Hacked Mesmer's Plea

About a week ago i've been hacked, meaning that someone entered my account, took most of my stuff and not being content enough decided to /delete my main character, basicly the only one i play during my guild wars time, Black Guinevere.
As you can see I had spent a lot of time, effort and GW money into this character. If u don't like ppl showing off stuff dont look at that screen. It's mainly for A.net, they have to see there probably wasn't another character this far with these titles.
http://img220.imageshack.us/my.php?i...ginezx8xs2.jpg
All i did in my Gw life is to play this mesmer, seriously i tried many times to create other characters to fill other roles in groups, sometimes i reached even lvl 20, but it's just not fun to play anything else.
When i have to heal, i reskill and I heal as mesmer, reskill to nuke, sb monk, tank, forgerunner... perfectly aware i could have done better as other classes, but i just loved being a mesmer so i never changed that.
All this stuff has gone, seriously i can't just start a new mesmer, i tried, i just cant enjoy the game like this.

Now... support has been kind enough to me, saying that can do nothing about it... seriously i just can't believe it. it's not a matter
of what a.net CAN is more what they WANT to do.
I havent asked a full account backup point, i know it's kinda impossibile to rollback one single account. all i asked was a single a.net employee to enter my account management options and create by their side a mesmer called Black Guinevere, clean the map i had before I've been hacked (developers/testes -comand line to clean all map anyone?). I can cap skills again if there's no way to restore exactly what i had.

Character data is kept in a database, a program that is meant to make it easy to retrieve and amend information. Just a few simple lines of program is all it would take. An hour of someones time, one hour to save many thousands of a loyal customers.
They CAN do that, seriously they program a whole game like factions or nightfall in a year, they have a game structure that allows
them to maintain servers up and running better then -almost- any other mmorpg around, without montly fees...
They are genius, are u telling me that u can't edit one account options? if they want they can give me my character back in 1 hour, the problem is that they dont want many people to know it, because the would be flooded with requests.

That's why i tried to keep it quiet for a week. noone but officers/friends knew this, confident enough that amongs a.net ranks there were some players that would have understood the situation.
The "keep it quiet" option didn't lead me to any results so i'm here.
I dont want any gold, items or ectos back, just my character. Not even my Fissure armor, i can buy a collector staff + 1.5k gear and be
as strong as i was before, just give my character back. I undestand it's not your fault for this happening, but it would take so little effort to fix it.

So please A.net restore my character...
This evening u will reset thousands of character, take them back to level 1 ad cleaning their titles tab. Just let my mesmer jump on the train going in the opposite way.

Ty for reading whoever u are, friends, haters, a.net employees... thanks.
if u need to talk to me just mp on guru, i'm not ingame anymore

Black Guinevere

and you were "hacked" how?

missing part of story here . . . .. . . . .

A.net knows the details pretty well.
System clean, someone somehow knew my password

if ANYONE deserves to have a hacked character restored, it's guinevere.
one of the kindest, all around most friendly and helpful person I've met in guild wars thus far, honestly.

please, anet ..

If Anet did it for one person, they'd have to do it for everyone who didn't practice decent account security. Tough way to learn a lesson, but too bad.

Much as I have to say I'm sorry for the situation you are in, ANet has to make a stand at some point. If they give in for one person, then they have to give into them all. Given that it would be pretty damn easy to conspire with a friend to make an account look hacked, I agree with their policy of saying no.

While I feel for you, you were right - Anet is not going to do it for you, because then they'd have to for everyone. It may only be an hour of one person's time (but may be more) for just your character - but imagine how many hours that'd be if everyone asked for this? (If it's even really possible, once a character is deleted, maybe their data file is too... would be quite a waste of space to keep).

Other reason they won't do it - their stance is that you can only get hacked by your own fault (no offense). If you were able to be hacked, it's probably because of something you did/didn't do. They have enough warnings up about the dangers of third party software, etc.

Anet has great support, but keeping your account secure was your responsibility and they're not going to fix it for you.

/signed


guinevere i feel for u. meet u a few times in game. even though i know anet couldnt(or wont) do anything for u. as stated for obvisious reasons. u ever need anything whisper me up ill help with what i can if u ever get back in game

How did they get your email, guinevere?

are you saying that plaync got hacked, and therefore your acct as well?

If you know details I think we'd all be interested in knowing exactly what went wrong.

He has proofs that he had the character and had many titles.

Do it Anet.

restore the character on grounds of it being the only one with every title possibly maxable at this time.. maxed? =\. that's dedication, there, anet! don't throw it away!

As BG's GL i know a little more about this and it was not due to a third party program. Instead of proving the negative, nasty side of the community. E.g Serves you right, AN won't do anything etc etc.

