Guild Wars 2

Talking to a friend who got hacked over a month ago (1 month and 1 week now) and apparently they still haven’t had a CS rep get back to them. Just the automated reply. I understand two weeks is the norm when there’s a backlog, but this is a little ridiculous. Is there someone they can get in contact with to escalate this issue?

Well, yes, it’s obviously going to become available in the gem store or expansion. Would be silly for ANet to make a new armor piece and not monetize it somehow.

Hidori.3472:

dodging, evading, blocking and similar skills are very powerful and after you played enough and learned the mechanics of the mobs, you’ll automatically go for more power and ditch passive defense stats.
I started as a power, toughness, vitality ele and now I’m running all pve with a glass build.

This works very well against dumb NPCs, but it’ll utterly fail in wvw or pvp.

That’s not incompatible with OP’s suggestion, which doesn’t rule out the possibility of armor that offers no Toughness or Vitality, but instead provides increased Endurance regeneration or Condition reduction.

So a person in Toughness/Vitality armor would deal the same amount of damage as someone in Endurance/Condition Reduction armor (provided they’re both using identical Zerk weapons), but the difference would be in their play style: the former will be dodging less and picking utilities to cleanse conditions and heal because they’re taking the hits, while the latter will be dodging like a monkey and picking damage boosting utilities.

Of course this is one of those things that probably sounds better on paper than in practice.

Mizuki Kusanagi.6584:

What’s happening with respect to stuff that costs SP to buy, e.g. various items from http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Miyani
?

Skill points will be converted into mystic forge materials, which in turn will be converted into a new currency, which in turn will be used to buy materials from Miyani.

They really should be standard drops off Eyes of Zhaitan, Risen Giants, and Giants.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Pandaman.4758:

lukejoe.1592:

lordkrall.7241:

lukejoe.1592:

The site says that skill challenges are becoming hero challenges and hero points will replace skill points, so I’d imagine they would just convert them 1-1.

Only skill points gained from skill challenges though.
The vast majority of skill points however are gained from Scrolls and leveling, neither which will be converted to Hero Points.

You’d have to tell me where you saw that. There really doesn’t seem for there to be a reason for that to be true. But I clearly remember reading about leveling as a way to gain hero points.

I suppose you could gamble that they will not convert the actual scroll, and might want to find a home for those points on a characters now, but seems like they would be making more work for themselves if they tried to distinguish where your points came from after the fact.

They’d have a billion people claiming they counted their points wrong…and seriously I doubt they have ever built that reporting feature.

The Specialization blog states that you will get 400 hero points from leveling to 80, while the Mastery blog states you won’t earn “skill” (now hero) points for leveling past 80, so it’s really quite simple: current total SP – (SP based on level + number challenges completed) = amount of points to be refunded as the new MF material.

My only concern is that it’s a new material and not a new currency. I have 8 characters with around 610 excess skill points each, plus another three stacks of skill scrolls, if they’re converting all of this to a material like geodes or bandit crests, I’m going to lose 20 bank slots instantly – and I’ve only been playing for a year. Two year vets are probably going to lose double that.

From what they have said, it sounds like you get an item in your inventory. When you click on the item it turns into a currency in your wallet.

http://massivelyop.net/2015/04/23/exclusive-guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns-interview-unwraps-specializations-and-traits/
“If you already have Scrolls of Knowledge and a bunch of existing skill points, you will end up with a lot of crafting material that converts into a new currency that will be used in the Mystic Forge.”

After that, this new item will drop from whatever used you give skill points (PvP, champ bags), and again, you will have to clink on it to convert it into currency.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/specializations-part-two-reward-tracks-and-elite-specializations/
“Old skill points in excess of those earned by leveling and skill challenges will be converted into crafting materials for the Mystic Forge. Items and activities that were previously repeatable sources of skill points will now also provide that same crafting material.”

Hehe, yes, I looked over the blog again and realized they said the material would be an intermediate step to converting to currency, didn’t edit my post fast enough though.

lukejoe.1592:

lordkrall.7241:

lukejoe.1592:

The site says that skill challenges are becoming hero challenges and hero points will replace skill points, so I’d imagine they would just convert them 1-1.

Only skill points gained from skill challenges though.
The vast majority of skill points however are gained from Scrolls and leveling, neither which will be converted to Hero Points.

You’d have to tell me where you saw that. There really doesn’t seem for there to be a reason for that to be true. But I clearly remember reading about leveling as a way to gain hero points.

