In reply to: Anet and hackers

I tend to agree with the idea that Anet shouldnt automatically resore accounts its too open to abuse.

Could there however be a variation on the hom for all the games where you "register" characters, items in fact anything except consumables money potions dyes etc.

Example
I add my Ranger his favourite weapons and best armour using a hom type system.
What would this do.
It would make the character the weapon and armour permanent additions to the account.
The Character would be none deletable and the weapon and armour unable to be deleted salvaged or sold.

It would preserve of course titles aquired achievements reached etc.
If hacked you would lose money and anything in storage not so preserved.
Not perfect I know but no doubt some able person could improve on the basic idea.

I was actually gonna stay out of this up until you pointed this out.

I know Courage very well. He and I have had many a conversation on TS and Vent over the months, and honestly, a lot of people tend to take him the wrong way. There are plenty of people out there who are saying "You deserved it, it's your own fault, quit cheating," blah blah blah...

Courage is a good guy. He helped me through quite a few tough spots in-game when I was still newb. I have NEVER seen him or known him to cheat. Point in case, when I asked him what he thought about texmod for cartography, he chewed me a new one for even thinking about using a 3rd party program, because "You should be playing Guild Wars the right way, or don't play it at all."

Also, @ OP, thank you for bringing this back up. I have been fortunate enough that I have never been hacked. I did /facepalm myself once when I deleted a PvP only toon, and then realized I left almost 1 1/2 stacks of ZKeys on it... Granted, your suggestion wouldn't do me any good in that situation, but I don't expect ANet to cover for me on a stupid mistake like that on my own part. And before anyone even tries it, yes in that situation I could claim my account was hacked and I want my damn ZKeys back, but I wouldn't. Believe it or not, some of us in the world were raised with a small sampling of honesty and integrity, contrary to popular misconception.

SUMMARY: Quit assuming that just because you wouldn't use a feature means it's a bad idea. There are a lot of players out there who could benefit from things you don't plan on doing/using/whatever. That doesn't mean they have an advantage over you, so your e-peen is safe.

EDIT: Knowing Courage as well as I do, I will be the first to admit he has his moments of asshattery, but we all do. However, nothing I have seen him do or say deserves the level of animosity he seems to receive. AND based on what I have seen from the community as of late, I would not be at all surprised if some one from a guild he may or may not have left ::coughcough:: decided to get overly butthurt at his shenannagins and find a way into his account to exact their sweet, sweet revenge.

Allowing discussion because I maintain hope you fine folks are capable of it.

Play nice with the guild drama.

I was thinking about this problem and I think they should implement an encrypted backup that backs up the characters and complete inventory to a players hard drive every time they log off.

Then if they are ever hacked all they would need to do it send this encrypted back up to Anet. Anet could first examine it for tampering to make sure people are not hacking their backups. If it is legit then they could do a full restore for the customer using that back up.

It is a wonderful solution. I would sign for it. It even seems to be duable for them in much easier way than character backups etc. I would myself place a NPC in every guildhall with such storing possibilities. Anyway I am afraid it will not happen in GW1. Maybe you can start a thread in Sardelac with your proposal?

Worse, the person hacking your account would first login, then logout, thereby owning a totally legit restoration copy. He could then delete and restore effectively duping A LOT of items until Arenanet closes him down.

I dont know how its set up for GW, but the backing up of individual player accounts for possible recovery is a no-brainer necessity for GW2 imho. I havent played one MMO where characters werent protected.

I don't care about backups - what I want is the option to make a character permanently undeletable. That's got to be faster and easier to implement?

If anyone ever gets into my account (and basically, if you use the internet at all, there is always going to be some risk)... they can take what they want, as long as my main character remains, with titles and HoM intact.

Whoops, my bad! I thought by being overly absurd, people would find the humerous intent of my post. But I forgot that on the internetz, not everyone can see the humour in things and that some read everything for literal truth. Again, my bad... I'd just like to clarify that I wasn't stirring, just having some fun. Father Ted anyone?

@ Sin City Gamer. I'm not making any judgements about Courage! or any body else for that matter; I have absolutely no idea what has happened or what is going on.

On topic: I feel sincerely bad for any innocent players who have been genuinely hacked and it would be nice to see a remedy for such incidents. Unfortunately this could not be done; imagine all the players who've been hacked in the past begging for their old accounts to be restored? If they did it for one or a few, there would be mayhem. Not to mention abuse of such a system. So ignoring costs and technical limitations, there are other reasons for Anet not to do it.

