Everybody knows the joy of hacked accounts and the issues attached to it. However, I wanted to look at it from the perspective of the players and see how happy people are with the support given to the players (or in our case to the hackers) by blizzard.

I am a bit frustrated at the moment with what happend to our guild; I wanted to post this on official forums, and then I realized nothing good comes out of it.

A little backstory; Weeks ago a player from our guild was hacked. His fault of course. He sent all the info needed to blizzard. 2 months later we still haven't seen the gear. With the seasonal recruitment shortage and the need of shadow priests on twins, our progress completly stoped in sunwell. We had no chance to replace him and then blizzard kept responding with "Any day you get your gear".

Today, I log in and see the former guild leader of the guild, who is not playing at the moment and was infact a very trusted guy on the server logging in and out. A few mins later I go check the guild vault and see a string of "UNKNOWN has taken X" on the logs. I check the guild roster and realize that his characters are deleted as well now.

I immediatly make a ticket asking for assistance. After 6 hours the GMs show up and tell me that they can't do anything at all as he had access. I tell him, the guy was the former guild leader and his characters are deleted now, It's obvious that he has been hacked. Even if he wasn't hacked it would be an obvious scam and scams aren't allowed in this game.

The issue is that we can't find the guy as we have no access to him either, so our only hope was that blizzard does the obvious common sense and gives us our 700-800k worth of mats and sunmotes and HoDs and recipes back.

Anyways, long story short, My questions are; Why are the hackings carry on? Isn't that because of blizzard's own lack of support for players that get hacked? Aren't they indirectly helping the hackers? What are all the "procedures" worth if the GMs lack any sort of common sense? Why doesn't blizzard do anything to secure their game more and even punish players for it instead?

Why are the hackings carry on?
- There are monetary benefits from hacking accounts. (in addition to people being jerks for fun)

Isn't that because of blizzard's own lack of support for players that get hacked?
- Absolutely not, as much people like to believe "The Customer Is Always Right", the customer may also be lieing for the above monetary benefits.

Aren't they indirectly helping the hackers?
- No, if they made it easier to recover lost resources hacking would be more rampant (along with liars)

What are all the "procedures" worth if the GMs lack any sort of common sense?
- GMs are limited when it comes to what they can do, they probably sympathize with you that items were stolen but if the best you have to offer as proof is "I just know he was hacked" that's not good enough. It's just as likely the guy sold his account.

Why doesn't blizzard do anything to secure their game more and even punish players for it instead?
- This is a fair question, but blizzard is putting the tools into the hands of the players when it comes to security. Joe Public is lazy and picks lazy passwords, blizzard can't force people to not be lazy.

The one thing that I'd suggest to help against hacking would be a "New IP password" system that would be a secondary password that you'd need to enter if the IP you are logging in from hasn't been used in the last 14 days.

In the former case's story, I find it hard to believe that for 2 months Blizzard just has been lazy about restoring your friend's character. In most cases a character restoration shouldn't take longer then a week. I've known players that have quit for months and come back to get their characters restored that they ebayed before they left in the span of 3 days. I read an amusing story on Blizzard's Customer Service forums the other day in which somebody prolonged their restoration process by constantly closing their ticket and reopening it over and over. Other things that delay the process is dispute over who actually owns the account, if there's a dispute between 2 people over it this can also delay things. I just feel in alot of these cases where "I haven't had my account restored in months" there's alot more going on then we know about.

In the latter case's story GMs have no way of knowing if your Guild Leader was really hacked, or if he just decided to become a jerk and take all of your shit, and destroy it all for fun. If he's the leader of your guild, it's like a contract, he has the right to do whatever he wants, and no amount of complaining to GMs would get you any of your stuff back. I watched a friend of mine being hacked in front of me and I held a conversation with a GM at the time and for the most part they cannot do anything without a confirmation from the account owner that foul play was at hand.

Well that he was hacked is obvious:

2 seconds after he logged off, his chars were gone from the guild roster without the log showing anything. That only happens if the characters in question are indeed deleted. Why would someone delete a top geared character? Again, he was a former guild leader, he could as well take everything without deleting any of his chars.

I know that it's not a proof, but blizzard can infact prove it with the info they have. Issue is that they ask us for the impossible. "find the guy and have him petition". How? Untill that's done the items are happily sold by the hacker. That does indeed help them instead of the players.

Hard to believe but yes, infact happened. The guy still wearing greens and helps us in sunwell when we are really desperate. Yes nearly 2 months.

