Posts by Iaerah

  • Welcome to the new Guild Wars Legacy!

    Quote from Kevin

    New update, I spent some time testing how to resolve it, but it's taking far longer than I hoped.

    It'll return though.

    After quite a long while, it's back. Will get some template changes soon, too.

    How does it work now? You need to use the bb code gwbb for it to work

    You can simply use [build=buildcode] or [Skill Name] within it to make it work.

    For example: [Pain Inverter]

    You might need to reload the page after posting, since the javascript might not pick it up.

    There is a button (gamepad) in the editor now to enter the gwbb code.

  • Legacy down - network issues 18 november 2018

    Hello everybody,

    I'm typing this message after 19 hours, 19 minutes and 9 seconds of downtime on Guild Wars Legacy (we've got monitors for that information, after all).

    The downtime was caused by issues between our server and the network uplink provider, which was far out of our control and unfortunately, we were forced to wait until they resolved this issue.

    Some other issues forced us to restore Legacy to the latest available backup - we have lost a tiny bit of content, but due to our backup system almost everything was left here.

    Update: I have been informed by our service provider that it was, in fact, not an issue with the network uplink provider, but the physical hypervisor which housed our main Legacy web VM has had major issues and this led to data loss - the VM got corrupted and could not be restored.

    Fortunately, I might have overdone it on the backup front and was able to restore GW:Legacy with barely any data loss.

    When the downtime started, we had no idea how long it would be and if we could retain the existing content that was not yet available in our backups - this led to us not spinning up Legacy on another server as we wanted to avoid having a Legacy server that was out of sync - we'd lose posts in either way.

    This incident was a good pointer for us and tested a lot of the systems that we have in place when Guild Wars Legacy has issues - we have an amazing backup system, our emergency staff chatroom was online and was actively used, our monitoring system notified us about the issue within seconds of it starting. Other than cosyfiep being treated for withdrawal symptoms, everything is fine :).

    Over the last few weeks we've been optimizing the Guild Wars Legacy infrastructure and we'll be taking further actions to avoid lengthy downtime.

    The first step in this is to setup a secondary database server that will replicate the main database, so loss of posts is reduced to a minimum.

    Next to that, we're going to drive up the database backups even further.

    Sorry for this downtime - it was completely out of our hands, but we're taking steps to avoid further downtimes like this and will be handing over the responsible ones to Mad King Thorn.

    - Kevin

  • The remaining GW1 community is very bad.

    I wouldn't say the community is bad -it's a very close-knit community nowadays and almost all activity happens in guilds - LGIT, PUPU, GWAM amongst others.

    There are ton of players that are happy to help others.

    Are there more toxic players? I wouldn't say so. But the fact that people are centralised in a few locations, makes it easier to encounter them. And that plays a big role in that.

    I never had issues with finding other players to play, though.

  • New campaign for Guild Wars 1, we can make it happen if there is a will.

    I've tried to stay outside of this conversation for a while, but I'm going to step in now and clarify a few things:

    NCSoft hasn't had anything to do with Guild Wars since september 2015 - at that point, ArenaNet took over the publishing of both GW1 and GW2 - whilst ArenaNet is still owned by NCsoft, the direct involvement of NCsoft in operations have been cut since then.

    That's also the reason why the in-game shop closed, as that was being run by NCsoft.

    Does that mean that NCsoft doesn't care? Well, NCsoft is more focussed on Asia nowadays and ArenaNet has proven that they can handle running an MMO and the business side - so they're a bit more out of sight.

    For GW1 to get a new expansion, a few things would need to happen:

    - They'd need to train a new team to use the GW1 engine and tools - since most of their current team is working on GW2 and they need those people there - they won't remove people from GW2 to improve GW1.

    - The GW1-tools have been broken terribly and have been a nightmare to use for years. Joe Kimmes was responsible for adding the Balthazar weapons (it was a pet project of him) and it took him a very long time to get the tools to work at all - which is understandable, since those tools didn't get any use in the last 5 years.

    So, in order to fix those, they'd need a sizeable programming team to properly fix them and probably would need to build a few new ones.

    - Bill/Stephen have been trying to add new features (like the item rarity coloring, bigger bags), but it caused a lot of issues when they tried to implement it - I'm not sure if it's still coming, I sure hope so, but the GW1 engine is very old by now. Knowledge of it has lessened in the company (not only due to people leaving ArenaNet, because a ton of GW1 people still work there), but if you stop working on something you lose knowledge of the structure quickly (I'm a sysadmin/devops, I know what I'm talking about here :P).

