, but I would say you sound optimistic) the changes would take 1 developer a month. Currently we have 1 developer to keep the to keep the game running and occasionally add limited new content. So it comes down to; you want this change, which will be of no benefit to the majority of players, to be made at the expense of maintaining the game to an acceptable standard? Either that or you want us to go pay-to-play?

all these suggestions should go for guild wars 2 directly, as it's pretty clear gw1 is left as it is.
that said. a restore character function in gw2 would be a smart move.

Okay, then clear the backup of characters that have been deleted for over 3 months.

Offering to do their job for them when you dont have a clue how the DB is built is hardly going to impress anyone.
Anet has no legal obligation to keep data, the data retention laws apply to ISP's and telco's, not ASP's aside from accounting data for tax purposes, ofcourse.

Right, so the person who actually has to click that button works for free then?

As for abuse, we've all made mistakes and I can pretty much guarantee Anet would get a constant stream of hundreds of requests per day. Anet simply put into place a consistent and clear policy from day one. No restores of individual accounts or characters. Period. Problem solved.

Right so that person can give you back access to your account if you're sending them pretty pictures of gw boxes but it won't be able to click a button in the admin interface to restore your deleted toon.

Right. They work for free already don't they? Or you never contacted customer support? And the customer support at HP that sells you a computer works for free after the computer was sold as well, right?

I think you are being a bit absurd. Anyway none of us are working for them so let's stop assuming things, I've made my point and if ANet wants to consider it, so be it.

You don't know how data is stored, so you can't really know how easy or hard it is to restore a deleted toon, especially if it requires merging data from a backup into the current db.

On the easy side, everything about your toon is stored in a single 'file', as in NWN's .bic character files. One worry though is the effect of updates (that occurred between backup and restoration attempt).

It becomes harder when data on a character (skills, titles, appearance, inventory) is stored across many tables, linked with proper realtionships. Merging deleted data back in from a backup becomes more involved, and error prone. Concerns about updates remain.

It becomes neigh impossible when, for instance, objects and/or characters have unique ID's and the ID's are reusable (when objects are destroyed).

Just some thoughts from another IT person.