Posts by Iaerah

    This issue has plagued us for months, but I'm glad to say that it should be fully fixed as the root issue has been found.
    Furthermore, the entire set-up of the email system has been changed.

    All activation mails (and further, all mails sent by the server) should now arrive.
    The issue had to do with a bug in a certain piece of software that was quite hard to spot.

    I now officially live in /var/log/syslog.


    Back to the OP, I'd happily donate a fiver(£5) to this good cause as I'm one of those strange beasts who loves both games and has had years of enjoyment from them.
    Kevin,pm me as to how you'd like the money sent (if you're still doing this).

    You can use the "Donate" tab on top (below the logo, next to Recent Activity).
    That will open up the donation screen :)

    I'm not affiliated with arena-net in any way but with what they HAVE come out with, I can be very confident in saying that the GW1 servers will close when ArenaNet dies. Why? Because their server architecture is very similar to the two games, and because GW1 takes minimal amount of resources compared to GW2. Because of this they can easily just piggyback any GW1 instances open out of the servers for GW2. In short, I am pretty sure that GW1 is alive now in large part to GW2.

    Its easy to call ArenaNet a single entity, however there are many people with many different opinions and positions in the company. Yes a good chunk of their GW2 employees have probably never even played GW1. Yes their network security team has had a bad rep for mass bans before. Yes their support team was outsourced which allowed for very mediocre service. But realize that there are good people there, even to this day.

    Also, I think most people know, whether you want to admit it or not, that most of the 2015 bans were warranted, whether they got their accounts back or not.


    A fun fact: after the Gaile hack, they brought the servers down for Guild Wars but not Guild Wars 2.
    Guild Wars 2 kept on running perfectly, but the entire integration was blown: you lost all your HoM points and titles and the God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals title as well.
    Which means that Guild Wars 2 doesn't really need GW1 to keep on running, but it would take quite a lot of work and resources to decouple them.
    I think it's way easier for them to just let GW1 run... and they might still earn a bit from it too.


    I can appreciate you having to keep quiet on whatever information you have, but try to look at it from the other side. Whatever it is you know... we don't. And I don't think the majority of us intend to be rude or to burn bridges but frustration does that.

    It's hard to have the same enthusiasm we used to when we lost out on the Elona portion of GW Beyond, the Ranger and Paragon skill updates, as well as and rest of the Lunatic Court storyline. All for a game that is literally nothing like the original so many of us loved. Old news, I know.

    @K A O S Theory I don't think we need to be thankful for them keeping the game running.
    They're the ones who tied the HoM to it in the hopes to generate sales for their new game. If GW stops being profitable or useful to them? They'll close it pretty fast. Nothing personal, just business and it would suck but that's life and we move on.

    What we know has nothing to do with the game or plans for the game. We only know Legacy-related things.
    I can't really say more than that. We literally know as much as you guys about the plans for the game.

    The big issue is that they've said they wanted to do those things, and as such, we were kinda expecting them. In the case that they didn't talk about it, people wouldn't complain about that so much.
    However, this is completely normal and is why ArenaNet now has a "we don't talk about anything unless we ship it in a week" attitude for GW2. Which kinda looks like the attitude that they had for GW1...
    GW1 had it's share of cancelled projects as well, like the Guild Vault which never saw the light of day; The Xunlai Market, Ahmtur Arena. But except the Vault, we officially don't know anything about these, they never talked about them.
    Look at it from the other side: we did get War in Kryta, Hearts of the North and Winds of Change, which in total is quite a huge amount of content we got for free. I literally can't say that I know a company that created such a ton of high quality content and released it completely for free in a triple-A game, especially an MMORPG.
    We can still be thankful for that. It's not like just any company would have done that completely for free.

