Posts by Iaerah

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Kryth Vocans

    hi again, I don't know if I should be posting this here - but when I post a build with the gwbb wrap in the builds forum, it displays inaccurate (possibly older/imbalanced) values for skills. Say for example when I post a build that includes Blazing Spear with 12 Spear Mastery, the damage displayed in the forum is higher than the skill's actual damage.

    Is it because the forum is not up to date with the latest skill values or is there another reason for this?

    To make that work, we use https://github.com/arnapou/gwbbcode which hasn't been updated in a few years.

    So, I could probably fork that and fix it, but it's not the highest on my list of priorities.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Unholy

    A couple questions for ya. It doesn't look like spoilers within spoilers is an option anymore? Not a huge deal, but I did use it from time to time.

    Just tested it and it does work, but the editor doesn't allow you to add a second spoiler, but when you add the bb-tag [ spoiler ] (remove spaces) [ /spoiler ] it does work:

    Display Spoiler
    Display Spoiler

    Test

    Quote from Unholy

    Is there no way to hyperlink a URL as alternate text? I see the hyperlink option, but that only lets me plug in the URL itself, with no option to change was displays as the clickable text.

    The editor itself has changed with this release (before Redactor 2 was used, now it's using CKEditor). The previous versions of Redactor has been deprecated and support drops after this year, so the developers of the software had to replace it (and the other software that Redactor made to replace Redactor 2 is wildly un-useable for a forum). So changes in behaviour is normal due to this... this also explains why more spacing is added, it's simply the way the editor works and how it is set-up differently.
    It seems like previously, Redactor added a <br> when using enter, while CKEditor creates a new paragraph. Shift+enter is the way to still do a <br>/newline in this editor, which is actually the appropriate behaviour for an editor (as it allows for better styling/whitespace behind a paragraph, which is impossible to do with a <br>).
    I might adjust the whitespace after a new paragraph, but shift+enter mimics the old behaviour, as Marty Silverblade rightly pointed out.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Kryth Vocans

    Is it me or are people deliberately choosing lousy font colors against dark mode :p I have to highlight everything with mouse to be able to read the forum now :p

    Give people a choice and they will abuse it... that's actually one of the main reasons why the developers decided to disable this option in the first place, but it has some uses.

    I hope people will keep it in mind though, as soon as Legacy gets an official dark mode, which should be soon.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    In a further update I have updated all of our available themes/styles (you can pick one all the way down by using "Change Style").

    They are now all fluid up to a max size of 2200px (instead of 1100px before), which should help a lot for those with bigger screens.
    All of them got some extra tweaks as well.

    If you find a bug, feel free to let me know.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Just a small update, I've updated most of the pages on Guild Wars Legacy that had white boxes poking out where they shouldn't, like for example:

    That unneeded white background has now been removed. I might have missed some, so should you encounter any place where you can still see it, feel free to let me know so I can remove it.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Forty Second Rogue
    Quote from Iaerah

    Font-color is now back! It was an option to disable it, which was enabled by default in the new version. It had a quite cryptic naming so I didn't find it.

    But, font-coloring is now back on the table!

    NOTE: there is going to be a dark mode soon, so keep that in mind when choosing colors.

    Thank you, makes it easier to differentiate between the rarities, at least for me.

    No problem, glad to be able to solve it this quickly! :)
    Picking the font color is something which is quite necessairy in my opinion. It should also work for all existing posts as well.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Neutral_CH

    I don't know if this is recent or not, but how to change the background of: Custom User Title. Does it depend on a status or can it be customized with code or something?

    The color of these is decided by the title itself, and is hardcoded can't be changed by a user.

    It is dependent on the amount of points you've gathered on Legacy:

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Iaerah
    Quote from Red Fireball

    in the table I had used font colouring to indicate the respective values for the different rarities of staves. I tried to recreate it with my last two edits, but there is no purple font colouring option. so I can't do it. but at least you can see what Forty Second Rogue was referring to - thanks for pointing the issue out!

    I agree that this isn't a situation that works, I'll have to investigate if and how I can re-introduce a button to allow the picking of colors, not only highlighting the background.

