Some background information on this as this question is asked constantly:
XP save is not a vanilla ET feature, meaning that your XP were lost as soon as you disconnected from a gameserver. XP save was later added to the game by community mods, and the mod delevelopers needed to find a system to identify and recognize players across sessions. “Across sessions” means that identifying players by IP is useless, as your ISP will assign you a new one every 24h. So another system had to be found. Luckily, there was PunkBuster (PB) which, in order to ban players from servers, already came with an across-sessions way of identifying players: The GUID.
When you first launched the game after installation, the PB client that comes with the game and runs locally on your machine would contact the Evenbalance (the company behind PB) servers and fetch a GUID for you. One can only guess why the client didn’t just generate one locally, most likely to ensure global uniqueness. That GUID is stored in the etkey-file in etmain. The fact that the GUID was stored in a file in your game directory and not in some sick locked-away registry key allowed for easy transportation when reinstalling or moving to a different computer. (The fact that you could simply delete the etkey-file to get a new GUID and thus bypass GUID-based banning ridiculously easy is another story)
So far, so good. Mods hijacked the GUID feature for XP saving purposes and everybody lived happily ever after until the day that Evenbalance decided to drop support for Wolf:ET and no longer distribute GUIDs in order to save $5 per year in server maintenance cost. From that day on, things got messy.
Players that newly installed the game were no longer assigned a GUID by PB and therefore, gameservers were unable to identify these clients and assign them the XP they had when they last visited the server. Luckily, the syntax of an etkey file is easy and soon, a website was launched that gave players the possibility to download etkey files and so have the pleasure of joining the mad circus of XP farming. Of course, one had to know this and somebody who newly installed the game didn’t. And so it became a full-time hobby of all the server admins out there to tell new players what they had to do to set up XP save, which is the following:
TL;DR: HOW DO I SET UP XPSAVE?[ul][li]Release the Caps Lock key.[]Quit the game, go to http://etkey.org, download an etkey file and move it to its correct location (which is OS-dependent, there’s a how-to on the website).[]Now you need PB to hash your etkey file into a GUID. In order for this to work, your client-side PB has to be enabled. To check if it is, type “/cl_punkbuster” into the console. The echo sends “1” if it is enabled, or “0” if it’s not. If you don’t know what a console is or the output says PB is disabled, follow the next step:[]How to enable PB on your client: Contrary to popular belief, you can not simply enable it at runtime with “/set cl_punkbuster 1” as it is a write-protected variable. Instead you need to set it at game startup with a parameter: Create a shortcut to ET.exe (the one that has been created on your desktop is perfect). Right click -> Properties -> Shortcut. This window opens. There, in the “target” field, outside the quotation marks, add the following (without quotation marks): “+set cl_punkbuster 1” (leave a space in front) and, while we’re at it, add “+set com_hunkmegs 128” as well (again, leave a space in front). This fixes the Hunk_Alloc error on resource-intensive maps like fueldump or Transmitter, another hilarious tale in the never-ending book of ET errors.[]Hit OK and start the game (using that shortcut of course, silly).[*]Yaaay, XP save!![/ul][/li]Epilogue: What is it with these “NO_GUID” and “unknown” GUIDs I see on some players sometimes?
“NO_GUID” means that the player has their client-side punkbuster enabled, but there’s no etkey file present in their etmain directory.
“unknown” means the player does not have their client-side punkbuster enabled, regardless of whether or not there is an etkey file present.