I suppose you could gamble that they will not convert the actual scroll, and might want to find a home for those points on a characters now, but seems like they would be making more work for themselves if they tried to distinguish where your points came from after the fact.

They’d have a billion people claiming they counted their points wrong…and seriously I doubt they have ever built that reporting feature.

The Specialization blog states that you will get 400 hero points from leveling to 80, while the Mastery blog states you won’t earn “skill” (now hero) points for leveling past 80, so it’s really quite simple: current total SP – (SP based on level + number challenges completed) = amount of points to be refunded as the new MF material.

At most you’ll see a Digital Deluxe upgrade to the expansion, but not the expansion itself.

What a lot of people fail to understand is gems don’t have any value and developers don’t sustain themselves on verbal abuse and unicorn farts alone. When you (or someone else) buys gems, you aren’t putting x amount of dollars into gems, you’re paying to keep GW2 running; the money’s gone, it’s been consumed by salaries, bills, investments, taxes, dividends, and the like. The gems we’re getting back for paying this volunteer subscription are basically tokens of appreciation that we can trade in for free items (nothing in the gem store can’t be acquired through grinding gold).

You can’t pay for an expansion with valueless tokens any more than you can expect to get expansion for free in a subscription-based MMO just because others have been paying the subscription fee.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/reimagining-progression-the-mastery-system/

Because the Mastery training bar completely replaces the experience bar, players who’ve reached level 80 will no longer gain levels but will instead train Masteries. This means characters that have reached level 80 will no longer gain skill points through leveling. Skill points will be added as rewards across high-level content to offset this change.

They’ll just add it as a renamed “new” currency reward to higher level content. I imagine any content that can give enough exp for a full level (dungeon explorable, fractals, etc.) will also award a mystic forge “skill” point at the end.

Did he fall for a phishing scam, by the way? One of those “Your GW2 account will be suspended or partially limited, go to this page and fill out a request form to prevent this” messages you get through in-game mail?

It’s always a good idea to watch out for trojans, but people tend to forget just how effective social engineering is.

Think it’s a bit too early to be judging, but I do have to say it’s a little concerning we’ll be locked into traits selections per tier, because more than one of my characters double up on Adept/Master traits because available Master/Grandmaster traits are too specialized or utterly useless.

Here’s to hoping the new traits won’t be Antitoxin Spray-level of useless.

The RNG does produce some pretty odd results sometimes, finished a scale 29 fractal last week and got a Khilbron’s Phylactery… as did three other people in the party. Not only did four out of five people manage to get a third item from completing the fractal, we all got exactly the same ring.

RNG is RNG, sometimes you get Dawn out of a moa, other times you get shafted in the most statistically impressive way possible.

Jourgound Meister.8561:

Pandaman.4758:

Jourgound Meister.8561:

For those of you who don’t know, when an MMO is launched in a console it takes you to a custom client just like on PC.. from which you launch the game. It’s not updated thru the consoles update system.

What you’re ignoring is that the vetting process (and associated fees) isn’t just the console maker charging for the use of their network, it’s the maker’s in-house QA making sure the patch doesn’t do something it’s not supposed to with the driver calls and such. It doesn’t matter if the launcher is connecting directly to the MMO developer’s servers to grab the update because it’s still installing the update on the console and thus needs to be vetted.

That being said, if it’s a server-side patch there won’t be any vetting process and there’s likely a process to fast track patches that only have content updates, but for everything else there will be additional QA (which isn’t a bad thing, mind you) and it will be delayed.

What you are ignoring is the rest of the post you just quoted. I doubt either you or I actually have any first hand knowledge of what the actual “update getting process” entails. However, I know for a fact that you know less than I do because you’ve never touched a console MMO. The updates are downloaded from within the client NOT the built in console update system. A server side update wouldn’t even require a mention in as an update because none of us would ever know about them unless we where told by the devs. Hence I am inclined to believe that if there is any getting process it must be a single initial deal that allows the developer client to update independently… That I believe may be an initial real obstacle and not subsequent individual updates.

Again, how a program installed on a console gets its update is irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter if it’s downloaded in a single chunk through the launcher or streamed through the client while you play; what matters is if a developer wants to release a patch on a console, they’re contractually obligated to certify it before releasing it.

