Posts by Iaerah

  • A little glimpse into the development environment of Guild Wars Legacy

    Hey all,

    The last few days we've made a move towards a new server, Zu Heltzer (replacing our previous server, Vekk). Another server is in use for secondary programs and tools which is called Lutgardis - you might notice that the theme of server names for now is the Great Kurzick Houses.

    Next to that, I also have a local development environment which I use to run tests upon and to help prepare for server moves like this. I thought a small insight in my local development environment would be cool!

    This is the current set-up in my local mini-rack (which I 3D-printed myself):

    As you can see, my local Kubernetes cluster is comprised out of the nodes Grenth and Dhuum. The third machine (the Dell one) is called Balthazar and the final one is called Proxmox, but lets pretend it is named Menzies.

    So this is a small glimpse into how Guild Wars Legacy is being developed/worked on, the live servers itself are a bit harder to show off, but those are located in Germany.

    Thats it for this little insight!

    - Kevin

  • Trouble uploading photos?

    Quote from Elojah
    Quote from Iaerah

    This is now resolved - unfortunately, this didn't happen retroactively - this only works for new uploads going forward.

    Thank you so much for your effort and dedication to make this forum the best it can be! ^^

    You're very welcome <3 Guild Wars is extremely dear to my heart, this is just one thing I can do for all the years of enjoyment GW has given me (so far).

    By the way, our new server is now Zu Heltzer, Vekk has officially retired now!

  • Image uploads broken since maintenance?

    To bring you all up to speed: it is harder to find the issue because of both the server move and the forum software getting a big update where the way the file uploads are being handled being changed.

    That means that the way the upload is going is completely different and I do not know how that handles things (after managing Legacy for so many years, I did know a bit how the old system worked).
    The strange thing is that the files are still being uploaded, since you can download them. So it is not an issue with wrong write-rights on a folder. So I need to figure out why this is going wrong, and I called for help from the developers.

    The process is ongoing, I'll keep you up to date once I have more information.

  • Trouble uploading photos?

    Quote from Elojah

    Has this been resolved yet?

    Unfortunately, no. Working on it.

    It's harder than I had hoped and I have checked and ruled out a lot of things on our new server that were the likely culprits. What doesn't help is that the way file uploads are handled are changed in this version of the forum software (and radically so) and thus I am not that familiar with how it works now.

    So, currently still investigating it. Will update as soon as I have an update to make.

    - Kev

  • Image uploads broken since maintenance?

    Quote from Looney

    So all new images will just show up as attachments for now with a link to download the image(s) until the new forum software devs can update on their end?

    For now, unfortunately, yes. I will ofcourse continue to investigate and see if I can figure out what is going wrong here.

    Quote from Neutral_CH

    ALL images are “broken”, both old and new, and are only visible after downloading. :(

    I'm doing everything I can to get this fixed asap

  • Image uploads broken since maintenance?

    Ok; extra update. There are a few things changed with the last server update, but in the new version of the forum software there is also a change that has an impact on how files are uploaded and delivered. I'm going to contact the developers of our software and investigate with them.

    In the meantime, all caches have been rebuilt, all attachments have been checked so no server site it all looks good for now.

    I'll keep you all up to date!

    - Kev

  • How did Guild Wars treat you today?

    Quote from San

    Unread posts and watched threads don't function on mobile for me since the recent maintenance. Neither does tapping the selling section actually, just puts you back at the homepage. Do more people experience this?

    I just tested it on my phone and I can't reproduce it. There was an issue with some rewrite rules though that can explain the issues that you have experienced.
    These should have been resolved though, but it could be caused by caching of the old rules. So one step I would first suggest is: try another browser and see if it happens there too. If it doesn't, you'll probably need to clear the cache.

    If it happens there too, please let me know as many details as possible (browser you use), so that I can investigate. But right now I suspect it is just cache.