IANASA* but I believe the records stored in the database are BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) which complicates matters somewhat. I presume they do backups at certain points so they can perform a rollback of the whole thing, but not something at a brick level that would allow the restore of individual toons.

(* I Am Not a Sql Admin)

Hackers don't exist. No really, they don't exist. O.K. They do exist but they have nothing to do with "Hacked" accounts in Guild Wars.

You and I and everyone else with two brain cells to rub together know full well that people with "Hacked" accounts either sold their accounts and use it to defraud the buyer, or they share their password and account name with friends/guild members/family and someone takes advantage, or they brag about their "wealth" and use poor security and someone guesses the password and robs them blind...

The people who say they were hacked are simply too embarrassed to face the truth.

So Guild Wars has this policy. One that states that account security is up to you.

Allowing restoration only opens itself to abuse. Someone gets mad at their guild for example because they got kicked out or something. They throw an emo fit and delete everything with an "I quit" post of vitriol on the local board.

A month later they regret their decision but know that Anet will restore everything. Two weeks later their "girlfriend" in Guild Wars tells them he's really a dude and another bout of rage and deletion....

This also removes the necessity to research every single claim of "Hacking" resulting in the loss of only 1 ecto or a sword that the owner threw in the trash bin allowing them to claim "hacker!" later...

No, I agree with ANET's stance. No restoration. Keep your account secure. Hackers don't exist.

A long thread already, havnt read every post. Aside from the technical aspect of doing it, has anyone suggested a fee to Anet for restoring an account? Cover the cost of restore, and reduces the amount of ppl wanting the restore.

This could be exploited so easily, just edit the local copy add GWAMM and "accidentally" delete the character then upload your local copy. That is basically the same reason why Anet doesn't restore accounts. Someone could use a second account, or a friend to "steal" the items. The traded item could then be laundered by selling to another account. Then report the account as being hacked and have characters restored with items that you now have 2x of.
Also accidentally deleting a character is pretty hard to do since you have to confirm the delete with the character's name. It isn't Anet's fault for you being hacked. It's completely yours and the hacker for being foolish to share account info, using third party programs, buying gold, or some other stupid activity.

In my company we once a while receive reports regarding websites fishing passwords for various multiplayer online games. There are people there interested in our passwords and accounts because it means money, Do not write such flames on the ones who got their accounts hacked since you have no idea how many possible reasons can be there. There are really victims and they do not deserve such treatment.

I don't think that backups on the player's computer are a good idea because the risk of cheating. I think the best option is a backup maintained at the ArenaNet servers.

Marking characters as permanently undeletable is an excellent suggestion imo.

You really just bolstered his point. If you fall prey to a phishing scam for your details that is not hacking.

If anybody could hack the gw servers for account information then i am sure they would'nt waste their time hacking a game when they could hit something bigger.

There have been various bugs and exploits found in game, many people have had accounts stolen because of their own stupidity or lack of common sense with passwords etc but no hacking.

Guy go play WoW they have awesome customer support. Polite and nice GMs that get back to you an hour after you put in a ticket. They helped me move a couple items that I accidentally rolled need on. They also have the ability to check and fix if you or your guild got scammed/hacked. They are just awesome. Kudos to them for having a very good customer support.

Good point someone make about saving things to the Anet hard drives as a way of retrieving that information.

However, most people myself included have 80Gig hard drive or better. my computer has 3 things installed on it. I have anti-virus/hacker, Firefox and Guild wars.

My 3 gig of ram in 120 gig hard drive are no match for this puny game! Why can i not save a "Code" that will be able to restore my information from their server? Surely the "Code" is complex enough for someone that they can not steel it.

Come on. For A-Net to set up a file on my puter that will allow me to restore some information is not all that hard to do.

What happens if there is a fire where the servers are that my game is stored on? Does that mean that my game is done? I sure hope not.

Because such a code could be altered or spliced to gice you a stack fo ecto for example.
Doing soemthing like that is a huge security flaw.

Older online games stored your character info on your own pc and where seriously abused. That is the reason anet store everything serverside where it is safe.

Anet also keep backups of the whole gname in case of emergencies or need of rollbacks. Server rooms are also generally well fireproofed.
The reason they don't offer single character rollbacks is not so much because then cannot but because the possibility to exploit such an option is greater than the good it would do.

A notion like that was suggested a while back. The premise was an option on the creation screen with a button to lock it from deletion. With either a time lock or a permanent lock.
But Gaile came in and said it wouldn't be a good idea, with some crap that if people hack your account they might lock them all. And they would be inundated with support tickets about unlocking locked characters.

