GW2 - Poorest Account Security ever?

[Remilia]

I think the problem is that the "archiving" process would have put additional load on the already overloaded servers (at the time). It's more than likely something that they disabled early on as a temporary measure to keep the performance up and something that they will be enabling again in the future.

Not really. The images that are saved are very very minimal process. If for some reason your servers can not handle an image saving system to a database, then there is something wrong with the process.
Your computer generally sends bytes and bytes of data to their server, and vice versa. Now at the very minimum of 6 hours (though I'd say every hour, 2, 4, 8, etc), that means 100kB of data being sent to the database, and receiving nothing back. As opposed to the byte of data being sent back every second for your game and the server. Resulting in higher loads than just a periodic transfer. The time logged system would be done on the database side so there should be no interference with the servers that handles the clients connected.

[DrakeWurrum]

I got a whole bunch of mails stating "my password or email has been changed" on an email address that I'm not even using for GW2, since i dont have GW2 yet,.
so,. clearly a scam message.

Actually no. What happened is that 3 specific GW2 accounts were manually changing their e-mail address over and over again, going down the list of e-mail addresses that they have in their database of "e-mail addresses to hack for online games"
If the change worked, there's no GW2 account for that e-mail. If it didn't work, they've gotcha, and now have half of your login credentials! This was obviously exacerbated by the fact that, until they disabled the feature, they could do this without a "Click on this link if this was you!" e-mail - instead you got a "Hope this was you, if not you're screwed!" deal.

Pro-tip: This means they have your e-mail in their database and should get a new one.

[Sylvanie]

Not really. The images that are saved are very very minimal process. If for some reason your servers can not handle an image saving system to a database, then there is something wrong with the process.
Your computer generally sends bytes and bytes of data to their server, and vice versa. Now at the very minimum of 6 hours (though I'd say every hour, 2, 4, 8, etc), that means 100kB of data being sent to the database, and receiving nothing back. As opposed to the byte of data being sent back every second for your game and the server. Resulting in higher loads than just a periodic transfer. The time logged system would be done on the database side so there should be no interference with the servers that handles the clients connected.

Huh? Character backups would occur solely server-side and have nothing whatsoever to do with the client or your network connection. And it is difficult to make an educated guess about the cost of such snapshots; optimizing database queries can be a very tricky business when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of active concurrent users.

[DrakeWurrum]

Huh? Character backups would occur solely server-side and have nothing whatsoever to do with the client or your network connection. And it is difficult to make an educated guess about the cost of such snapshots; optimizing database queries can be a very tricky business when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of active concurrent users.

Would make the most sense to save snapshots every time you log out of the game, as well as just "every X hours you are online"

[Remilia]

Huh? Character backups would occur solely server-side and have nothing whatsoever to do with the client or your network connection. And it is difficult to make an educated guess about the cost of such snapshots; optimizing database queries can be a very tricky business when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of active concurrent users.

It is server side. As I stated as a comparison the load difference between client server and the server side basis. Maybe my wording was poor but it was meant as a comparison.

Now at the very minimum of 6 hours (though I'd say every hour, 2, 4, 8, etc), that means 100kB of data being sent to the database, and receiving nothing back. As opposed to the byte of data being sent back every second for your game and the server.

[Gray_Matter]

Not really. The images that are saved are very very minimal process. If for some reason your servers can not handle an image saving system to a database, then there is something wrong with the process.
Your computer generally sends bytes and bytes of data to their server, and vice versa. Now at the very minimum of 6 hours (though I'd say every hour, 2, 4, 8, etc), that means 100kB of data being sent to the database, and receiving nothing back. As opposed to the byte of data being sent back every second for your game and the server. Resulting in higher loads than just a periodic transfer. The time logged system would be done on the database side so there should be no interference with the servers that handles the clients connected.

It's not about the amount of data. I know, I am a software architect and build large enterprise systems. In fact the system we are presently readying for deployment needs to handle approximately 26 million transactions every day. That's 300+ transactions every second. Each transaction consists of approximately 1k of data so it's a serious system. While the whole concept of storing snapshots may sound simple, it's probably not that simple, especially in a system as complex at GW2. It's extremely unlikely that all of this information is stored in a single table. More than likely it is stored across a number of tables.

GW2 has at least 2 million users. That's 40000 per server or 200000 characters per server. If the data is stored across only 10 tables (it's more than likely more), a simple backup of every char every day would mean an additional 2 million copied rows that need to handled per server on the database daily without impacting the performance of the system. Not exactly small number when the load is so extreme that they had actually suspended sales. This is an obvious over simplification of the system as there could be various integrity issues that may need to be handled as well which would seriously impact the complexity of archiving the information. For example, assuming that each item in game has a unique id, you have a weapon with a unique internal ID 1234567890. Not the weapon code but the unique item id. This weapon could have been purchased by someone else on the Trading Post so you can't just take it away from them. That would mean restoring the item would be more difficult than just restoring a few rows in a DB. It looks like GW2 make use of a central database in at least some form (switching servers is easy and they have a single Trading Post across all servers) so it will be much worse than just a simple server action.

It would have been nice if they supported this from the get go, I am just saying that there is probably a very sound technical reason why it is not in place at the moment.

[Deleted]

9 times out of 10 if you get hacked its your own fault, Anet might have bad customer service atm but its the same for any mmo on release, they have other things to be working on right now that are kinda more important than people who cant manage there own internet security.

I got hacked on swtor and on wow both times were my own fault not the companys, pretty tired of people blaming anet for them getting hacked, yes i understand complaining that the process of getting your account back is slow but in general it usualy is with other mmos to, swtor took me 3 weeks to get my account back, and wow took 8 days, and in both cases i bought a authenticator, My point is simple if you dont want to get hacked then manage your account better, dont use the same email or password you use for anything else and remember to do regular virus/spyware/malware scans and you wont get hacked in the first place

[Remilia]

Dumb phone

It's not about the amount of data. I know, I am a software architect and build large enterprise systems. In fact the system we are presently readying for deployment needs to handle approximately 26 million transactions every day. That's 300+ transactions every second. Each transaction consists of approximately 1k of data so it's a serious system. While the whole concept of storing snapshots may sound simple, it's probably not that simple, especially in a system as complex at GW2. It's extremely unlikely that all of this information is stored in a single table. More than likely it is stored across a number of tables.

GW2 has at least 2 million users. That's 40000 per server or 200000 characters per server. If the data is stored across only 10 tables (it's more than likely more), a simple backup of every char every day would mean an additional 2 million copied rows that need to handled per server on the database daily without impacting the performance of the system. GW2 make useNot exactly small number when the load is so extreme that they had actually suspended sales. This is an obvious over simplification of the system as there could be various integrity issues that may need to be handled as well which would seriously impact the complexity of archiving the information. For example, assuming that each item in game has a unique id, you have a weapon with a unique internal ID 1234567890. Not the weapon code but the unique item id. This weapon could have been purchased by someone else on the Trading Post so you can't just take it away from them. That would mean restoring the item would be more difficult than just restoring a few rows in a DB. It looks like GW2 make use of a central database in at least some form (switching servers is easy and they have a single Trading Post across all servers) so it will be much worse than just a simple server action.

It would have been nice if they supported this from the get go, I am just saying that there is probably a very sound technical reason why it is not in place at the moment.

You also have to remember that the backup system may be also completely off the server side that handles all the server side required actions. The trading post can be many methods as for the item id it depends on whether they have a 100% random and dynamic system for it which is doubtful. A user id tag would be more plausible

Obviously we don't know their server setup there's different possibilities