    Quote from trademeimfamous

    maintenance.jpg

    Display Spoiler

    legaception.jpg

    Legacy-ception! That was a bug that happened just after the maintenance, while the webserver was restarting :).

    All should be fine now, though.

    Fun fact, the server now is no longer Vekk, but Zu Heltzer...

  • Xunlai Marketplace: post limit for Buy/Sell/Services

    Quote from Serus Krysyth
    Quote

    We are currently experimenting with a post limit for the Buy/Sell/Services boards. In essence, you will need a total of 5 posts before you are allowed to post in these boards.

    I've lurked since coming back to the game in ~February and I'm curious about the reasoning on this. Is it just a problem with low-effort posting, spam, or something similar?

    We are currently looking for more moderators (Recruitment: new moderators for Guild Wars Legacy!) - we haven't recruited new moderators since Legacy started and some moderators have (naturally) decided to stop or reduce the amount of time they can invest in Legacy.
    Because of that, some changes - like this one - are being put in place to help our moderation team.

    Quote from Emryle

    Have these requirements changed? I believe I meet the requirements and waited 30 minutes still can't post. Just trying to figure out if I'm missing something.

    The requirements have not been changed, but it can take up to 10 minutes before you are automatically moved to the right group.

    Quote from XaRaaN

    5 posted threads or are 5 reply’s also ok?

    5 replies are okay, it's just posts not new threads.

    Quote from trademeimfamous

    I get why this has been implemented but i am not sure if the current side effects are particularly desirable.

    imo this needs some sort of rework or refinement

    It is currently a trial test and can be reconsidered or refined in the future.

    Quote from desmo

    It seems like posts made in the price check forum don't count towards the total however. There aren't too many active discussions so it's a little harder to contribute without making random meaningless posts, definitely understand the rule change though.

    Price check should be set-up to count the posts.

    Quote from Projet2501

    Oh... Maybe this should appear in the Xunlai Market Rules?

    I've added this in - thanks for bring this to my attention :)

  • Xunlai Marketplace: post limit for Buy/Sell/Services

    Quote from Looney

    Are these forum services powered by an Asuran Auto-Mod-a-ton?

    No, we had to outsource to some very capable Skree Harpies Grawl.

    Quote from Ecto U Obsi Magnet

    Thats the reason why i cant post on my own auction now for days?

    That can indeed be the reason - it's a side-effect of changing this, unfortunately. You should however have enough posts now to be able to post there again.

    Quote from Lee Anza

    Does the min 5 posts mean in total across all of gwlegacy, or 5 posts in Xunlai Marketplace?

    Across the entirety of Guild Wars Legacy.

    Quote from Peri Bear

    still waiting to be able to make a sell post

    ><

    Once you meet the requirements, it takes up to 10 minutes before you are added to the right group. You should be in it right now.

  • Xunlai Marketplace: post limit for Buy/Sell/Services

    Hello everybody,

    We are currently experimenting with a post limit for the Buy/Sell/Services boards. In essence, you will need a total of 5 posts before you are allowed to post in these boards.
    Your account also needs to be at least 24 hours old before you can post there.

    Once you satisfy these requirements, you should be able to post in these boards within 10 minutes.

    Kevin

  • Xunlai Marketplace: automatic enforcement of post limit

    Hey all,

    As all of you probably know, you can only have a single thread active on these boards:

    • Buying
    • Selling
    • Services Offered
    • Services Requested

    Right now I am testing a (custom) plugin to enforce this limit automatically - if you have an open thread, you will not be allowed to post another thread until your first thread is closed.

    To close a thread, please create a new post with Please Close in it (or something like it) and I will close your post as soon as I can. In the near future you will also be able to close your own posts.

    Now, there is always the possibility of an error with something like this. If you encounter an error, please let me know - either via a reaction here or by mailing me on [email protected]

    - Kevin

  • 20th Year Update Announcement

    Quote from Cottura9Minuti

    New areas, titles, skills, or game modes would’ve hyped me way more tbh. Bringing back old stuff just seems low-effort to me.

