so...my account just...vanished

I have 3 accounts on guild wars, i own 3 copies of the game, one is my main account, one is my fiances, and one is shared and mostly for pvp..well my fiance has been studying for finals a lot recently and hasnt played her account is about a week (i have been on it a few times..including yesterday) Anyway we were going to play together today and when she goes to log on it says her email doesnt exist...so of course our first thoughts were typo..she tries again and same thing. The account is just gone..there is no way anyone deleted it..no way anyone stole it..its just gone..we emailed arenanet but just got back a pretyped letter asking for the cd key and where we bought the game. We had a lot of stuff on that account and not to mention A LOT of time..3 lvl 20s with 15k one of them holding all of our green items we have found, and over 200k worth of materials. Something similar happend to my friend, he didnt lose his account but he lost all of his characters..all of his unlocked stuff was still unlocked his characters were just gone..he did what we did and emailed them..they asked him the same questions and told him to send in his game and stuff..he did, and nothing was ever fixed. I am very worried that nothing is going to be done about this..have we wasted 50 dollars and hundreds of hours just to have it erased for no reason? Does anyone have any idea how this could have happened..or has anyone ever had this happen? I thought maybe it was a serverside glitch due to the new update and somehow the account got messed up...i have no idea...but we are very upset. I hope something can be done..if anyone has any info on this we would really appreciate it.

This is a matter that Anet had BETTER take very very seriously. Because what you experienced can be explained either by someone getting access to your account (e.g. keylogger) or due to an error in Anet's database applications. If the latter is the case, then there are going to be a lot of very angry GW customers when this begins to occur more often, which will eventually lead to a very large customer dissatisfaction with Anet, a lack of trust in Anet with a subsequent exodus of interest in the game.

I spend a lot of my professional hours programming database applications, and GW is obviously based on databases to store all user information. If you think about it, the task of managing the user information in this game is huge. Every time your character picks up an item, sells something, converts something, etc. etc., all this has to be updated in the database. When there are lots and lots of players, this means a lot of database updates are occurring quickly and constantly. Two main things can go wrong: an outage in the communication such that an update on your side isn't registered correctly on the database server. Or, worse, there may be a programming error in the game's application code, which can cause all sorts of errors in the database data. Finally, there can also be an error in the underlying database program itself.

We can't make our own backups, so we have to trust Anet to be handling all our game occurrances in a correct manner. If there truely is a problem somewhere, then Anet better fix it and soon. And they should help their customers by restoring the state of a player's account in the event of major deletions like you seem to have experienced.

Clearly the first thing that Anet expects as an explanation is that someone has hacked your account, or that you purchased your account from someone else who then also has access to it. It is for them the most convenient answer, because the alternative means that there is a bug in their programs and that means a lot of work to find it and fix it.

If you truely mean that your account is legit and could not possibly have been hacked, then keep fighting with Anet. They have to fix this if it is an error on their part, and they really need to restore your account's content in some fashion.

yeah im sure they think im probably just trying to get free stuff or something, but ill do anything i can to prove that this is legit..i am almost 100% sure that there is no way the account was hacked, i never download anything sketchy and i would definitely never download any kind of third party program..but the thing is..it says the account doest exist..so therefore it was deleted...if it was stolen why would it not exist? and if the theif changed the email..wouldnt i have to accept it in my email..

this happened to me and they downright refused to give refund me with ANYTHING. they just said tough luck

how can they do that?..if i prove that its legit and they dont do anything about it..have they not just stolen 50 dollars and many many hours from me?

Yeah, that's the strange thing. If someone got your account through a keylogger, then you should have gotten an email when they tried to change you account name. I've never heard of anything like this. Good luck getting anything back. Sadly, likely thing is that if the account name isn't recognized, all of the data under it is gone now, too.

Holy crap, that is one of the worst thing that could happen to naybody playing that game. If that happened to me I would simply be depressed for a few years. I'm sorry to hear that, keep emailing them, sue, just make sure you don't go down easy.

trust me, im really mad..but nothing compared to my fiance..and shes not one to give up easily. i mean HOW could they do nothing about this??..i bought their game expecting that if i followed all the rules i would be safe...well it appears i was wrong..and if all the data is all gone i would AT LEAST expect them to refund us the money..or a new account, but i really dont want to go through the time unlocking runes/skills,remaking 3 ascended lvl 20 characters, and outfitting them with weapons and 15k armor again...just because arenanet messed up...that seems VERY wrong to me.


EDIT: and another thing in relation to what human said about if all the data is gone...it still shows the account in my guild list, so wouldnt that mean that there is still something left of it data wise?

Regardless of your situation, ANet should impliment some sort of backup system that can stop this happening - or improve their current one. Trying to blame it on keyloggers is a lame dodge.

