#21 - Sept. 17, 2012, 6:34 p.m.
ShadowX, of course they have access to the live server, they have access the same way the rest of us do through the game. By giving the live server no administration rights the live server cannot be hacked by outside parties, and the command line/console cannot be hacked in the client by botters. If they live server data had administration rights people would be able to hack in an delete your character without even bothering with your account credentials. They would be able to spam the database itself and potentially crash that without crashing the game server and who knows what that would do. When a database exists on the internet it can be accessed by anyone if they know the right address. When a database on the internet accepts only connections made from a very specific piece of software a lot of those problems melt away.
And all this negates the possibility that your GM accounts get hacked. Other games using the console to create new characters usually also allow the creation of gold, items, pretty much anything. Can you imagine the chaos if a GM’s account got hacked by gold sellers who created tonnes of gold and siphoned it away to associated accounts before selling it on? What about gems? They could potentially cause huge chaos in the market. And Anet would then be the worst company in the world if they tried to take all the created items out of the economy – did you see the whinning on the karma weapon incident?
At the end of the day Anet has decided administration level access either via their own machines or through the client isn’t worth the problems it could cause and could potentially fracture the community. I clearly remember accusations of favouritism when a prominent pvp player in GW1 was hacked. The simple fact that Anet could not spawn gold, armour, weapons was what kept the whole incident from becoming more than whispers of a conspiracy theory.
Anet have full access to the back ups and copies they take of the live server (which I assume they can probably fiddle with) yet as it stands at the moment they would have to take the live server down to provide a restoration feature. Now one thing Anet has NOT answered which may/may not improve things for those who have been hacked is whether the restoration feature – when ready – will be able to restore a single character back as far as August 25. In theory if they are restoring from the normal backup data then this will all depend on whether they keep the backup database for that long. If they are restoring from a special snapshot of the database, then that will depend on whether they have been taking that snapshot – and I certainly hope they have.
Thank you for your calm voice of reason.
Restorations are best — they do the least damage to the game economy. As one of the ArenaNet founders said to me years ago, “If you make a spawning system, you can be sure that sometime, somehow, someone will hack it and your economy could then be in ruins.”
I hasten to add that it’s up to the devs how things work moving forward. Maybe they’ll want to add such a system to GW2. But I’ve always taken that founder’s words to heart in believing that making a new character and decking him out in high-level goodies — while leaving the thief in possession of those same things — devalues the achievements of legitimate players where finding the hackers, taking away the items, and “rolling-back” the player to a point preceding the hack is the best way to go.
Much as I understand the distress of losses — truly understand and sympathize about them — I also try to keep in mind the larger picture. That’s why I’m excited about account restorations, which are very different than GMs “duping” items.