Console makers require game developers to submit all patches (that will be installed on the console) to their in-house devs for certification, that vetting process is a well-known fact that is lamented about by more vocal developers practically every year. The only thing that really changed in the past year is that Microsoft has dropped their ($40,000) certification fee for the Xbox 360 (for certifications after the initial free one developers are allowed), they haven’t dropped the certification requirement for patches – if anything it sounds like it has become even more convoluted.

You don’t need to play a specific game to be aware of these issues, simply following game development in general is enough because so many titles these days aim for cross-platform releases; if developers aren’t sharing their experiences with news sites, then they’re sharing them with the larger community through devblogs, you would literally have to ignore every tech (not just gaming) news site and the devblogs not to realize this.

This was the third 75% off sale in the past 80 days, chances are it’s going to go on sale again in the next month or so.

Jourgound Meister.8561:

For those of you who don’t know, when an MMO is launched in a console it takes you to a custom client just like on PC.. from which you launch the game. It’s not updated thru the consoles update system.

What you’re ignoring is that the vetting process (and associated fees) isn’t just the console maker charging for the use of their network, it’s the maker’s in-house QA making sure the patch doesn’t do something it’s not supposed to with the driver calls and such. It doesn’t matter if the launcher is connecting directly to the MMO developer’s servers to grab the update because it’s still installing the update on the console and thus needs to be vetted.

That being said, if it’s a server-side patch there won’t be any vetting process and there’s likely a process to fast track patches that only have content updates, but for everything else there will be additional QA (which isn’t a bad thing, mind you) and it will be delayed.

Tigaseye.2047:

Pandaman.4758:

In a more serious tone, there are adults with full-time “white collar” jobs who aren’t in as financially stable a position as they’d like (for a variety of reasons outside of their control) and have to manage their budgets accordingly; as such limiting how much they spend on entertainment a month is the responsible thing to do and GW2’s cash shop enables people to do just that, to broadly portray it as being immature is pretty kitten disrespectful.

Of course.

The vast majority of white collar workers aren’t in the 1% (or anywhere close to it).

Not leaving me much room to interpret this as anything but a red herring.

Belzebu.3912:

US states borders are almost all squares too, so what is the issue?

Because borders are drawn by people with rulers and mountain ranges are naturally occurring geological formations?

Tyria’s map looks unnatural because the straight borders aren’t lines on a map, they’re perfectly rectangular enclosures of mountain ranges.

Don’t forget that Microsoft and Sony both vet patches before they’re released, a process which can delay patches anywhere between one to two weeks. For a game that updates as frequently as GW2 that means the console version will always have a backlog of patches waiting to be applied, so the only way PC and consoles can coexist on the same server is if ANet delays PC patches to match console patch releases.

If you want a console version, you’ll have to settle for a segregated server that’s perpetually one or two patches behind.

tigirius.9014:

Yet more evidence that systems like DR do not work and do not prevent bots or gold spammers at all. Their scripts didn’t break they just never worked in the first place.

What does diminishing returns have to do with gold spammers?

Haven’t you noticed that all of the gold spammers use stolen accounts at one point or another? Their main source of gold isn’t bot farming, it’s stealing accounts, liquidating all the assets, then sending it to their customers – customers who wind up getting their accounts stolen as well because they were dumb enough to fill out the registration form on gold seller sites with the same details they used to sign up for GW2.

The current deal (legacy armor, mithril box, etc.) on Heroic and Digital Deluxe editions has been around for at least a year now.

Tigaseye.2047:

Pandaman.4758:

Sizer.5632:

Id be all for it. Once youre more than like, 16 years old, you realize that $15 a month for something you can easily play for 20+ hours a week is nothing compared to other things you can spend your money on.

But since like, half the playerbase is 16 (or acts like they are), it wouldnt work, so i dont think it will ever happen.

And once you’re more than 22~24 years old and paying off your student loans, bills, taxes, providing for the filthy parasi-I mean, adorable baby, having one less monthly bill is a welcome thing.

Unless you’re clinging to a bachelor lifestyle or suffering from a sudden abundance of wealth, that is.

I think these are social and political issues that extend far beyond a sub/no sub debate.

Why exactly are you and your family being made to struggle to survive, when 1% of the population own almost all the money in the world?

I was actually being a bit snarky by characterizing Sizer as a person who hasn’t actually worked for his money yet, much like how he characterized people who are unwilling to pay monthly subscriptions as being teenagers or adults acting like teenagers (which, honestly, doesn’t make sense because teenagers are the ones who tend to overspend at the drop of a hat).

