In reply to: Anet and hackers

It would involve a total cost of duplicating their existing database and it's hardware. As if they don't already have a failover system in place...

So, in fact, it would probably cost them a fraction of their current database system. It needn't be the fastest system in the world either, since it's likely to receive far less read/writes than a live database. Effectively, the initial copy and 1 write when the char is deleted, and the undelete is covered. Seriously, this isn't hard or even that expensive. I know of a department store which has 30 nationwide stores and their daily transactions (think 10 tills, on average) from all stores are written to a single central Progress database overnight. That database is running on a dual Xeon, Ultra 320 SCSI server. Estimated hardware cost : £2000. Not exactly breaking the bank for a company like ANet....

yea I WOULD UNBUY MY FOW ARMOR FOR MORE CONSUMABLES FO SURE!!!!

Maybe you could factor in also money needed to be spent on people?

Estimated cost of having full time employees handling undeletes and maintaining whatever needs to be done stuff ~50k a year.

Estimated cost of rewriting storage engine to support it: ~50k.

Estimated cost of having people "get over it, it is just pixels": zero.

As always in "big data" IT: People and time costs overshadow any HW costs. HW is peanuts in comparsion, even expensive stuff.

@OP. Yes, good idea. I am fortunate to have never been hacked but can sympathise with those that have.

It won't happen in GW1 but I would hope that something similar to what you suggest is implemented in GW2.

Technically the OP has a point. Every real database will have backups made. Anet keeps them otherwise they wouldn't of been able to roll-back before.

Sure they could implement a system to copy entrys from the backup db to the current one. But its practically impossible to prove a hack has taken place(whos to say people wont just get their friends to clean out the account ) then report it hacked and get a free dupe

While this would be indeed, lame, I would settle for a once a week where all the character restorations get rolled into an update every couple of days. It would suck I'm sure for all those people with lame internet connections, but I would personally feel better knowing that all the friends I ever had that got hacked or me myself if it happened to me had a recourse other than being told "that's all folks, shows over."

They could charge a fee, say $50, to research logs and restore an account, that way, whoever stole the stuff would get banned and lose stolen items. Even if its not practical to restore money or other items, at least the person hacked would get their account and any customized items back. With 3 + years and countless hours, various campaigns etc... Some of us would not mind paying a restoral fee.

I sort of agree with the OP's thoughts, but not on the execution. Instead of seeing a restoration of the characters I would like to see something that means we can't immediately delete a character. For instance if we hit delete, enter our name etc, I would like some kind of confirmation email sent to our email address as well as a 24 hour holding period after which we need to re-confirm the deletion. That way Anet doesn't need to worry about holding or restoring unnecessary data, and our accounts/characters are marginally safer. It still won't protect the gold, items etc on the character, but it will prevent the character from being deleted. AFterall, I don't know of many 'hackers' who would be willing to hang out on an account for 24 hours just to delete a character, and if there's a deletion confirmation pop-up you'll know you've been 'hacked'.

She didn't reply because you had the stronger position. They also didn't want to do it in the first place.

An even simpler idea was suggested too: a second account-wide password be used when deleting characters. This, to me, is a champion of suggestions as it releases Anet from the burdens of proper data management/redundancy and the deep costs that come with them.

With both suggestions you may lose you're gold and shinies but with the characters still there and replacement weapons/armor so easy to get, you at least won't lose your progress.

To the OP - TLDR

Taki's suggestion above is probably the most reasonable in the entire thread. It has been suggested before, but Anet indicated that it would be fairly difficult to implement. Runescape does something similar by having a PIN number associated with your storage (Bank Account).

If you were to look at the totality of my postings, you'd see I almost always side with Anet, as their development decisions are almost always good ones. But in this case I differ, as simple pin number associated with storage and deletes would solve most all problems due to hacking.

It wouldn't solve stupid (people giving their "friends" passwords, or being susceptible to Social Engineering), but Darwin has already spoken in that regard.

Fixed it for you

On topic, I partially agree with you but I don't think it should be a PIN the user would choose unless it was forced to be different than the account password, we all know a lot of idiots/lazy people that would end up using the same twice.

My question to OP:

Assuming that I only have one campaign and I have four (4) character slots and after playing for 36 months, my characters are all developed already with all max items, etc.

Then, you have this so-called backup system so I really have nothing to fear because i can always get back my character if i get hacked.

Now, assuming I got hacked and what the hacker did is something like this:

He gave away all your uncustomized weapons, etc. to other players.
Then deleted all your charaters.
Then created 4 new characters with same names but different class.
Then deleted again.
Then created again.
Then deleted again.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Then created 4 new characters again.
Then logout.

So, if i'm going to call for support and ask them to restore my character, do you think they'll give me back my 3 years old characters with all my items?

I'm sure backup system is a good one and i'm sure that they have a regular db backup in case of system failure and will require a rollback. But making a backup for each deleted character?

I'm a technical guy, too. But its good that businesses are not run purely by technical people.

GW is a real time game and as such a restore command would not work, the DB is an ever changing entity and would have to be stopped (as in the big rollback) for a restore to be done. Look at every update, they require a restart of the client and DL new content, and that is because a fresh updated DB needs to merge with the existing DB. We would have restarts every few minutes if they implemented a restore. Players would delete toons and then change their minds, the game would stand still most of the time.

Account gets wiped.

Make a new character? Or do something else instead of GW for a while.

QFT. This thread is doomed to fail when people think data storage and character/item restoration is only about "technical stuff", "implementation" and "HW/SW". It's about a business model, and that would probably not work with what Anet proposed (you have to pay the devs, designers, artists, CR/M, commercials, etc.). Once you realise that Anet is not getting any money in their bank account each month like other companies do, you realise the business feat that GW is.

@OP:

A different solution to character deletion has been provided in Sardelac.
Gaile Gray answered in the thread, if it is something people are ready to pay for, they might be tempted to add it to GW.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10248665

LOL this was my topic but i was the one complaining about the hacker