    We know from years ago that they don't like to mess with title tracks since it's all interlinked with GW2 and changing it is probably quite complex and it would also mess up the Hall of Monuments Calculator (which is by now so ancient that it still uses Flash which has been completely dead for over 4 years now. Changing that is véry unlikely to happen as it requires vastly different skills than those required for making changes in the game itself.

    Adding new areas is something that you also shouldn't expect to happen: that requires quite a large team to do. I could entirely be wrong here, but I think the last new area that was added in the game was The Mausoleum and that is rough at a few points (for example it has no map texture). That map was also made from existing assets and back in the day when there was an actual live team for the game.
    Creating a new area is simply out of scope... you need map artists, creatures need to be spawned, designers, quest designers (otherwise there's not a lot to do in the map) and finally you'd need the QA team to test the new area. That's a lot of work.

    Making new skills, like with the previous anniversary, was something that was done by the person who did almost all of the coding of the skills and balance patches for the last few years of GW1's Live Team (Joe Kimmes - who is still at ANet as far as I know), but adding new skills still takes a lot of time and effort since these need to be tested and to be honest, it is quite hard to create well balanced and cool skills.

    Adding a new game mode also takes a TON of effort. It's not as simple as just adding a toggle. For example, when they created Hard Mode, that required ALL areas of the game to be revisited by the developers and they modified quite a bit (monster skill bars, AI behaviour etc). It would require a TON of development time and money, money that they probably will not be able to recuperate (because let's be honest here).

    The changes that have been announced are sane changes that the current game team can handle and will have a positive impact. It can give incentive to play content that isn't played as much anymore and can revitalize content.

    However, what they do mention is very interesting. I would love for more variants of for example the Soulbreaker Scythe to drop. I would even love it if they took that skin and created some variants of it, for example a black or fire version.

    I like the tease of "new loot". I'm curious what that could be!

  • How is the difficulty and grind?

    Also, I wouldn't really treat GW1 as any other MMORPG - it's very unique in a lot of ways. The combat is a lot deeper than you might expect from a 20 year old game - the fact that monsters use the same skills as players (for the biggest part) plays a huge role in it. Combat in GW1 is - compared to a lot of other MMO's, but this one is more an CORPG than an MMORPG - much deeper.

    But there certainly is challenge in the game and there is a reason why there is still a community around, even after 10+ years without new content.

  • So, which song is on your mind today?

    External Content youtu.be
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    Something to do with the day

  • How is the difficulty and grind?

    Quote from Inoccuity

    About 4 months ago I tried out New World

    Fun fact, the company founded by the last founder of ArenaNet has worked on New World for years now (Manaworks), almost all of them worked on Guild Wars 1.

    Now, about Guild Wars, it is not a grindy game per se, it was designed to not be a grind but there are goals that can take a lot of grinding to achieve, e.g. getting the God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals title track to the maximum rank or maxing several titles. But I wouldn't personally consider this to be real grindy game.

    In terms of challenging content, there is content that is challenging for almost all players, even those with 15+ years of experience. Domain of Anguish, for example, or Slaver's Exile in hard mode.

  • Recruitment: new moderators for Guild Wars Legacy!

    Hello everybody,

    A few months ago we shared a post that we are looking for some moderators to join the Guild Wars Legacy team. That request is still valid and we are still looking for some new moderators.

    Because my prevous post might not have been the clearest, I'll quickly go through what this means.

    - The biggest chunk is going through all of the new posts and address them as needed. Ideally this happens daily, but no worries if you can't do this daily - all help is welcome!
    - Handle any reports or PMs that you might receive. Not each report/request requires the same action, some might not even need action and some reports might not be justified.
    - Close threads in the Xunlai Marketplace that have been marked for closure.
    - Communicate actions that you have taken that might be relevant to others, for example when you hand out a warning or a ban, escalating issues that need to be handled by the admin, etc.

