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.