In reply to: Anet and hackers

Name taken in the mean time? what then?
no cost? What about the guy who has to do it? isn't he getting payed?
Are they going to restore everything people ask for? (tons of requests, more characters to restore, more time/cost)
or are they going to investigate the character before doing anything with it (more time/cost)

I think I would sooner get an ANet engineer to agree with me than you guys.

And I don't see the point of you being so against a useful feature, really. If you ever deleted toons or got toons deleted from your account and *you* don't want to undelete them then that's fine with me. That does not mean we should force everybody to be OK with the lack of this feature.

This is doable, this is doable at a click of a button if desired I have implemented may databases in my time that could undo deletes and I have changed a couple that did not support this feature to support it (that is assuming they have a db behind which I don't know for sure). But whatever they have and whatever system they store data in, they can implement it so that deletes can be reverted.

Yes they have to think about things (character name conflicts and probably other stuff) but they can do it and they don't really have excuses for not having done this to start with, in my humble opinion and from a developer to a developer.

Very probably they won't do it, however stop finding excuses for them. They don't really have any...

They have about twenty judging from the responses you've got so far.......

I totally agree with Anet on this one. If my account ever got hacked and I lost everything then I would not expect them to restore my account.

I know I have no hard numbers to back it up but, I would have to guess that 99% of all accounts that are hacked, are at the fault of the account owner not the company that provides the service.

So, I agree with them DO NOT restore these accounts.

The accounts never get hacked, its always the fault of the user when they download a virus or a keylogger or something. ANET shouldn't have to work harder to clean up after users that are careless with their computers, that's just stupid.

To restore a character/account one would need to check all the logs to see what exactly happened to that character/account and then decide how to move on with the restoration process, helluva job depending how big playerbase is of course. In subscription fee based games GM's are paid to do that so this brings bunch of new PoV's to GW - can Anet make some kind of proper backup system without making players pay for it.

Based on how they previously dealt with this kind of situations - yeah, one would be a fool to expect a different kind of behavior now.
But the big question is - how does this negate our wish for A.Net to start looking into the possibility of making a system that would enable this?

Let`s think like this for a minute, what if A-net get`s hacked and some crazy hacker wipe`s data on their server.And A-net doesn`t have a "WAY" to restore our toons, would you start from the scratch ?
I shure wouldn`t i mean i invested so many hours of play in my chars THEY ARE the reason i play this game now !

The delete system is impossible to do by mistake. You have to type in the name of your character in order to delete it, not just "yes" or "delete" like other games.
In the unlikely event that a hacker deleted it all, you'll not find a single game company that is willing to completely restore an account because it got hacked. None

The feature is useful to a minority of players, to normal players it is mostly useless, it's a lot of work for a very small part of the member base.
The game is old, a feature like this makes no sense putting in now, and if they ARE going to put some more money into it to develop new features, there's a lot of other ones that would be more useful to more people.
It's not like anyone is digging very deep to find these reasons it's not already in game, or "excuses" as you so unbiasedly put it

The game is too old for it. There is no point at all implementing it now, it's a bunch of extra money they have to put into it, and since its a conservative feature in nature, and not something that'll help new people(that don't have anything worth saving), it's not gonna draw anybody new to the game, It'll keep a minority of people here for a bit longer, but even that wont bring them any more money in, cause there is no monthly subscription for this game.

It's a financial lose - lose situation for the company, they wont gain money for it.

IMO I think it would be dumb for them to even consider such a thing. People would try to abuse the system right from the start.

Also, think of all the extra time and money it would take to have to review these cases. In the long run it would only make things worse as people would be even less careful with there accounts. They would think "sure I will let this person have my password to farm XXX for me, heck even if they destroy my account good ole Anet will just restore it for me"

Anyway, I think people should start taking responsibility for themselves instead of asking for everything to be handed to them on a silver platter.

Hardly. Like I said before, Anet has a clear policy which they've not deviated from since day 1, expecting this to change after 3 years when GW is just being maintained has as much change as seeing the devil ice skate to work today.

/signed x1000

Thanks for posting this. It's a much needed feature for those who are in great need. Fortunately I've never been hacked or taken over (yet) but I would love to get my account restored if it has been compromised. I gladly would sacrafice a bit of the economy for it (If it gets misused) because a restore can be so essential.

Also, there can be many ways to limit possible misuse, including:

• A limit of one time per year per account
• A small fee (€/$ 4-5) for a restore.
• No restore for gold and materials. (Losing your gold and materials is still better than losing characters, titles and progress etc.) Also customised items like armor can be restored without risk of misuse.