    I'm going to raise this as a concern with the developers of the forum software, and look into a temporairy fix.

    Font-color is now back! It was an option to disable it, which was enabled by default in the new version. It had a quite cryptic naming so I didn't find it.

    But, font-coloring is now back on the table!

    NOTE: there is going to be a dark mode soon, so keep that in mind when choosing colors.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Red Fireball

    in the table I had used font colouring to indicate the respective values for the different rarities of staves. I tried to recreate it with my last two edits, but there is no purple font colouring option. so I can't do it. but at least you can see what Forty Second Rogue was referring to - thanks for pointing the issue out!

    I agree that this isn't a situation that works, I'll have to investigate if and how I can re-introduce a button to allow the picking of colors, not only highlighting the background.

    I'm going to raise this as a concern with the developers of the forum software, and look into a temporairy fix.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Blind Was My Fury

    check if it's again that we have to reactivate them or if they officialy gone pls kev ?

    Unfortunately, they have been removed from the forum software itself.... I can't bring them back, I fear :(

    Quote from Hate Core
    Quote from Iaerah

    Glad to hear that you approve, Hate Core ;)

    No worries, Kev.

    Was a 10 hour marathon negotiation with the gwlegacy-supervisory board but in the end I convinced them that it would be in best interest of all shareholders to perform this critical maintenance update.

    We might increase your bonus for this year, thanks for your commitment!

    Glad to have you, Hate Core! I'm curious for the bonus ;)

    Quote from Blind Was My Fury

    Second thing is not having lines in main page to separate subjects / threads SUCKSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

    Hmm, I'm going to improve the look over the next few weeks, I'll probably add in some line.

  • This game was my absolute favorite; I want to create a successor

    Quote from Smallish Dayz
    Quote from Iaerah

    To keep it short, I've been thinking often of creating my own game - something which I did in the past as a teenager as well - and it would no doubt be heavily inspired by Guild Wars, but I simply don't have the funds or people to do such a venture with.

    It would be fun to make an MMORPG for the community that I love, without having to be the biggest game around.

    Please if a gofundme for this ever happens post it here so we can all support the continuation of this wonderful game

    Very late reply here, but building a game and certainly an MMORPG is a massive undertaking and a gofundme won't cut it. However, I have an idea for a smaller RPG that I hopefully will someday find the time and energy for.

    The idea would be: the last day before the searing, but from the eyes of someone else.

  • Code 3023

    Quote from Neutral_CH

    Note Iaerah I originally wanted to create a separate topic for the 3023 code, but i posted here on this bots topic. There is no reference topic on legacy for code 3023. Can you remove the messages since my intervention and create a new thread (named: code 3023) with messages, so as not to pollute this topic right here?

    Done.

  • Code 3023

    So, let me get it straight, you are complaining for getting banned for sending a known RMT trading site to another player?
    To say the least, that ain't smart to do that, as you can expect some action for that... they'll probably reverse the ban if the chat log indeed confirms that it was meant in a non-serious way, but it ain't a good idea anyway.

  • Nick name changes

    Hello everybody,

    I've gotten a few requests over the years for nick name changes, but there isn't really a procedure for it.

    That doesn't mean that you can't change your nick name, however! Simply messaging me on either my Legacy mail (which is [email protected]) or by sending me a private message on Legacy, you can request a nick change.

    I'll process this as fast as I can, but keep in mind that I can refuse nick name changes if the name is already taken or if the name chosen is offensive.

    - Kev

  • Stealth server move

    Hey there,

    We just completed a server move to our new server, which is proudly powered by an Asura-magitech revolution. As such, it is only fitting that we name this server in honor of one of the best asura-masterminds in the game, Vekk!

    For the record, Guild Wars Legacy is now running on an ARM-powered server - a move I took mainly for the reduced energy consumption of the server, combined with great performance.

    If you encounter any issues, feel free to let me know.

    - Kevin

  • Sale of botted items on Legacy

    Quote from Purely

    Is there some kind of regulation that's got you by the balls preventing you from taking action?