In a more serious tone, there are adults with full-time “white collar” jobs who aren’t in as financially stable a position as they’d like (for a variety of reasons outside of their control) and have to manage their budgets accordingly; as such limiting how much they spend on entertainment a month is the responsible thing to do and GW2’s cash shop enables people to do just that, to broadly portray it as being immature is pretty kitten disrespectful.

Sizer.5632:

Id be all for it. Once youre more than like, 16 years old, you realize that $15 a month for something you can easily play for 20+ hours a week is nothing compared to other things you can spend your money on.

But since like, half the playerbase is 16 (or acts like they are), it wouldnt work, so i dont think it will ever happen.

And once you’re more than 22~24 years old and paying off your student loans, bills, taxes, providing for the filthy parasi-I mean, adorable baby, having one less monthly bill is a welcome thing.

Unless you’re clinging to a bachelor lifestyle or suffering from a sudden abundance of wealth, that is.

The problem with this behavior isn’t due to rank point rewards, because you only get points based on how long you’ve been in the match (spectate mode excluded) – if you’re on a losing team for 7 minutes you get 200 points, but if you’re on a winning team for 1 minute you get maybe 50 points, so it’s actually counterproductive to try to squeeze into a winning team in the last minute if your intention is to farm rank points. There’s also a bit of a curve to the time-reward scale, because being in 7 winning games for 1 minute each gives you less points than being in 1 winning game for 7 minutes.

So as Sir Black says, it’s almost entirely about getting the win credit. Removing or equalizing PvP rewards will not change this behavior because what’s actually being farmed is Achievement rewards.

Rank points are awarded based on participation time as well, so you need to be in the match for 7 minutes in order to get maximum points (whether it be winning or losing).

You need a total of 1,111,500 points to reach 80, assuming you’re playing unranked/ranked (1,500 points for winning, 500 for losing) games exclusively you’ll be averaging 1,000 points per game plus another 20 for bonus objectives (5 from capture, neutralizer, player kill, and skirmisher, defender, or assaulter).

That’s about 1,090 games for a minimum of 127 hours (not including time spent waiting for queue to pop, people to ready up, loading screens, etc.).

moomincat.9816:

sounds like you are just jealous,
if I cant have it no one else can :/

The problem isn’t just they’re using a skin that isn’t released yet, it’s that they’re using a skin that’s either going to be a gem store purchase or expansion exclusive (betting it’s exclusive) without paying for it. So it’s actually in their best interest to stop openly advertising they cheated ANet’s store, regardless if it was an intentional or accidental exploit.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Now, if they bring back the nice face-to-face cutscenes we had in the original personal story, we would be back at the beginning, which – to be totally honest – would be a big step forward compared to the LS.

Honestly, I hated those mini-cutscenes because it was impossible to do them well. It was like watching voice actors try to act with absolutely no visual or audio queue on how they’re supposed to react – they just stood there, fidgeting with their default idling animation, and maybe used some emotes to emphasize certain lines… but that was it.

Someone runs off in the middle of the conversation to do something suicidal and what does your character (or whoever person doing the talking at the moment) do?

“Now”? I’ve been hoarding them for a few months, up to 463 in my bank already (geez louise, ANet, your censorship is way too sensitive. Having “I keep” following “bank.” triggered the censor kitten, took me a while to realize what was being censored). I keep meaning to use them for keyfarming, but have just been too lazy.

Well, put yourself in their shoes.

You and a bunch of friends go into fractals, one guy starts saying “range range range” on a boss, which you don’t do because it’s not a strategy you like/don’t think it’s necessary, then on the next map a friend gets DC’d and the guy who was calling “range” earlier immediately votes to kick without asking you or anyone else anything.

Would you consider yourself crazy for kicking them instead?

Hamfast.8719:

Nice find, Lil Puppy! I don’t think this is a “jail” per se… more like an animal pen being used as ad hoc incarceration facilities. But this is definitely an all-Norn establishment, so I would say that they do indeed believe in jailing folks under certain circumstances.

I would conjecture that confinement is just to keep the wrongdoers under wraps while their fate is being decided, rather than as a form of punishment in itself. For example, if that pickpocket got caught while the holding’s master was off hunting, he might have been tossed in the cage until the rightful person was available to pronounce sentence.