    And I actually got excited for the Hall of Monuments and I think it is a very good addition to EotN. When they talked about adding the HoM to GW1, they literally just started development of GW2.
    Back then, they didn't know that the game would turn out to be completely different and that GW1 players wouldn't really like it. That was when they were even just prototyping things.
    So yes, they added the Hall of Monuments to boost sales in a way, but rather to give us GW1 players something extra in GW2. It took years before we knew what we would be getting, and that's for a good reason: they didn't really know themselves.
    The skins that we get in GW2 for our HoM-points are mostly GW1 references. You can only get the Fiery Dragon Sword in this way.
    I'm not trying to talk things good here, but I'm trying to put things into perspective. Game development isn't easy - things change a lot during building the game (note, I can relate to this but in other ways, I'm a programmer myself).

    Was I dissapointed when GW2 came out? Yes and no. It never replaced GW1, but I think nearly nothing can replace it. It's so special, unqiue and there's nothing like it. Is GW2 a good game? Yes, if you cut it loose from it's GW1 roots. The biggest dissapointment for me in GW2 was that the lore was minimal. I liked the wall of texts in GW1, the quests which gave you so much detail.
    I liked that when you did a mission you would return to the area around it to do quests to broaden the story. I really loved that, dynamic events are too limited for that.
    I much prefer the skill system in GW1, the replayable missions in GW1, hard mode, the gameplay, the story... GW2 is a good game on it's own, it's just not a good successor for GW1.

    But enough about that and time to end my rant - ArenaNet didn't make all the perfect choices, but no company ever did. I'm just glad we're in a position to keep playing our dear game with no clear signs of it being shutdown.

    In general, I'm really glad Guild Wars 1 is still online and being maintained. Yes, it's not getting new content, but we have known this for years. We've had the live team, which never was intended to actually make content. We got that as a gift from ArenaNet, without it costing anything to us.
    People tend to forget that.
    They have been working actively on GW1 for as long as they could during the development of GW2. And yes, I still want to see those chapters that were planned, but they're never coming I fear. But we have gotten so much from them for free, which other companies would never have given away for free.

    I've played many MMORPG's in my time, and most of them have been pulled offline for years now (might be because I have a kinda special taste): Dungeon Runners, The Chronicles of Spellborn, ArchLord. None of those games, save TCoS, could capture me as well as Guild Wars can. That's why I have been playing it and still play it daily. But it's really rare to see a game that's nearing it's 12th birthday still being run and even being maintained. We all didn't expect updates this year, but we got one that fixed an issue that was in the game for years - and it was a proper fix. That was a long time in the making I guess, since you don't whip that kind of stuff up in a month.

    People should realize that with almost every other company in the world, GW1 would have already been sunset. Don't even doubt about that.
    And that's why I propose sending them those treats: to thank them. For the game they've made, but also the game they're still running after all these years. Yes, a lot of people from the GW1 era have left, but many of them are still working at ArenaNet on GW2: Joshua Foreman, Gaile Gray, Izzy, Mike Zadorojny, Tirzah Bauer, Joe Kimmes, ... I have only named a few, but still quite a lot of them are at ArenaNet.
    It's also a nice way to, as Max said it, build bridges. I mean, not much positive news (about ArenaNet) has come out from us as a community over the last years, which is completely understandable.
    But what if we try to improve our standing a bit? It might not do that much, or even anything, but it can only improve and I think that's something that all of us want.
    And believe me, they won't throw away real Belgian chocolates ;).

    About my feelings I expressed earlier, I have to agree with Max. It's nearly impossible for me to say anything about this. It's something that will be revealed later once we can.
    But I can say that they have done enough to make me feel that we still matter.
    Things have gotten both me and Max (and others) excited, so you know it has to be good ;).


    Is the motivation behind this idea to get them to pay attention to GW again? Honest question here.

    Other than that, I'm finding it difficult to see a valid reason to send anything to Anet. They'll get the chocolates, eat them (possibly taking pics doing so) then go back to working on the over priced train wreck that is GW2. That's been made clear even by this very forum.

    That in and of itself, makes it very hard to get people motivated imo. We're being honest here and Anet only does things to profit. Anything people feel that was done above and beyond was nothing more than a business decision. That's neither good nor bad... just business.