    This can get quite technical really fast and I'm not an expert in the matter either, so I'll try and explain my reasoning here. If it's unclear, feel free to let me know.

    First of all, Guild Wars Legacy (as well as I) are located in Europe, more specifically I'm located in Belgium. Our servers are located in Germany.
    That means that we need to follow the European laws, and in essence I need to follow both the Belgian and German laws here. Since I'm located in Belgium, those laws are prioritized. You might know the GDPR by name, but that is the general name of the law that each country has had to adapt into their own laws. In Belgium, the Dutch version of that law is also known as AVG (Algemene Verordening Gegevensbescherming). The other law I need to follow is the anti-discriminatory laws of Belgium.

    Belgium is quite strict in terms of laws. You might know that we're practically the only country in the world that banned lootboxes, for example.
    Privacy and anti-discrimination is very important in Belgium, so at Legacy, I try to uphold these rules as well as I can.

    The AVG is extremely expansive and difficult to comprehend and explain, it differs on some accounts on the general GDPR rules. So, quite a while back, I consulted with a lawyer into what this means to me/us.
    The reason why I take this so serious, is that a few years ago, I've started my own company (GuildLab), under which Guild Wars Legacy technically falls these days. That also means that the laws that are applying to me/Legacy are suddenly a lot stricter.

    What came out of the conversation with my lawyer was (and what I still remember, there is more).

    • Technically, try to have everything in order. If something goes wrong, we need to inform everyone ASAP.
    • If you're aware of a breach, you need to inform all users that are involved and the authorities.
    • Security is important; if I'm aware of things not being technically secure (like storing passwords unhashed, for example), I'm liable to get serious fines for that.
    • Users can always request an export of their personal information that we store and we need to provide that as soon as possible.
    • A user has the right to request a re-evaluation of actions taken against them.

    And that last one is where it becomes difficult: upon a re-evaluation, we are required to provide the proof as well. It's just like back in the day when ArenaNet banned users depending on what processes ran on their computers; due to a GDPR request, ArenaNet had to give the proof upon which basis the users were banned. And this makes it difficult.

    TL;DR: laws suck. Being in a country with a strict law is hard.

  • Sale of botted items on Legacy

    I absolutely still care, but the same points still apply and are very hard to tackle for us, unfortunately.

    How can we know that something is botted and how can we know that something is not botted? How can we be certain?

    The issue lies that if we are going to police this, we would need to have solid evidence of it, which is hard to collect for us since we do not have the in game logs or information. In GW2, you'd be able to walk around and see the bots, but in this game it's impossible to do so.

    ArenaNet is in fact the one that should be policing this, not us. They aren't, and that forces us in an uncomfortable position: how can we be certain if something is gained from botting or not? What proof/evidence do we have?

    If someone bots on Twitch and we see those identically same items listed for sale here, that is indeed solid proof. But if someone that we ban as a cheater comes to me and requests me the proof on which grounds the ban has been given, I need to be able to provide that.

    It's like instead of calling the police and deal with issues, taking justice in our own hands. And that just never ends well.
    Even though the case here is a bit different as the police is just never coming... it's though.

  • This game was my absolute favorite; I want to create a successor

    Quote from Kryth Vocans

    You know I think it must've occurred to all the old timers to develop a spiritual successor to GW1, except we don't have the skills or know-how to do it. I did my fair share of research back in the day to find out whether it was possible to learn to develop a game like GW1 but I found out that I had waaaays to go. Learning code, learning 2d 3d design and modeling, learning to work with a game engine, and then building a game...

    We keep playing the old game at the end of the day.. =/ Tho I'd support a kickstarter campaign to the best of my ability if one were to start.

    Game development is hard and the reality is that only a few people on this planet are able to build a game from scratch on their own. Chris Sawyer, for example, who programmed RollerCoaster Tycoon on his own in the hardest possible language, Assembly. That's like trying to build a house having only a hammer.

    So, realistically, you'd need a team of people and that's always hard to accomplish, since that makes it quite expensive to do so. Artists, programmers, sound designers and so on. The original Guild Wars was made with 50 people, but Guild Wars 2 was made by (at launch) about 350 people.