Norns were depicted as being fiercely independent with no central governing body in GW1 and it’s still true in GW2 (as evident by Knute’s comments during the summit in Season 2), so It’s more likely that particular Norn settlement has adopted jailing rather than the traditional exiling rather than any indicator Norns adopting other cultures’ legal systems.

You also have to remember that incarceration isn’t free. You need to have people dedicated to guarding the prisoners, which in turn means the community now has to put in extra effort to not only feed the prisoners, but to hunt for the guard’s share as well. It’s just not compatible with how Norn culture is depicted.

MarkBecks.6453:

My Character was named Peta File, and I could not log in this character until I changed the name. Please explain the difference of my name to paedophile? I am disappointed and had no option but to do this. GW2 has a violence, drinking, swearing tag, and the whole purpose is to run around killing things. I don’t get it, to me this is the most pathetic thing that I have encountered so far, we are supposed to be adults, and their are a lot of names out their that are tounge in cheek which I enjoy, but really, in light of what this game is all about I find this totally unacceptable.

Please, tell me how you noted the various ESRB tags but completely failed to notice the Teen rating. Not everyone in the game is an adult and as a (supposed) adult you have to modify your behavior to match this reality.

Complaining about being reprimanded for acting inappropriately is not an adult thing to do.

Rank has never mattered since you can get to dragon from repeatedly losing games as well, it’s the leaderboards that are important and those can’t be farmed.

Also here’s the official stance on whether or not it’s an exploit.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Rewards are time-based now. These players must be in their match for the same amount of time as any other server. We cannot necessarily stop people from ‘playing’ oddly for their fixed amount of rewards unless it’s an actual exploit.

I’m surprised it’s not intended, because if account thieves can’t send the gold directly they’ll just buy the most expensive item they can and send that instead.

What do they care if they lose some of the gold they steal?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/farm-servers/first#post4426311

Evan Lesh.3295:

Rewards are time-based now. These players must be in their match for the same amount of time as any other server. We cannot necessarily stop people from ‘playing’ oddly for their fixed amount of rewards unless it’s an actual exploit.

There’s your official stance.

You should be thankful for farming/dailies maps diverting some of the leechers away from your regular games, without them you’d have even more people AFKing in your games than you see now.

Honestly, that’s just way too minor an issue to warrant any sort of action. It’s a reward you can easily (and repeatedly) earn through the PvP track or even running the dungeon, not an exceedingly rare RNG drop or one-time reward that could take months to get again.

Also CS is pretty backlogged right now and you probably won’t get a response until next week at earliest, so you might as well make use of that time to redo the PvP track.

Could always take a screenshot and post it on this forum or Player Helping Players to identify pieces. Most veterans can identify pretty much any skin, except possibly the dozens of variations of medium gloves (when worn with long sleeve coats).

Instrument macros are just recorded music, how does someone playing recorded music offend you? Do you go around town burning down radio stations, smashing record/cassette/CD/MP3 players, and throw eggs at concerts (a lot of concerts use prerecorded lyrics because the artists can’t be expected to prance on the stage and keep their breath to sing for extended periods of time) because it’s not an actual live performance as well (which the artists get paid for as well, idly)?

Well, which do you prefer?

A) People grinding wins in private servers that you don’t have to go into, 500 points per win, capped at two tiers for reward tracks. This can be “fixed” by banning such maps.

B) People leeching wins/losses in unranked/ranked matches that you have no control over, 500 points per loss, 1500 per win, no cap on reward tracks. This can never be fixed because it’s impossible to differentiate between people playing badly to throw games and people playing badly simply because they’re bad.

Right now those rank/reward track servers you’re complaining about are reducing the number of people doing B. As unhappy as you are about the situation, it’s actually making your PvP experience better overall by funneling some of the people who don’t want to participate away from your regular games.

If you get rid of A, expect to see more people leeching in your games.

Starbird.4029:

Guardian:
- I feel slow hoofing it around.
- Apparently in higher end PvE I’m not going to be using a greatsword.
- Armor is icky, aside from two sets I’ve seen (one being a gem purchase, one being a cool silvery thing that has a feather motif…that nobody seems willing to tell me about).

Guardians and Mesmers are two of the classes that have no innate speed buff options (traits or signets), you can get around that with superior traveler runes, but they’re pricey and weaken your stats slightly.

Where in the world did you get the impression that Guardians don’t use greatswords in higher level PvE?

Are you talking about the Ceremonial Plated Armor by any chance? That’s actually an Outfit that goes in the outfit slot, any class can wear it but it has limited color channels and no mix-n-match options.