    The biggest chunk is the moderation of the Xunlai Marketplace, which has the most strict rules of all boards to keep things running smoothly, but ofcourse, the other parts of Guild Wars Legacy also need to be checked and moderated.

    This task does not entail trade moderation.

    You'll become part of the Guild Wars Legacy team and you will get access to the staff boards and our Slack channel where matters can be discussed with the whole team and with moderators both new and old.

    All in all, this isn't a complete list of actions nor does everything happen each day, so on average this takes about 10-15 minutes per day.

    If you are interested, please place a post in https://guildwarslegacy.com/forum/thread-add/95/ - this is a special section where only you (and our moderators) can see your thread. If you have questions, feel free to ask these.


    Kevin

  • We're looking for new Legacy moderators!

    Hello there!

    We've decided to start looking for some new moderators to join our team - for the first time since we started Legacy!

    If you are interested, feel free to apply by posting a thread here: https://guildwarslegacy.com/forum/thread-add/95/

    - Kevin

    (I also threw this into Gemini, it generated an awesome text, so I decided to paste it below):

  • Economy Discussion

    Quote from Forty Second Rogue

    One of the things I prefer in GW1 is the low level of different currencies. The constant adding of new currencies in GW2 is one of the things that brought me full circle to the original.

    It's the price to pay for having horizontal progression. The problem is that without those currencies, there would be no boundaries into just buying everything upon the release of something.
    That means that content becomes optional and only rewards more of the same, which means that next time over something new releases, people can just insta-buy it again.
    To avoid that, you introduce a new currency that you can only earn by doing specific content (aka the new content) and earn the rewards in this way. While GW1 has significantly less of these currencies, there are still quite some in the game (for example, Medals of Honor, Zaishen Coins, Armbraces, Hero Armor etc) and should the game have been in development for longer, we would probably have the same issue here. GW2 has been in development for over 12 years (after launch), whilst the active (with the exception of the Live Team) development of Guild Wars 1 after launch only was about 2.5 years long. Now, that has always been a terrible shame in my eyes, they should have increased the studio to support both GW1 and GW2 instead... but that is another story.

    But with horizontal progression, it's very hard to avoid introducing new currencies. And GW2 is the extreme in that, but they've finally started working on that (e.g. Unusual Coins being re-used in expansions, and when a new expansion drops the existing Unusual Coins become Ancient Coins). But, the same issue exists here: if they release new rewards, unless they want people to just instantly buy all of them, they're going to use a new currency for it.

    Quote from Forty Second Rogue

    not with GW3 in development

    While GW3 is most likely in early development, I highly doubt it has passed pre-production. From what I could gather from that investor meeting, it was a panic-induced reply and not really "GW3 is fully in development, going to release soon". I would expect that even if it is currently in development, it's still going to be 6-7 years before we see a release.
    While there was a gap of 5 years between GW1 stopping development and GW2 coming out, I highly doubt they would risk killing off the cash-cow that GW2 currently is (it's still one of their most profitable MMOs), so I would expect to see development on GW2 going on for many years.

    GW1 getting new content is out of the question, not on the table at all. But I still suspect some improvements might be coming still, as long as the effort required is small. Stephen loves the game as well and I have no doubts that he is going to make a lot of changes, but I think most of these will be behind the scenes. But I do expect something to happen at the 20th birthday.

    Best of all, Stephen getting to work almost fulltime on GW1 means that the servers aren't going to be shut down anytime soon.

  • Economy Discussion

    Quote from PyroLobster

    You don't need super powers to identify bots. You need eyes and about 65IQ to get 99.9% accuracy and then let support deal with the 0.1%.