    So sure, it's easy enough to take up a collection and buy the chocolates but I feel it's the equivalent of sending them to your ex, who's already moved on to another person and has no intention of looking back. They just don't really mean anything, and nothing good would come of it.

    I'll make it clear that I feel the intent was good hearted, but maybe not worth the effort? Do any of them even bother to look at this site?

    ArenaNet is quite aware of Guild Wars Legacy and I have no doubts that they look at our site - in fact, months ago I have contacted ArenaNet and we're in their fansite lists/relations.

    I have reasons to believe that they haven't forgotten about us, believe me. I can't really say anything and I have absolutely no information about what's in store for Guild Wars.
    Call it a underbelly-feeling. But if we treat ArenaNet with respect, we'll get respect back. ;)

    Hello everybody!

    Over the last few days I've been thinking about sending a small package to ArenaNet with some gifts from our little community.
    I've thought about sending some specialities from my country (Belgium.. some pralines perhaps ;)) - I'm certain they'll like those.

    I'd like to ask the opinion of all of you on this and perhaps we can raise our donation meter a bit to pay for the shipping as well as our gift.
    The easiest thing to do is sending a box of chocolates of about 1.5kg (it costs around €40 and contains about 100 pralines) . That leaves us with about 500 grammes, in which I'd like to put letters and posts from us all thanking ArenaNet for the great game they've made with Guild Wars 1. Memories, great moments, screenshots... submit it all!

    That way, we an show ArenaNet that we as a community are grateful with the game they've made as well as give them some sweets. We haven't made it that easy for them over the last few months and we might not all agree with what ArenaNet is doing with Guild Wars 2, but this is a way that we can try to thank them for the game.
    (Btw, I will add a note that everybody who worked on GW1 should get a chocolate first ;). And we'll need a picture of Josh Foreman eating his. That guy rocks.)

    So what do you say?

    The costs would be:

    • Chocolates: € 40
    • Shipping: € 26.10

    That would make about €67 that we should raise as a community to do this.
    In the case that we won't reach the amount, I'll simply send them a Holidays card instead.

    Kevin

    Hi everybody!

    WoodenPotatoes has, together with another redditor, been working on a higher resolution version of the original Guild Wars trailer (think: Devona/Aidan/Cynn).
    Here is it:

    External Content www.youtube.com
    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.

    Well Max, I hope you'll love me for this.

    I have fixed this ;) - all images that are embedded on our site now go through our image proxy called Devona.
    So if you would embed a non-HTTP image, it will now go through Devona first, which uses HTTPS. That way your image gets loaded without any warnings.

    Yes, you can love me for this ;).


    Yeah, I agree with Jayson. The off-white background is a tad bright.

    Edit: Also, the tabs for individual boards now read "Forums - Selling" (for instance). That's new, right? Suboptimal when you have a bunch of tabs open and can only see "Forums -". In my opinion anyway.

    There are going to be different styles for this theme, some with a darker look. I'll tweak the whites some more here though.
    Good catch about the title, I'll see if I can fix that.


    Beautiful. No complaints from me.

    Kind of jealous of your sick admin background, though. Nice touch!

    Yeah, it came out quite nice! Very simple in itself, but looks great.


    i just want to understand :
    What happens in Anet after Nightfall ?

    We have a company who have made a good game, good mechanics, great univers, and, suddently, they give up, and made a theme park extension (GWEN).

    Whats happens ? they loste their minds ? the founding fathers suddently go mad ? They all lost their balls at the same times ?
    Or inflated by pride and greed, corrupted by the Great Evil Capitalism :p , they lost their mind and decide to give up GW1 and raise a new child : GW2

    This is mistery for me !