I had a problem some time ago, as did other people, where the game refused to remember your character progress. So if you travelled to a new location on the map, found a new decent item, got more faction, etc - you'd lose it if you logged off and on again. You'd even lose it sometimes if you travelled to another location. I and others informed ANet and they fixed it after a few days - but they pretended nothing had gone wrong publicly. No apology on the website, not even an e-mailed apology to affected customers. I thought that was very sneaky and weasely.

im very certin the account wasnt stolen. but its looking like its just going to be blamed on that and no action is going to be taken..is there anything i can do if this is what happens? I can send them all 3 copies of my game including the jewel cases with the cd keys..ill do anything they ask.i just dont want this to be brushed off..in my opinion this is very serious. All i can do right now is wait anxiously for their next return email..which is probably just going to be another non personal pretyped response.

Well, I think Anet does have some people monitoring this particular forum, so in that case let me just say the following:

I and my wife have 3 accounts between us, we play just about every evening, have worked very very hard on our characters without having them run anywhere, and with finding all our special weapons. If anything happened to our accounts or our characters, either because of a programming or server or database error, or because of a malicious hacker with a keylogger, we would be so terribly disappointed that we, with high probability, would just give up and leave the game. We just wouldn't want to have to begin over again.

So I hope Anet takes this very seriously, and check and fix their programs if this is the reason. And there certainly should be a way to restore an account to near its last legitimate state in the event of a loss due to e.g. keylogging. Even with antivirus and firewall protection, this is something that can happen to anyone today.

Edit: I mean, look at my cat! She enjoys watching GW action while we are both playing (sometimes props her head on the keyboard and stares at the screen). How sad it would be if our account got destroyed and she didn't have GW anymore!

thanks for the support and info everyone, and if anyone from anet sees this post i hope mabye they will put some effort into helping us anyway they can.

What they should do is, right when you log off it saves your files to a backup, so if the server somehow lost the data you will still be able to get your stuff back.

As a programmer myself, if I did make a server such as the one used on GW, I would be sure to back everything up. You can never be to careful. Like coolsti said, one small error can cause massive errors. This is a very true fact, if you typed like hundreds and thousands of lines of code in C++ and forgot one single } it would cause a lot of problems.

However I'm not experinced with database's to the extent of GW, but if a bug happened it could cause hell.

Oh and I almost forgot, if it was due to a keylogger, I'm sorry to say but ANET is no longer at fault or needs to do anything. However they can if they wish to help you, being hacked from a keylogger is not a problem with the server, just someone who has your passwords and logged in, made a transfer and left. They can indeed track it from log files and ban the accounts and try to get your stuff back, but don't count on it.

I would have to hope that ANet has these neat little things called "backups." Thus, if your account ever existed (which we're sure it did) then they should be able to roll it back to last night's or last week's state... the last known-good state. So you might lose the last few days' work if TSHTF with their servers, but hey, ---- happens, as long as it's not ALL gone...

If they don't have backups, they need to find a new IT guy...

Now, granted, this has to be done carefully, because otherwise you could give all your greens to your friend and then cry for a rollback, but they should be able to deal with these things. "Warranty of merchantability" sort of issues come to mind.

I’m sorry if I sound like an idiot but...
If the account had been deleted, wouldn’t the CD key you used of disappeared from there database to? Have you tried to re-use it again? Or is that just stupid?
I know a little how you feel and it really sucks! I once had to re-install sims2 and all my family trees had gone. Anet better sort this out

yeah i was hoping they could just roll back the account, and of course i would expect them to think i was trying to scam them in some way to get duplicates of my items etc...but like i said i would be MORE than happy to do anything they asked to prove thats not the case..i would hope they would have some way i could prove that..if not...couldnt they just put off any incident like this as a scam?

and harold thats a good question...but the account still shows up in my guild list, which doesnt make sense to me...and i would try to reinstall using the cd key, but i dont want to do anything untill i get somesort of info from them..im scared to mess things up more.

thedesign all I can say is just hope for dear God that someone didn't hack your account, or else you may never see your things again!

I really hope this get's fixed for you, I once lost all my things on Ultima Online.

True, true. But there is that thing called customer satisfaction and maintaining this at a high level. Although not obligated, it would be in Anet's interests to do some extra work in extreme situations like an account being destroyed by a keylogging hack.

I mean, look at the great extra effort that Anet took in creating those Halloween special effects. It seems like Anet cares to keep its audience happy and satisfied. Unlike some other major companies which are effectively unapproachable by the ordinary customer (a maker of PC operating systems comes to mind ....)

Your very right, thats one of the key things you need to do, is always please your gamers and make sure they are well and happy. However a lot of companys for diffrent games lack that. Would be sad to see ANET follow their path.

I haven't entered my password in probably 5 months. I fear no keylogger.


1) Right-click the Guild Wars icon.
2) Select 'Properties'.
3) Select the 'Shortcut' tab.
4) In the 'Target' field...

"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -password=*****

where ***** is your password.


Of course, make sure the path is correct, which it should be there already. You only need to add a space, then '-password=*****'.


Sorry about your luck. Anet should address this. Maybe you should start a support group website for people with lost accounts? (totally serious)