    - If all of these hordes have been tackled with, new content would be possible - but it would take a year before anything would come of it, at the least. You'd need people to get used to the tools and software and that's something which takes a while. Since the live team was about 10 people, those were able to create sizeable content drops in the game, but those were rather small and released in bits.

    - Would it still be financially viable to create new content? Whilst I don't doubt that there are a lot of players and a lot of returning ones, I don't know about this. You'd need to train new support staff, hire a new team and train them, the costs to get everything working again and up to modern standards... it's going to be really expensive. GW hasn't had new content for years and the community, while still being sizeable, might not be big enough to support all of this.

    Once all those hordes have been passed, a new expansion might be feasible. But those are quite big hurdles.

    Should we get this big enough, I don't doubt things are possible - but we'd need A LOT of people to pull this off.

    We're here to offer the place to let you promote this and if we can we'll try to help, but this isn't an easy feat to pull off - remember that the original campaigns were made by about 50 employees in about a year - to get a return on that, you'd need to sell a lot.

    So, all in all: not impossible, but nearly. But there might be a small chance.

    What I think is more realistic is having a small live team again that can create some small content drops, perhaps and work on small improvements that the game still needs. That alone would be amazing for me and much more likely to happen.

    - Kevin

  • Change to Embedded pictures?

    We're currently actually only using about 4.4 GB in total storage on the server, so that's really plenty of space.

    Legacy is hosted on currently 4 servers (Webserver, Backup node, the Archive node and the Mail Server) - all of that is being monitored and visible on https://status.guildwarslegacy.com

    Legacy is designed to be a bit more resilient (and fast) than most sites, it's one thing where I am really proud of :)

    And yeah, it keeps you on your toes :)!

  • Change to Embedded pictures?

    I'm afraid that I wasn't able to reproduce this bug - what are the exact steps to reproduce this?

    We're not trying to save space - our server has plenty of free space left (19 GB to be exact), so I'm not worried there - Legacy is backed by a couple of servers and disk space is certainly not an issue.

    We're also not on a free host (never have been) or on a shared webhosting provider - Legacy is simply too big for that (simply put: we'd use too much resources for that). Legacy has been managed by me from the start on several platforms.

    I'll have to look into what exactly is causing this.

  • the poster above me

    Quote from Looney

    The poster above me usually wears a white hat with his white mantle buddies.

    Lies! Slander! That is totally false - I am and I will always remain neutral! Hail the Unseen Ones!

    Oh.. excuse me, I had to burp there. Yeah, that was it.

    On topic: The poster above me secretly has no secrets! Haha!

  • GW1 Client Install Problems

    Quote from Volkey

    Hey guys,

    Glad to find a community still dedicated to the game I grew up dedicating what seemed like my life to.. I have stumbled on an itch to play some original Guild Wars, however am having a hell of a time getting the .exe client file to launch after downloading from the ANET GW1 website.. Can anyone shine any light onto getting it to launch specifically in Windows 7 64-bit? I tried changing the compatibility launch options to Windows 98/ME, to XP, and everything else to no avail... Trying to log into my old GW account is going to be a whole nother ball of wax because im not sure I can remember my old log on creds lol.

    Any help would be appreciated.. I do also have the original box/disks/activation keys for both Prophecy and Nightfall, Factions and EoTN were both bought digitally back in the day, if that matters at all.

    Thanks guys!

    Is there a specific error you are getting?

  • ArenaNet Drama

    Bad timing on this, though. It kinda overshadowed our cupcakes...

    That being said, there's always a line you need to make sure you don't cross - if you do, the results of that are yours to bear.

    Is this justified? Well, it's not my place to judge about that. Fact is, people lost their jobs and perhaps got their name burnt as well - morally, that's a bit of a grey zone for me.

  • We are in the news again!!

    :D Thank you all <3

    This was really something the entire community did, I'm just glad to have been a part of it - the thanks are really for all of you.

    We have had good communication with ArenaNet since when I first approached them - they even invited us to the GW2 meetup last year in Cologne, which I attended (and handed over some chocolate).

    They've provided us with prizes, which allowed us to do cool things.

    ArenaNet really cares for this game, and I'm glad we could do this, all together!

    - Kevin

  • Activation mails not being received by Outlook/Hotmail.com

    Hello everybody,

    Over the last few weeks we've had some issues with emails not getting received by @outlook.com or @hotmail.com emailaddresses.

    This is because the mail provider we're using has gotten blacklisted with Microsoft - and is currently working on resolving this.