    What probably happened is that they had so many ideas and intentions which they couldn't realize in GW1. From that point, they tried to make a game that would embody those things.
    They had a game that was great, but also frustrating at some points for them as devs:
    * It was a nightmare to balance and quite hard to create new and unique skills
    * They shoehorned themselves into adding 2 new classes with every release, which became quite hard
    * Every release they needed to add more and more skills to the old professions + complete new ones
    * The engine had it's limitations
    * They wanted to add more races, but that would require tons of work since you could go back to other campaigns (armors, animations, cinematics would need to be modified)
    * They talked about adding mounts, which wouldn't work.
    * They had locked themselves in a 6 month release cadence
    * They had the possibility now to do things they couldn't before, as they had a lot more money compared to when they started the company.

    Combine all that together and it becomes clear why they changed things: the things we as players like are not always the things that are easy to implement. Some systems might be nightmarish!
    I just think it's a combination of everything and a desire to do something new. When they announced that they were starting with GW2, they already had worked 7 years on GW2 (even though it only released in 2005, it had been in development for 5 years).

    I still think they're enthousiastic for the game they've built and still like it, but also see it as something in the past. With season 3 they are really going back to the Guild Wars 1 lore, bringing the White Mantle back, Mursaat, the Forgotten and so on. It's obvious that they still like their first game, but we also need to realize that they haven't got the manpower to run 2 games. When they decided to go for GW2, they knew they had to end GW1. But they didn't do that at once - we got support (and even new content) until the last minute they could - the Live team was pulled a year before release I think, but they gave us 3 fantastic releases that actually are still challenging on hard mode on this day.
    It was never the intention to release any new content after Eye of the North got released, but thanks to Lindsey Murdock and her team (she still works for ArenaNet) we got new content. Which continued when John Stumme took over (he unfortunately doesn't work for ArenaNet anymore). They gave us great content!

    But... if you're working all day long on a game, which you're really proud of, and you don't really have that much time anymore to devote to the original... well, that's kinda what happened. The devs switched over to GW2, of which they're really proud (and it's a good game, just not a good successor for GW1) and on which they work daily. The motivation to work on GW1 is quite a bit smaller, and it simply doesn't have the players anymore it used to have (which is normal, as new content isn't being added). However, they are using the story of the first game, they're adding in small hints to GW1 everywhere now.
    ArenaNet still loves this game, there simply isn't a doubt about that. But the future for them is GW2 and the past is GW1 - but they don't regret the past.
    While they might not support the game 100% anymore, they still run it. Not many companies would do that. This MMO is 11 years old and it's still running - not many MMO's can say that, and there's not a single word about the game getting shut down.
    I'm pretty certain a lot of devs still play the game nearly daily, but if devs would be more active here, would talk more to us, we kinda would expect that the game would get new content. We'd get excited and those things would probably never happen. That's why we have the radio-silence of ArenaNet - not because they're ashamed, but because they've moved on and they don't want to disappoint us.

    That's what I think.

    It will work if you change the http to https in the link.

    All images that are hosted on a non secure connection will no longer embed, but will instead link to the image itself.
    In most cases you can simply change the http to https and it will work.

    The reason for this is to keep our lock on all pages, as we had the error before that we were loading unsecure content. This fixes that.
    There is also another solution, but it requires me to run another server which costs money :(.

    So, to keep it short: change the http to https and it will work


    I have tried to dl a mod, and, yes, it works !
    You are a real genius, Kevin ! You do nothing, and it works ! :p
    I suggest that we call him "Mast3r of th3 S3rv3r"

    Well.. I didn't have a custom title yet. I like it. I added it :P


    Kev Da Dev.
    Or Darth Kevin.

    He really is the engine room of this whole site, and without his drive and enthusiasm it would not be successful. We are all in his debt.

    Awwwh <3 ^^
    It's my pleasure guys (and girls)! :D


    Anyone think it would be feasible that Guild Wars could be updated using the GW2 game engine?