My counter argument that people would rather have an account full of undeletable characters than an account of deleted ones didnt get a reply from her though.

There's no such thing as hackers on GW. There are only people that are irresponsible when making passwords or dispensing information elsewhere on the internet. Someone with the ability to hack A.NET security coding would literally be wasting their time on small fish like Guild Wars accounts.

Maybe this has been mentioned... Anet has a backup system... they rolled back the whole game some time in the past because of a merchant problem. It is simply a time/cost vs reward (their bottom line).

Dead wrong! The first and most important thing that programmers do is considering that their users are going to exploit bugs and even ones that they don't even expect to be in the program. So don't talk about stuff that you know absolutely nothing about.

Ehhh.. no one is willing to discuss having Anet restore an account for money. People want the option but not willing to pay for it.... If it costs time and money for Anet, and you really want your account restored why not put money where your mouth is.

If it was worth the effort by Anet to have such a service... and they could do it reliably... they would have offered it by now. My guess is there are far too many special cases that they would spend way too much time investigating before restoring...

Worked in dev a long time then mate? I didn't think so, since you clearly know nothing of the practicalities of day to day programming for games ...

Not saying that security isn't a concern and coding in a manner that minimizes potential exploitation isn't important, but in games dev it's waaaay down the list, and in my experience nearly always fixed retrospectivly.

google ... 117 ban guild wars

"apparently" there are hackers.

A lot of the people posting in this thread are not considering a few things that are important to all this. For example:

Your account gets hacked, someone takes all your fancy weapons, gold, etcos, etc., and deletes your characters. If you get you account back, and ANet gives you all your stuff back, what happens to all the gold, ectos, weapons, etc., that are still out there somewhere. Or do you think ANet should spend lots of time looking through every log trying to find where it all went?

Your account gets "hacked" - someone steals your 105 ectos. Anet gets your account and 105 ectos back. Your account gets "hacked" again. ANet gets it back. Now you have 105 ectos and you buddy has 210.

I mean, seriously folks! Can't you see all the potential hassles and abuses that would result from this?

Yeah I am aware that this might be an issue.
But if there is a chance that they work around it and prevent becoming an issue - it would be a superb addition to the game.
(Btw - could you even become GWAMM without the account-wide titles that are Luxon/Lucky/PvP titles?)

I'm trying to think of games that restores characters and items. Strictly for informational purposes in this thread.

World of Warcraft has a character/item restore = http://worldofwarcraft.filefront.com/info/restoration
As you can probably guess, people frequently complain about EVEN THAT. From the time it takes, to the process, etc.

Dark Age of Camelot had an item restore, not sure about characters.

I know AC and AC2 there was none.

Everquest you got a character restore once per account. Items, experience, etc. you did not get back.

Lineage2 has one character restore per account. No idea on items.

Final Fantasy XI does a restore of character/items. Takes a bit though i.e. weeks/months

So just a bit of info on other games. I agree that it sucks and I wish there was a system in place. For a lot of the older above games it wasn't until later that they added this feature as an FYI. But I actually don't fault ArenaNet for not having a character/item restore. I think it does come down to the manhours necessary to do such a thing. We've all heard the complaints people have about Support, and I don't think that adding further burden on them to restore characters would result in a satisfactory solution for anyone honestly. The same complaints that are stated in the restore feature in the games above would happen here too. From the length of time, to the process, etc. Probably compounded actually.

Yeah, also eve-online has a timer on chars you want to trash, they have a que and it doesnt erase the char all at once, it saves it then you have to re-confirm 12 hours later that you truely want to erase the char.

I do have played GW for over 3 years have alot of hours logged and if I lost all my stuff? I'd be in an outrage, the fact that a.net doesnt help people get their stuff back from hacked accounts is allready pretty sad..

My friend of mine recently had his wow account hacked (I do not play wow, will never play wow) and he lost *everything* he's been playing for a long time had alot of toons with alot of "epic gear" or some such stuff, anyhow, he reported the hacking and within 24 hours of being investaged by an admin he got *EVERYTHING* back. all his gold, all his gear, all his whatnots.. all of it.

now honestly, I dont like the look or the feel of wow, but Frankly with that kinda insurance I'd rather play a game where I have a chance to get atleast SOME of my stuff back, and possibly all of it.

Same with eve-online, if you lose a ship, or your account gets hacked and its investagation goes well (and it almost allways does if its ligit hack or something) they will compleatly restore your account.

its true that I play eve and I make enough money in it to buy time for the game for free but I still get that kind of service even though I play the game for free.

