What I can NOT tell the difference between is WHY it happened:

* you made a backup to guard against a computer crash - it crashed - and you restored.

* you wanted to 'take back' some change to your character (say, honor or karma related)

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The only "solution" I can think of is:

"restored characters cannot take part in ranked play"

so no fight results would be posted to the web site for such characters.

yeah.. that sucks. But I guess it's why you don't want anything to go wrong with your file system. It's possible I might be able to survive if you back up the ENTIRE savedHeroes folder instead of piecemeal heroes, but that would probably still mess up people who like to drag their character around from machine to machine.

Of course, all this is because I have a stateless server and the character data isn't stored in a single on-net location.

You only have to keep Windows from crashing your hard disk for the duration of the tournament.

And existing characters will not have a problem (I'm not THAT mean) if you have backed up and restored them in the past, I mean.

Also, it is specifically the act of restoring an ANTIQUE COPY of a character which triggers me. But this is exactly what would happen if you made regular backups every week and then had to restore from backups after playing a day or two.

I'm open to suggestions on other ways of doing this (and I don't plan to take any action on this front until the tournament stuff is online anyway, so it's not a big rush yet)

Who knows, maybe it won't even be a problem. Maybe people won't try to cheat the rankings system I can always wait until it IS a problem and then clear all the rankings and make everyone start all over again after putting this in later

Just trying to worry outside the box, as it were.

As everyone should know, my system clock is wacky, and reads all different times and days everytime I boot. (This was really obvious when my guild site had all wacky update times earlier this year)

So if it goes by file mod times, I am screwed.
And also, the file mod time can be changed, so it's too hackable.

If you CRC the character file and store it somewhere, it is less hackable, but foolable, I will not go into that, as I doubt others would realise how to do it, and I don't wanna tell them. You should already know about that one Dan.

[my technique is not un-hackable, but does not depend on the clock. That's all I will say about it. -s]

And don't you dare use the 'archive' bit on the file, as that'll really be foul, and easy to hack :-)

Create a program to backup your character files. It packages them all up in one nice neat little bundle (which means that if you want to restore, it's all or nothing) and stores in in a file.

Elsewhere on the hard-drive, have the backup proggy create a little file. (or two or three). If this file is missing, more than likely the computer crashed, and the person is restoring because of it. If the file isn't missing, then WoS keeps track of how many times the person has restore.

Then, you could make a little option for people running tourneys if they want people who have restored their char or not, and how many times they are allowed to restore. That way, you could block out people who have restored 100 times, but allow people who have only restored 3-4 times.

[that's an interesting thought... I had thought as far as 'forgiving' restores at the start of a new tournament, but tolerating a certain number is interesting... and I suppose it should be recorded in the tournament results perhaps. Still, it's silly of me to imply that WoS tournaments would ever be anything but a lark. There is no way to make the results *totally* un-hackable (for example, using friends to intentionally play poorly on the oppposing team), so if people really need that to have fun, it won't be fun. And it's supposed to be just for fun. So I will try to worry a little less about it. -s]

Anyways, on paper it's a nice idea. So SHUT UP you fnokking F'nok! :p

If person X wins 10 tournaments in a row but always has 30 or 40 'system crashes' per tournament, people could choose to look askance at them.