    Over the life of GW2, so many of the original character models have been remade (the Mursaat just recently) and if the trend continues, the majority of the work would be done without having to add extra manpower and resources. I'm not talking about updating GW to GW2 mechanics as I prefer the original style in every way, but a mini pet storage would be nice. :P

    So is it a crazy idea? Would it make sense for them financially? Would it draw more of the GW2 crowd to the original, or maybe new players in general as a new game?

    How hard I would want it - chances for it are very slim. Very slim indeed.
    The best thing they could do is backport features from GW2 into GW1, but during the development of GW2 they didn't do that, so I wouldn't see why they would do it now. Features like windowed fullscreen shouldn't be that hard to implement.

    The big issue is that the knowledge of the GW1 engine, even though it's the basis of the GW2 engine, is kinda rare in ArenaNet, with probably only Joe Kimmes as the only one who really has in-depth knowledge of it. When they added the Balthazar weapons for the 10th anniversary, they explicitly said that it "was fun to revisit the GW1 asset pipeline", as it is something they didn't do in years.
    Next to that, the styles of the game are completely different. Many times the models of GW1 are quite a lot more detailed compared to the models of GW2. - perhaps not in terms of polygons, but in details. Take for example the Fiery Dragon Sword - it looks a LOT better in GW1 and in GW2 it's simply cartoonish. The styles of the game don't blend at all.
    The big issue with porting GW1 to the GW2 engine is that the GW2 engine has cut out many things that made GW1 unique: the way missions work is nowhere to be found in GW2, the combat is completely overhauled and doesn't even support elemental damage, the armor system/classes are different, there are no heroes in the game/henchmen, the secondary profession system, ... It would be a MASSIVE undertaking to port GW1 to the GW2 engine, and I much rather would like them see just updating the GW1 engine instead. By moving GW1 to the GW2 engine you'd have to reimplement all the mechanics again.

    I would love a mini pet storage, though years ago (around the fourth anniversary!) they said that adding more storage was unlikely as it would require new servers - however, I don't think that's quite an issue nowadays. They should have simply added the option to grab a copy of any minipet you had in your HoM when they introduced it. With the customization of them in the beginning, this was 1000% feasible, but instead they made it attuned...
    Oh well..

    But no, it would make no sense at all for them to do so - they've got another game that they're fully supporting and GW1 is on the lifeline, though I have to be honest and praise ArenaNet - they're keeping a game up and running, even maintaining it and doing some patching without gaining anything from it - I highly doubt that GW1 still covers cost.

    That would be great as a solution for me and others interested in visibility, but if that is a regular complaint maybe a standardized fix to the font and/or text size would be useful. That was really my point.

    Even just the current font bumped up one size is far better. Right now our font/size combination is a little below the point of easy legibility, at least for me.

    Add this in a Stylish stylesheet and it'll change all the post fonts to Georgia 18pt:

    Quote

    @-moz-document domain("guildwarslegacy.com") {
    .post_body {
    font-family: Georgia;
    font-size: 18px;
    }
    }

    I'm not really a fan of Times New Roman/serif fonts myself (though I do like Georgia). But I can create a small stylesheet for you that you can use with Stylish for example to change the fonts into Georgia 5. That way, you can browse this site like you want to :)

    Hello everybody,

    I think it's hardly a secret that we've been working on a new theme that would solve a few issues that people have/had:

    • Text too hard to read
    • Several items that are very hard or impossible to read
    • People might not like the dark layout


    In order to solve this, I started working on a new layout - codename for this was "Stormcaller". The alpha versions of those themes are still available, as "Stormcaller" and "bickycheese".
    However, I decided to use another theme as our base and started customizing it for our needs.

    That theme was MyIPB, which bases itself on the base theme of Invision Power Board. I modified it quite heavily, incoporating several new features (like the "Recent Activity" on top. I couldn't miss it ;3).

    Now, this new theme is available for all to test! Should we get no complaints, we'll put this theme as our default. The current default, Revolution, will stay available as a choice.

    You can enable the theme by going down on the page and choosing for "MyIPB" in the dropdown menu!