Do NOT tell me that a.net is too "Small" to not offer this kind of service.. the game is huge compaired to eve (in amount of players) and it really should have some kinda admin "Account restore if lost" type of insurance.

I too have played GW for over 3 years. If I got hacked and lost all my stuff - well, heavy sigh - it was time to move on anyway.

If you simply stopped playing GW and went over to the dark side (WoW), would you still be outraged at all the time you "lost" playing GW?

Insurance? Do you mean Anet should indemnify themselves against the players being hacked/commiting fraud? Or we should pay a fee to an insurance company so that if this happens to us they'll pay for a programmer to get our char back? I cannot see either of these working, so I assume you meant something else?

Eve might be smaller in terms of player-base (I don't know) but it also has fees to play, and they're not negligible either.

Resource is the key question here; this feature does not currently exist; like several posts have mentioned, do you want to pay for this additional service?

I'm pretty sure this is about exactly what ANet has said in the past. They can't rollback a single character or a single account, because its all one big blob. They can't "spawn" anything on the live server, it would require a small update. Do you really want to update your game every day because Bob was careless with his account information and got his account stolen and his characters deleted? I know I don't.

When you delete you have to type the characters name. You type the name of the CHARACTER YOU ARE ABOUT TO DELETE. How does that not tell you oh "Phaern Majes" I don't want to delete him *cancel*. If you are too dumb to realize what you are typing then no, Anet shouldn't have to restore for that.

People who get their accounts hacked, get them hacked from the client side...that being their own computer. It takes 10-20 minutes to run a full anti-spyware/adware scan. There are free scans available such as spybot search and destroy. If you can't take the time to make sure your computer doesn't have a keylogger or virus or whatever, than again not Anet's fault.

They have no reason to restore the accounts of everyone who's been hacked. Especially when a number of them were hacked due to the use of 3rd party programs, buying/selling account keys, or numerous other "risky" behavior.

Haven't had the time to read all but the OP starts on the wrong basis: all implementation has a cost, it seems easy and cheap for you, but I'm sure that Anet made pretty and accurate calculations to determine that this would not be done. And second-guessing Anet's implementation by invoking SQL is not right.

Feasible? Yes in general. In a F2P game like GW which offers so much for no-monthly fee? Clearly no.

Security is down most of the time to people's insecure practices, or the inadequacy of UIs/commands to people's understanding. Anet has done a very good job at fixing stuff IMHO, and take a cautious approach towards so-called "hackers" (there's not enough money to make in GW to have a proper hacking community...). Protect your password like your credit card PIN and adopt an appropriate model of trust when online, this is where we, as a community, must work towards. I'd like to point to:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10298453

idk...as a programmer, i'd expect any client of mine to get pretty pissed and take their business elsewhere if their web site/user account/whatever got hacked or deleted and i could not restore it.

anet's database & program data is surely backed up on a regular basis (probably hourly, i'd guess - most certainly daily, at least). judging from some of Gaile's posts about the duping issue, they keep their logs intact for months, if not forever. a + b = c = character data can be restored. but at what cost? we dunno. it could be as simple as a SELECT * FROM UserTable WHERE UserName = '<Username>'...or not.

either way, i do believe that character restoration should have been implemented right from the start. restrictions would apply, of course, but should definitely be available for legitimately hacked accounts, and not for the *oops i deleted my char and forgot to take my ectos off it!* people. there are already customer support reps who investigate hacked accounts - restoring the account should have been a part of that process.

and ffs, its not always "their" fault for getting hacked. not everyone who plays this game has a BA in computer science, or knows the difference between an email from their grandma and a keylogger, or is downloading farmbots. these people are victims - not criminals - regardless of how they got hacked. if a client of mine gave their password to their cousin and lost all their data, i still have to go in and fix it. i can't be like HAHA YOU LEARNED YOUR LESSON, NOW SUFFER. that is not professional...

I disagree with you but the thought of saying that made me laugh out loud in real life.... I think I might try it at work tomorrow

I've seen someone suggest that A-Net sell a character lock for a small fee that would prevent the character from being deleted at all. Personally I think that's a grand idea. Profit center for A-Net, insurance for the player. Yes, it would remove some options from the player as far as deleting the character at a later date, but that would be understood when they bought the lock. It wouldn't save the stuff, but stuff can be replaced. The name, hours of play, skill unlocks, titles, the true meat of the character would be safe that way. If it was worth it to the player. And if it isn't worth a small fee to the player why should A-Net waste any money on character restoration?

Spot on.

The costs of keeping database backups made on even an hourly basis is trivial when compared development costs, bandwidth usage and the servers themselves.