I suppose it’s to prevent people from using temporary passes to access and permanently squat in those areas.

So do you just not do anything else but dungeons all day, every day? Are dungeons so important to you that you don’t consider anything else in the game worth paying for?

I mean, sure, I totally support not paying for stuff you don’t like, that’s a perfectly rational thing to do; it’s just a bit less rational if you’re actually refusing to spend money on things you do like simply because of one missing feature.

I was only able to make it to the second stress test, but didn’t experience any connection or performance issues. Overall very positive impression of the map with two exceptions that stand out in my memory:

The torching vines adventure’s explanation appears briefly before closing itself and there is no UI element for progress on the adventure, so I had no idea what I was doing wrong while repeatedly failing it.

The UI for masteries definitely needs to be redone, possibly as another page in the hero panel much like how PvP reward tracks are presented in the PvP window; currently it’s rather intrusive and cannot be closed by quickly hitting escape, so if you were to somehow accidentally open it in the middle of combat you’ve basically just slapped on a blindfold.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

On occasion, the CS Team has given more than one account restoration. Your friend can also request a new Serial Code to be associated with his/her account. And, to have their account flagged as known that others may contact support impersonating them.

That’s reassuring, I’ve passed on that bit of information. Up until now I (and a few others) have been telling them that ANet only does one restoration ever, so that’s been pretty discouraging to them and I’m glad there even a little bit of promising news to counter that.

Brother Grimm.5176:

If the player was aware the hacker possibly had access to the SN, that should have been a priority to address before the first roll-back happened. I know hindsight is always 20-20 but if his email was compromised that is always a possibility.

Did the hacker actually USE the Serial Code during the first compromise and/or the second one? That needs to be a question ASKED of Support to prevent it in the future.

Well, that’s the thing, as I detailed in the original question that phishing site asks for everything about your account. The page looks identical to the “Submit a request” page under Services -> Support, but with the additional detail of asking for your email password and GW2 password. They submitted all of that information before a family member (who also got the phishing mail and was in the process of going over the information on the page) became suspicious and they started asking friends if it was a scam.

Since it was less than an hour since they submitted the details, I told them to immediately change their GW2 and email password, contact customer support with details about what happened, to request a change of their login email, and try to stay online until CS got back to them; from what I understand all CS did was reply to them with “we don’t see any other IPs trying to access your account, please contact us again if something happens” (but didn’t change the login email as requested) and a week later someone jumped on their account and changed the password, but didn’t take anything (CS did roll back the account after restoring access though). It wasn’t until a week after that did CS finally change their login email.

So I’m fairly certain the serial code was used both times to convince CS to give access to scammers.

Healix.5819:

Use a credit card on the account, then they’ll ask for the number as proof when trying to recover it.

Are you saying support allowed an account to be recovered by an attacker without knowing the full details of the account? If that’s how it happened, the fault would be on ArenaNet and they would roll back the account as a special case.

It’s more likely however that the account was simply compromised again. Used the same or a similar password somewhere else? Left an account trail, linking the old email to the new one? Out of date software? – something as simple as an ad on a website can act as a keylogger.

Pandaman.4758:

scanned for keyloggers (and found none)

If you suspect you’re infected, reformat. Malicious software that is written for a very specific purpose will likely not be detected. The “keylogger” could also be someone you know in real life – never type your password into an unsecure/public computer.

Convincing them to use a credit card now is pretty much impossible – they didn’t use it before because they were concerned about security, if I suggest they associate their credit card with an account that’s been hacked twice I’d probably get slapped (if we didn’t literally live on opposite sides of the world).

That being said, it’s not strange to be able to request a password recovery without having full information, because it’s not reasonable to expect customers to remember full details; for example I was able to regain access to my old GW1 account nine years after forgetting almost everything about it (could swear I saved the CD key somewhere, but I couldn’t find it) with just my login email, approximate date of purchase, and one of my characters’ names (which I didn’t even get correctly, it was close enough a match to be accepted). That same flexibility in policy which allows us to recover our accounts is also what scammers exploit to steal accounts.

As for the virus issue, I’ll suggest they get in contact with the guy who build the computer for them to give the PC a checkup, but since it’s just over a month old I suspect the antivirus has plenty of time left on its subscription and should be receiving all the latest updates. Cant’ really do it myself since they’re in Canada and I’m in Hong Kong, so it’s not because I’m a bad friend (which I am, but the distance is a convenient excuse).