    New games are incredibly complex, yet the cost of entry is almost entirely the same. Want to get into GW2, it'll cost you less to do so than it does to get into GW1. Monetization has changed so much in games, where as before gameplay was the key, monetization is now a factor as well.

    That's why you see so many games add in mechanics with lootboxes or pay-to-skip or pay-for-convience: making games is so much more expensive than it was all those years ago, developers had to find a way to finance it all.

    So, a successor for Guild Wars would - in my eyes - be an instant success, but monetization would make it a different game, I fear. Cosmetics would land in a shop, for example. Things that GW1 simply doesn't have or barely has right now.

    To keep it short, I've been thinking often of creating my own game - something which I did in the past as a teenager as well - and it would no doubt be heavily inspired by Guild Wars, but I simply don't have the funds or people to do such a venture with.

    It would be fun to make an MMORPG for the community that I love, without having to be the biggest game around.

  • Mail server retirement/Amazon SES

    Hello there,

    Over the past few years, we've gotten quite a few moments where e-mail has been an issue. E-mail is generally speaking a pain, due to how it works and the monopoly that Gmail and Microsoft have over this sphere (the both of them have a 90%+ market share).

    How we have been handling e-mail over the years was by using a software program called Postal and ran it on one of our own servers, which allowed us to send quite a lot of mails easily, but from time to time the mailserver froze/refused to accept new mails or providers blocked our mails for some reason.

    The last few years, I've noticed more and more problems going on with Postal - not only did the installation method change a few times, but also the monitoring became a pain. Over the longer while, the server that I used to run Postal on also became quite costly - whenever I would do a bigger mailing, the RAM-memory of the server needed to be big enough or it would just fail.

    That, paired with the issues we were having with mails not being received that were generally unresolveable by me (this is a real pain to deal with: you can't really get yourself whitelisted at most providers or un-blacklisted, it's a struggle and mostly ends up being though luck).

    Due to this, I've decided to look into alternatives. Legacy sends out quite a bit of mail each day - notifications, registrations, password resets and all of that. We however do not have the volume that makes some of the commercial solutions viable, even though I did look into a lot of them. Quite often these fell quite out of our budget, or had limitations that just didn't fit.

    Legacy is paid out of my own pocket (in fact, the last donation was years ago) and I don't mind doing that, but I didn't want to overpay for mail and hopefully save some money with this.

    So after a while, I decided to go for Amazon SES, the Simple Email Service from Amazon.

    This is now live, and I will be keeping an eye on this over the next few weeks.

    If you experience worse mail delivery, feel free to let me know so I can look into this.

    - Kev

  • Any way to cloud stream Guild Wars?

    You could indeed use Shadow PC for this, you could also probably use Parsec to stream from your own PC or something like Steam Link.

    You could perhaps try something like Contabo, but that probably will have less than ideal results because it doesn't have a graphics card.

    For the rest, I fear finding a cheap option will be harder. The biggest issue is mainly finding a Windows server, those are expensive due to the licensing costs.

    If I had to pick one, I'd probably go with ShadowPC (it's 30 euro per month) and beefy enough to run GW1 and GW2.

  • Archive server maintenance

    So, the archive is back up again!

    If you wondered why this maintenance (which took way too long), was needed: it was mainly that the old server was running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - which is supported until April 2023, which is slowly coming closer.

    It was also not running in the current stack that I prefer using (which contains Caddy), so it was high time to bring this server up to scratch with my other servers.

    It's still not running 100%, but it can now be properly used again (with some layout faults, though, in same folders).

    It now provides a search bar as well and should be a bit snappier than before.

  • Archive server maintenance

    Fun fact: the reason why the archive is such a hassle to host, it that it's about 1,013,509 files big.

    On it's own, it's about 100GB big, but the main issue is the big amount of small files - a Linux server has an amount of files it can handle, and each file uses a "inode".

    Since a server can only have so many indoes, it means that cheaper hosts are often out since we have too many files - if a webhost promotes unlimited disk space, they often have a limit on inodes.

    Anyhows, this is just an insight I wanted to share while working on the server.