    So, please let me know your feedback!

    - Kev

    Well dear Sadness, as it happens, I got a reply today (what a coincidence!).

    I got a reply from Gaile, and she states that she is pleased that we're continuing to cover Guild Wars, which is still a game that's very dear to her heart.

    In regards to an interview, they're not able to do one now, but should the opportunity arise, they'll think of us. That's not a no, it's a well, not right now, but perhaps in the future.

    Further some general things and she wishes us great success :).

    All in all, quite happy with the reply and we're also added to the community mailing list, so yeah, all in all quite positive.

    - Kev

    Hey hey all :)

    The monthly breakdown is as follows:

    * € 10 - Main cost for the server that is running our site
    * € 2 - Cost for snapshots (backups) of our server, occuring about once a week
    * € 3 - VAT for the server + snapshots
    * € 2 - Domain costs
    * € 10 - Costs for our backup server that makes daily backups of our site + database
    * € 2 - VAT for the backup server
    * € 5 - Extra bandwith costs (variable) (mostly traffic between backup server and main server)

    That brings us to about €30 a month for hosting costs alone.

    The other €10 is mainly used for transaction costs that are billed to us when a donation is made (unfortunately, we have to pay a chunk of each donation).
    If we get 10 donations of €3, that means we won't get €30 but about €25-€27.
    The rest of this is used as a net to cover unexpected costs, chargebacks (a chargeback always costs us €15), a rainy day fund and to allow us to organize contests with cool prizes.

    My ultimate goal is to have an extra server ready as well, so that when our server would go down, we still wouldn't have downtime because of our secondary server. That's however not feasible for me to pay right now.

    These costs are actually very low for a VPS that we're running on and that is because I am managing it completely myself. Managed hosting easily costs 3-5 times more.

    I also had no clue about this, but I'm glad it's fixed - properly this time.
    This proves that ArenaNet still cares about us, even though it's probably only 1 person (I'd put my money on Joe Kimmes), who has been a bit more active on the wiki a few weeks ago.

    I'm glad that they did this :).

    And that kind of attitude makes me even gladder that we started Legacy... even though Guru should be seen as lost now, at least we have a site now that's not in Curse it's hands...
    What makes me afraid is that Curse has these Guild Wars sites on their server:
    * GuildWiki (I can't imagine that it's still that popular, with the official Wiki... won't they kill this next?)
    * PvXWiki

    Yeah, they kinda lost my faith in them now.


    I'm going to answer these the best I can...

    1. Yes, we have more than enough bandwith to host it here. That's not the issue - the issue would be the size of the website, we don't have enough diskspace for it. I can set up a seperate server, with extra storage, but it would need to be funded by the community every month to stay online. Guild Wars Legacy is running on a server that I also use for other projects, so while income is handy it isn't required. For the archive, that would be required. Last I heard someone had a backup with a size well into 500 GB.
    2. I'm not aware of any full backups - if you do know it, let me know.
    3. Legal implications? Well, if the original content is down, we're just mirroring it. If we listen to takedown requests, we wouldn't do that much wrong.
    Since we're not located in the USA, we're not required to follow the DMCA though (our servers are located in the Netherlands) - we however do need to respect the copyrights.
    4. No, we wouldn't be able to do this. However, we would be able to use a Google Custom search to make it searchable, but it wouldn't be perfect.
    5. We would need more people and money to realize this.

    - Kev

    Hello everybody,

    In order to make our website more secure, we have been using HTTPS/SSL since the beginning of our site.
    However, quite a lot of you are using http-images instead of those protected by SSL (https).

    When an image from a non-secure source (non-https) is loaded, our site "loses" it's lock and is marked insecure.
    To solve this, we're now displaying all images from a non-secure source as a link.
    If you use an HTTPS-source, it will display like it always has.

    Most image hosts support https, like for example Imgur.
    Try to change the http to https, in most cases this will work.

    This helps secure our site and maintain our lock on all pages :)

    Kev