So a while ago I asked a question on how someone whose account has been compromised can re-secure it. After the first time my friend was compromised they changed everything that could be changed: account password, email password, login email, security question, verification, the whole shebang; they also learned their lesson, ignored all phishing emails and suspect sites, scanned for keyloggers (and found none), everything to prevent their new set of account credentials from being stolen again.

I’m sorry to say their account has been compromised a second time despite their best efforts. Currently they’re contacting me through a mutual friend’s account while they wait for CS to restore access, but it’s unlikely they’ll bother returning to GW2 since they just lost two years worth of work and aren’t likely to get a second rollback.

So the answer to the question on what a person can do if they fell for a phishing scam is quite simply nothing. Once a scammer has your real name, your serial key, and other relevant information (such as what email you signed up with, even if it’s not your current login email, character names, etc.), there’s nothing you can change that can’t be bypassed by someone impersonating you while contacting customer support; your account will be repeatedly compromised until you quit, at which point it will be used one last time for gold seller spam.

Rebound.3409:

@Pandaman and as i said, there might be a team outside of US which is in charge with US servers when they have issues late-night. Physical problems are not a problem anymore as you can activate a backup server which is god knows where (the Moon).

Their tweet indicates a team is working on it. It might or might not be located in the US. Everything is globalized..including work nowadays.

Last I heard all US servers are located in Dallas and all EU servers are located in Frankfurt, there are no secondary servers located outside of those locations for their respective regions. You can confirm this by looking at the IP of the servers we’re connecting to every time we log on.

Oh, and I just logged in.

Rebound.3409:

Read again what i said. I am not complaining that the game is down i am 100% sure they are working on it. I was explaining that the excuse “they might be sleeping” someone made is just dumb and should NOT be used in the context of a global services (like this game).

1 nation’s laws do NOT apply to a world wide service…because your service is not present just in 1 nation. It’s present on the whole globe so there are teams outside of US working to assure the service is constantly up and running.

I suppose I worded things poorly, so let me clarify:

The team in charge of managing the US servers have to be local to US to perform their tasks properly, ergo ANet needs to pay them according to US federal regulations; this means they’re going to be kitten tired (as anyone who has worked graveyard can tell you) and a smaller team (because it costs more to maintain them), so they’re not going to react nearly as fast.

It doesn’t matter if the service is accessible internationally because the US servers are still based in the US and thus are subject to everything that affects the US.

Rebound.3409:

Pandaman.4758:

Rebound.3409:

What’s irritating is the lack of news from ANet’s support team. No post…no tweet..no nothing.

It’s 3am in the west coast and 6am in the east coast, I’ll forgive them for being weak fleshbags that require sleep.

This is an mmo. Timezones are NOT an excuse and ppl should stop coming up with this lame excuse. They most likely have world wide teams working on servers and offering support to customers almost 24/7. NA teams EU teams SEA teams. They should be covering all timezones, even customer support.

When you create a global product you also offer global services. That means u are not tied to a certain timezone.

I understand you’re unhappy about not being able to log on, but please refrain from denouncing facts as “lame excuses” just because you don’t like it. Technical support has always been slow in MMOs during their nighttime and it might simply be because it costs more to maintain a night staff (10% more according to federal law, iirc); you can’t hire staff to maintain servers overseas because if it’s a physical problem that requires a reboot or a problem with the datalink, that would render them completely useless.

Agh, forum bug.

Rebound.3409:

What’s irritating is the lack of news from ANet’s support team. No post…no tweet..no nothing.

It’s 3am in the west coast and 6am in the east coast, I’ll forgive them for being weak fleshbags that require sleep.

Seems like it could be an attack on the login server.

It’s been asked for before, the problem is it’s not easy at all.

You basically have to take every animation in the game and mirror it, but that could either be relatively easy or extremely difficult depending on various factors (what animation program they used, does the animation file it produces allow for batch editing, how centered is the parent on the xyz axis, etc.).

You also have to mirror all animations for the weapons (both drawn and stowed), which have the same problem as character animations.

Then you have to make changes to the UI to include a button to toggle handedness.

Then you have to go through every action in the game that makes an animation call and change it so it will call the correct animation for the current handedness setting. This could either be accomplished by manually adding a conditional statement on every animation call or somehow make the toggle automatically modify all animation calls to reference the correct files (which might not even be possible, depending on the scripting language).

Honestly, it’s just too much work for too little.