    The issue isn't really to identify bots, because those are extremely easily identified and banned. The issue is how quickly they come back and it in essence becomes a game of whack-a-mole: ban one and mere seconds another bot takes the place of the first one. It doesn't scale up.
    The other issue is that those botters will often contact support to try and get some accounts unbanned, which creates a load on support. If the support needs significantly more time to deal with these issues because of a huge ban wave, that also means that the costs for support rise up (and these things are being budgetted for - if the costs of support rise a lot, that ain't a good thing).

    I'm involved in helping run an old MMORPG and dealing with bots is hard - because it's an ongoing fight. It's easy to ban a lot of bots at once (tweak something small in game that the bots have automated, make the official client do it just a little bit different, like send an extra value in a packet, and you can flag thousands of bots at the same time). It's however hard to keep doing that and keep tweaking things, it is a fight that takes a ton of energy - and to be honest, I would much prefer to see that effort go into improving the game.

    I do think that the future brings a lot of cool things for bot detection though, especially for gold spamming. AI is at the point that you can just feed it a chat log and it can easily pick out goldsellers and flag them - but then botters will try and find a new way to outrun even that. To see how creative they are, this is the chatfilter that we're maintaining for Guild Wars: https://github.com/kevinpetit/leg…/ChatFilter.ini

    It's crazy to see how many variations of the same there are. Older tools make it hard to detect botting that does things like this, but AI can handle this quite well. Finally some good use for it?


    PS: a now banned user was harassing someone because of this thread. Have respect for each other, just because someone else has a different opinion doesn't mean that they are wrong (or even right). Have respect for each other.
    I won't tolerate harassment.

  • Economy Discussion

    Armbraces only have a value since we players have given a value to it - in game they're only useful for several cool weapons and items, but have no further use.

    Quote from Neutral_CH

    Because let's not forget that the code governing GW1 is a load of crap, either to modify or to add new content (and it's far from the only game in this case). This is one of the main reasons why development on this game was abandoned, especially after the NF code was implemented in the game (creating band-aids and banning players who accidentally find exploits left in the code is not a viable long-term technique)

    I don't agree with this. GW1 has barely any real technical issues (though, like any game of its scale, it has bugs and exploits), but compare it to other MMO's of its age and it is running remarkably.
    Should the code base be that bad, they also wouldn't have created another game based on this code.

    Once thing that was coming up and made continued development difficult is that they were nearing 4 GB of the gw.dat file, which was a serious limitation since GW1 is still 32-bits. However, not much is stopping them from moving GW1 to 64-bits (though it might not be very easy, it is do-able) which lifts that limit. But back in the day, in 2012, this was a serious concern. But they solved that issue for GW2, can't imagine they wouldn't be able to do it for GW1 should content development ever be started again.

    What is an issue though is that a lot of the development tools haven't been touched since 2010 and those need some serious love. But adding a vendor is peanuts for them.


    But, going back to Armbraces... if they really want to, they can absolutely fix the economy, but it won't be a popular change (but changes to an economy never are). In essence, it would mean replacing Armbraces with a different item and devalueing the current armbraces immensely.

    The main reason Armbraces are a thing is because our trade limits, bank limits and characters limits are too low. Raising those significantly will take away the need for armbraces.

    But, what I expect is that Armbraces are just going to be ignored, and if something new in terms of rewards eventually do get added, they will use new materials and items instead that are better protected against botting.
    Protecting a game against botting is a losing battle, unless you are fighting against it constantly, you'll never win. And that's just the reality in any game, with the exception of games where there is no sense or need for botting.

  • 3d printed and painted statues of Guild Wars 1 characters!

    I can't wait for Eve <3

  • 3d printed and painted statues of Guild Wars 1 characters!

    Quote from L'atelier d'Alex

    and someone from here also bought from me

    I feel called out :P but indeed, I got 3 beautiful statues from your Etsy shop! My personal favourites are the Grenth and Balthazar ones, but I particulary love - which isn't strange, as I'm a necromancer through and through - the statue of Grenth.

    image.pngimage.png

    It was extremely well packed as well. I also love the keychain and the profession badges that you gave me <3


    Really love them.