I really find it absurd that there is no way to restore a deleted character in which several thousands of hours may have been invested. Please ArenaNet, provide us with some assurance for our time invested in this great game!

You want to believe it's their fault because if it is their fault it can not happen to you. Do you maintain different logins for each site, meaning a unique username, e-mail address and password? Do you use strong passwords (min 8 characters, mixed caps, numbers and symbols)? Do you change them every 6-8 weeks? Do you not write them down and do you not let your system remember them? You never download software, except from certified sites from well known companies or organizations? Did you check every download site to see if it's still maintained or that it has been sleeping for years? Do you follow each and every safety-protocol every time that you should do?

People don't download keyloggers because they want to, they get conned into doing so. It's not like there's a big sign saying 'this is a con', even smart people get conned, they get conned and even killed, like in the 419-scams.

I think that ANet is missing the boat here. Free restores of deleted characters? No, this would quickly hurt ANet’s bottom line. I think they should charge for it. Imagine logging in and finding your three year old character along with all the others gone. Would you part with, say ten dollars to restore them to the state they were 24Hrs ago? I would. Even if the character loses a few plat and some experience, at least I would have my character back.
We all know they do have backups of every thing that happens, they did once and only once a full restore of the entire SQL data base. We have seen hints that these backups go back at least three weeks. So the only problem I see here is cruddy SQL programming, from a data validation and maintenance point of view. As for as the server space required, I doubt it would take more than say 64bits per character to define the variable and if done properly one bit to record the characters’ status. Shoot, if they really wanted to, they could even add another field with the deletion date for each character.

This is just one of the services I see as being a viable source of additional income for ANet. Some of the other services would include renaming a character, changing the sex of a character. With the proper SQL coding, they would not even need to have a human involved, just go to the ANet or in-game store and select the service you would like to buy. Having worked with data bases before, I know that it would not take much to make it happen, the problem is getting ANet to realize it needs to happen.

This is a great idea. Would allow for saving characters but not be exploitable for gold. To be honest, if at this point my account was hacked (note: I have never ever ever done anything to compromise my GW) I would simply quit, as Anet has nothing in place to help. I would play something else until GW2.

oh man so enourmously /SIGNED for that! genius!

Bit off-topic, please forgive!

*Puts on detective hat, peers through magnifying glass*

It looks like I've found something in the other thread; this attack is the result of a domestic dispute!

*On-lookers gasp, then proceed to gossip amongst themselves in shock and confusion. Just before it dies down, someone from the back shouts "f**king hell!"*

From the other thread...

Looks innocent enough? Just a bit of banter, but then...

Bam! Grave personal attack! Nobody insults someone's emo music unless they have the deepest, darkest hate for them. Insulting someone's music likes and lifestyle is worse than raping their sister. Anyone who has the balls to dish out the dirt like this, I'm sure, would have no problem committing the much less severe offence of account hacking...

I didn't understand this bit.

By the way, not a serious accusation, just having a bit of a laugh misquoting.

Storing character data on client side is like storing your wallet on a seat in the local commuter train ... it's not asking for trouble, it's demanding it.

As for the OP, what can't be done can't be done.

You have BIG problems if you think someone insulting your taste in music is worse than a family member being raped

I really wouldn't know the internal workings of the server, but I know how big an issue protection from dupes always was for ArenaNet and that might have something to do with the "restore" problems. I do not know how Anet tries to achieve protection from dupes, but this is how I would try to do it, by implementing two rules: The server may not have a "copy" command, it may never have the "undo" command. Then code around it. Sure things can be "spawned" with a bunch of triggers, but that's it. No other way to inject data into the economy. No restoring of accounts or anything!

With Anet not likely to change that, all we can hope for is a minimizing of the potential loss.

The easiest way to solve it under those conditions is to link everything to a mechanic similar to the festival hatmaker. Show him a skin (will result in customization) and in the future you will be able to craft it on your account, show him an armor and in the future he can create it for a nickel and a dime, while you clear some inventory space. Same for minipets which then become dedicated, same for anything. All titles are account based, so no loss occurs in HoM or PvE skills.

Now imagine being vandalized under such rules. You simply shrug, create a character, port to the guild hall and outfit him, then level back to 20 and all you lost was access to a few outposts really. The thief can do even less with your equip since it is personalized. If people quit it will be due to loss of status items, that's something easily fixed.