In latter case. He is not the GM. He was former GM and after transfering leader to us reminded as officer because of an oversight on our side.

Anyways, since blizzard does something when a scammer steals 2 arcane dusts from someone and doesn't enchant anything, how can they allow this to happen? It's "common sense" and doesn't have anything to do with guild bank access rights. If their procedure allows this kind of anomaly then they should simply improve it.

So why do you expect them to treat it like it is.

Thats not blizzards job to sit around and think about.

The same situation happened to our guild, actually. A raider got hacked and took a LOT of stuff from the guild bank (over 500+ void crystals/prismatics, countless herbs and potions/food/oil we had stockpiled in preparation for Sunwell) and the GM simply told us 'he was taking the withdrawl limit allowed by the Guild Rules - theres nothing I will do until that player contacts me to inform they were hacked'.

No, i just want blizzard to investigate the matter. Put the facts togther and come to a logical conclusion. That's what i expect from support. But they saying "they won't do anything" just allows whoever got the items to happily ebay them. Am I the only one that sees this as one of the reasons that hacking even continues? *even if* it wasn't a hacked account, it's scaming. Since when is scaming allowed?

Go try to take some items from someone for an enchant and then don't do it. How is that any different? *they* gave you access to their items for another purpose and you missused the trust so the GM will intervane.

Tyrian slighty beat me to the punch, but there's nothing obvious about that. Again, the person is within their rights as an officer, to take things, and totally destroy them, and then delete their account. We've had a few guild bank thieves on our server, GMs do not restore things if they're taken through the rules allowed in the game. There's no way for a GM to know if it's a player or a hacker, period.

I don't know what you mean by "Common Sense" here. Blizzard support is not designed to make friends, it's designed to prevent destructive game play.

The best case for this has been the changes to the mail system, trial accounts, auction house, gold chat spam, and other systems. The changes they made have been empowering to the player, but still doesn't play the game for them, there is still personal responsibility for each "Yes/No" dialog box the player uses.

Account hacking is bad, and probably the worst thing that can happen to a player. Recently blizzard announced a security flaw in Adobe Flash player and provided a link for people to update. That's the best they can do, they can't force you to take care of your computer, and if you get hacked it's more your responsibility than Blizzards.

Your exact issue is that someone else was hacked and looted your guild bank. That happened to my guild a few weeks ago and it wasn't a hack it was a sold account. Thankfully our access rights where limited so at worse it was a trivial 300~500 gold in resources.

You ask for Blizzard to improve this, how would you do it?

I am quite satisfied overall with Blizzards support. The first time I loss all my gear was mid-Naxx (fairly confident one of the few people who had my account got keylogged as another account he had access too got ganked). Back then I had to fax my photo ID - which was a slight pain mainly because their line was busy until 3 am - but it still got restored shortly after a week. Given none of it was enchanted and that was a pretty big pain I was just glad to jump back into raiding without fear or quiting or re-gearing.

Unfortunately several months ago I logged into the Twisting Nether naked and falling into to Abyss - was clear it wasn't a keylogger and was later determined the only person who still had my info (a friend/officer from my previous guild before transfering when guild broke on vashj) and out of spite or unknown reasons decided many months later it would be funny to grief me. I ended up reporting more or less exactly what happened and got all my gold back and 80+ epics fully gemed and enchanted just the way they were. I was impressed not only that but in the speed in which it was done (reported thursday or friday --> back on monday).

From personal experience if you are the rightful owner of the account and have not done anything malicious you will absolutely get your characters back even if they have been transfered to another server. People who claim otherwise or tell their old guildmates "nothing could be done" are clearly not telling you the entire story.

It is unfortunate what happened to you, but unless the actual person who owned the account petitions you are probably out of luck (it still could have been him no matter how much you want to deny it).

What you guys say is totally true based on the procedures that blizzard has put in place. What I say is that those procedures need to be improved and currently don't do much good in such cases.

Yes, blizzard needs proof. On the other hand we are a 3 years old respected guild that happens to be the top guild of server. All of us are infact dissappointed because something "unfair" has happend to us that we can't do anything about it. Our only hope is blizzard here. I just wonder if it's the way it should be.

Relying on normal procedures when the case is not a normal issue doesn't result in correct actions.

If one Guild Master takes your whole guild bank and transfers off, you can report it and have action taken.
Keep badgering customer support about it, and I'm sure together you'll figure out what happened and have your gbank restored.
Blizzard isn't retarded enough to where they'll allow a Guild Master the power to fuck over 50 other people's hard work solely based on the fact that he's GM.