    In the meantime, we are unable to send mails to these addresses as we're getting an error back when we try to send to these addresses.

    Should you have issues getting activated, please mail legacy@scribe.guildwarslegacy.com so we can manually activate you.

    Kevin

  • Anet's stance on toolbox

    Well, I've seen a lot of opinions here, but there have been in my opinion some great Guild Wars mods - DressUp, GwVanquish, DirectSong editor, TexMod are a few that I've used before. They enhanced my game experience quite a lot.

    The devs of Toolbox have, in my opinion, the right mindset and are willing to remove features if required - something that we can only be glad for.

    It's still a far way of from being a real cheating tool/bot, but it has the potential - you can skip required quests etc, and that's a line too far for me. But those are only a few features compared to what is really handy on it.

    But, I'll cut it short here - if ANet isn't okay with it, we won't be either - otherwise, we'll make sure to provide a platform for it here.

  • Anet's stance on toolbox

    I'm not strictly against Toolbox - in fact, it's an amazing tool that offers a lot of QoL I believe would have been added should the game have been actively developed for longer.

    For example, opening up your storage - in GW2, bank storage access is far and between, but in GW1 you've literally got storage access in every outpost.

    Having a button to open it up, instead of having to find and run to the storage chest, would be a great time-saver at no cost/negative influences.

    I also liked several of the features that toolbox has (I started to use Toolbox for the borderless windowed mode).

    All in all, Toolbox is in my opinion a response to the game it's current state, but goes a bit too far - it's hard to find a gate monkey nowadays, so having the possibility to do that without having a second player for that, in the current state, is fine to me.

    Transporting to any (UNLOCKED) location in the game, without first having to go through Embark or any other outpost in order to reach it and re-adding your heroes - that's just annoying. Imagine having to go to the Gate of Pain - you'd need to go to Kamadan, through the Vortex to finally go to the Gate of Pain - only to re-add your heroes. Embark tries to solve this, but it's still a lot of work to find everything. In that viewpoint, it only shortens the time that you need to reach it and removes some annoying things - and this itself gives no real advantage - being able to reach places you shouldn't (or not without some special items like The Deep) is another thing.

    Other things, like flash GW's icon on the toolbar when you receive a new message is genious.

    It's a bit of a grey area - and I'm currently no longer using Toolbox. I only really used the Open Xunlai Chest and borderless window mode.

    It would be nice of having a ToS complaint version of Toolbox - until then, I'll allow discussion of Toolbox on Legacy, with the caveat that when things are directly about cheating, they will still get deleted and it's the discretion of our staff to decide if it should be deleted or not.

  • Minions Of The Rabbit Legion [pupu]

    Yep, the Kevin he's talking about is me.

    The world is small, isn't it, Fhaerron?

  • Chat Filter - Filter out gold spammers.

    I have a first test version of my tool ready, basically it does the following:

    • Checks if there is a ChatFilter.ini file in the folder it's running in. If not, downloads the latest version from GW Legacy.
    • If there is a file available, it downloads the header of the ChatFilter.ini on GW Legacy
    • Compares the header to the local downloaded version to check if the last edit date is different.
    • If so, it downloads the latest version from GW Legacy.
    • If not, or finished with the download, it will look for a shortcut called Gw - if found, it will launch this shortcut, so you can use the tool to launch GW - your arguments are still used.
    • If it can't find a Gw.lnk, it will look for Gw.exe and launch it.
    • If it can't find that, the tool window will stay open.

    The tool requires .Net framework 4 - I'll drop the source code when I get around to it, download is attached for the compiled version.

    Legacy Chatfilter.zip

    To install, drop the Legacy Chatfilter.exe in your GW install root.

  • Chat Filter - Filter out gold spammers.

    Quote from Saxazax

    See what I said here:

    I think you shouldn't waste your time. What if they start using Japanese or Korean characters? What if they just make a bunch of alts stand in next to each other to form the letters?

    Just added Japanese or Korean letters to your filter would root that out immediately, unless you actively play with Japanese or Korean players that should not be too much of an issue.

  • Early bump prevention :D

    Quote from Lexx

    Haha yes,

    if it was simple I know you would have done it already :D

    But I guess you could try do simple tests in the background, alter the theme or maybe the "REPLY" button color.

    I guess it's easier to alter something than to create a whole new dialog warning. A red "REPLY" button would still help.

    At 1st. maybe all users see the red button, but the original poster would know the consequences of using it :D

    It would require just a slight bit less code to do that, I would still need to write the detection script so... :P