Guild Wars - Limited Account Restorations

That is true, security should always be there and there has been security, but the hackers are ahead of the developers of anti-hacking software most of the time.
There are numerous cases that proof that even if security is there that it fails, otherwise people wouldn't get away with crimes as they do, or steal items, or hack into servers like what has happened this year all over the world with Anonymous.

It is true that the restoration part should have been there from the start but this is a step in the right direction, although perhaps a bit late.

while I sympathise deeply for those who have been hacked before this date, I do think it's a fantastic addition to the support for this game. Anet could so easily have not spent the time adding this to a six year old game but they did.

So thank you for putting this in and saving many, many people from the distress being hacked can bring.

It's kinda obvious, but it's also not a license to be silly about account security, I regard this facility as a last resort rather than a replacement for good security practices

This is a tool that should have been available much earlier, but I guess later is better than never. At the very least, it's great to hear that a tool like this will be available for GW2 security from day one.

As someone who had their account hacked years ago i can understand the frustration from some but even so, this is good news. There were obviously reasons they couldn't implement it before, and only due to the work on GW2 have they been able to make it backwards capable to GW.
I think this is a very positive thing for Anet to have done.

Fantastic, news. Thanks for posting this! I'm sure this is going to please a lot of people.

can i request some sort of way of either moving this to riverside or put a bulletin on top of page for people's interests. Basically every time you mention this somewhat important news that people will find interesting, people go WUTTT? WUT IS THIS YOU SPEAK OF!

Too late for me I guess, since I got hacked earlier this year, but at least the efforts I've made since then will be safer than before. It's something and I am happy to see that you did this.

It's a step in the right direction, yet the only thing that seems to be able to be "restored" is if a hacker uses a credit from one of the online-store purchases.

Meh.

+infinity

absolute joke tbh.

i'd be EMBARRASSED to release an update like this 6 years into the game, absolutely embarrassed. Should have been there from day 1.

It's actually a tool for GW2. It will be implemented there since day 1.
It's only a courtesy of ANet to make it available for GW1 as well, plus it's a nice testing area.

That said, i fully agree something like this should have been introduced much, much earlier, but it's actually a very good thing it got added at all.

I can somewhat understand peoples frustration, especially those who were hacked before 10/1/2011 but there are things you must consider before you start throwing bricks through their window.

Arena Net is in no way close to the size of Blizzard so resources go to where they are needed.

Guild Wars was Arena Nets first game. Mistakes were made and they are learning from them.

90% of people that were hacked were not careful enough. This includes sharing account info, downloading material from a suspicious site or person and having passwords a monkey could guess(ex. PASSWORD). These people should be blaming themselves.

The NCMA incident is not Anets fault. It is NCsofts. You can throw your verbal bricks at them.

or leaked info in official guildwars xth predictionsite

Pure BS.

Even a game like Guild Wars would have SQL database backups of all the players, and these backups would be daily at the minimum.

While it is a good thing Guild Wars is finally catching up, it's rather late to the game. Don't lie about why you're late when these kind of restorations have been possible since the beginning. MySQL has been out since May 1995. As such, backups and restoration of SQL databases has been possible since then.

Welcome to the 21st century, Guild Wars and ArenaNet.

^This.

Cannot agree more, I've known some friends getting hacked like this with no recourse to compensate the times they dedicated into the game only to have all their items "moved" to another character/account(in which Anet support can't even trace it), and with Anet saying they cannot restore due to technicality.

Have you even considered that what they lacked may have been a proper record of transactions and a way to track all items from the hacked account and revert all the transactions made by it?
Without a record of all the transactions, a previous backup would just show the items you had, but not where they went.
Otherwise people could do things like: buy/steal a second dummy account. Give it lots of items. Spread those items between other accounts, claim the dummy account was hacked, account is reverted... ding. Items duped. Now you have the items you spread AND the item from the reverted account.
This is just an example, since I have no idea of the structure of their database, but that doesn't change that it's a valid reason, and if there's one like this, there may be more.

Without knowin where the items went, you can only fix the problem by reverting the whole database.
I don't see why they should revert the whole database of players just because one got hacked.

If they say they couldn't do this before, it's most likely not "BS".
If they could, they WOULD offer the service. Because a happy customer is a customer that will likely get more of your games.

This.

We were always told that account restorations were technically possible, but they would require a full server rollback. So, they weren't going to restore an entire database backup, or even just portions - tables - of it, as this would have affected all the users and not just the single hacked account.

Snapshots are needed in this case and, guess what, it's just what they have implemented.

Probably also a manpower issue, and since they're now going to do it for GW2, the same people can do it for GW1.

Also, what they're having to do to make the HOM/GWAMM stuff transfer over to GW2 is what led them to how to make individual account restorations work in GW1.

At the end of the day, it just doesn't make sense for them to have not offered to do account restorations if it were technically and economically feasible before this.

Either way, that it's available at last is a good thing for everyone who still has an account. Thanks for putting it in, Anet.

My account got hacked earlier this month, and been contacting support. I got the reply that my account got involved in trading for real money etc...and was perma closed !

Luckily this tool and support managed to rollback the account and its amazing i have not noticed anything missing( rare items/minis/zkeys/etc) only lost few glad points. I am totally impressed and loving how the support improving.

This is FANTASTIC news !!!
Not concerned on this amazing upgrade and game enhancement as I was hacked over a year ago and lost very valuable items (unique minis, and tons of stuff).

Got in touch with customer support on my specific case at the time and always got very blurry answers...or was even accused being the bad guy...and i can assure that I did NOT download any weird stuff, I did NOT use a donkey password instead had letters, figures, caps, special caracters, was a different password than my email account ...and NEVER shared my account log in. Comes a bit late...but...

Never mind...I am so happy the Anet takes the hacker issue forward. It won't help me but I hope it will help all other honest players who get their accounts hacked.

If this feature is implemented straight from the beginning of GW2 and coupled with an authentificator I'll buy 10 accounts !!!^^

FAIL. I got hacked at the end of August.
This is just disappointing.