There is NO question of these titles being forged, BG does'nt want items, money, armor back. As A guild we have and will supply everything she needs but one thing we cannot regain are the titles. BG is asking for nothing that would imbalance the game or economy.

How about putting yourself in her place.

Imagine the hours and hours you put into your char being deleted out of pure spite, imagine every item you had worked to get being callously removed, imagine all your characters gone, replaced with insulting named ones.

Put yourself in her place and lets together do something constructive.

As i told...yes i knew that keeping this quiet was the best solutions. nobody knowing a.net recreates my mesmer = no ppl spamming them to have the same thing = better chances to me to obtain it; but after a week of time wasted time and be4 quitting the game i had to try this.
Once again I'm not asking for anything worthy back. Just a naked mesmer.
Considering it was one of a king in game... i'd at least ask a one of a king action from a.net.
As for the fault being hacked. The Account Securioty topped Discussion opened by gaile gray is mainly about me. Opened after knowing what happened to me.
I'm not that sure it's completely my fault. I'm very paranoid about security.

this for example wasn't a thing i could handle on my side for sure.

Oh and for all the people whispering me that they're sorry but a.net wont restore titles just for some tabscreens that can be photoshopped easily... i'm pretty sure i have opened my tab during some video i capped once. just doing a little research.

I had a friend who was hacked, his main character had fissure and max gold stuffz etc.. was rich.
he attempted to get his account rolled back, same thing happened.

He lost everything, got over it and now runs blood spike all day. lolex go pvp.

That is just cold. The fact that ANET can't even do regular backups to their databases raises a flag.

They should be able to do atleast a partial restoration to individual accounts.

I was going to add to the end of my post: Unless yours was one of the PlayNC accounts hacked. (I figured the odds of this was low, considering how many people post on here about being hacked).

Being that yours was... and it was THEIR fault that you were able to be hacked - yes they should restore the accounts for those few who were hacked through PlayNC.

Sorry for any offense implied in my post. And super sorry this has happened to you. If one of my two mains got deleted (with much less work put in than yours) I'd be quite upset too.

Anet: restore the character if it was hacked through PlayNC. Make an exception for those affected "through a combination of errors."

Guinevere Ac you have my sympathies in regards to your character and like the many examples of such hacking Deletion from other games like WoW,DDO and L2 all have but the same results of GMs not being able to provide a account restore but i do hope that you might be the exception.

However one point to note though, if i remember correctly you are the one who posted the "Kind of a Big Deal: Better drops as a reward for getting this title? " thread during the increased gold drop event in factions and for a while had the "KOABD" title pasted on your mesmer's head as your avartar? (somehow i remember such stuff)

link: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ferrerid=92302

Sorry to say this now, but it seems that the past way of "showing off" perhaps was the reason why perhaps you caught the attention of Hackers, either to "rob" you of your possessions (unlikely since item logs are kept and they can be traced) or just to delete your character which you are proud of to simply rob you of your pride.

Either way let this serve as a warning to those who would so careless wave their fortunes around to others online.

Edit: used the serach function.

IIRC WoW GMs can rollback items/characters.

That's a fact? Really? Where did you see this? Any, and I mean ANY company that deals with ANYTHING on computers and wouldn't do backups and restorations would be dead in days. You have no clue what you are talking about.

How they choose or are able to do restorations on any level, system wide, or account wide is entirely up to them. I am pretty sure that they are technically able to do an individual backup, but have a policy against it for reasons that are their own. We have to trust they are valid.

That being said, I am so very sorry to see that this has happened to you Guenivere. I know very well the time and effort to put into getting those titles and the attachment to a character you have been playing for so long.

I loved showing off stuff. Never told i didn't. But it's the main point?
Are we saying that noone should go for titles because that just exposes him to higher chances of being hacked? U wander around cities with a koabd showing and u have to fear who may see u, presume u're rich and decides to go for your account?
Then dont work for titles at all. is a nice feature a.net included to make pve have a way longer life and interests, but dont go for them is it's this useless and dangerous

Found the video i was referring to.
http://rapidshare.de/files/34364269/...eting.avi.html

look how many brave mesmers are there. Argh. many of them have at least 2 pieces of fissure armor. they might be exposed to hacking nooooo.
after 55 seconds there's my titles tab.
sorry for my tremendous video editing skills, i know the video mainly suck. it wasnt meant to be posted anywhere like this. just to prove the titles were there.

You have my sympathy, Guinevere Ac. Sad to hear this.

It's probably not gonna happen, but we can at least hope that you get your character reverted. If not, as they say, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again. Simply re-make her, and re-do everything. It was fun the first time, right?

Good luck to ya. I would help with some free stuff, but from the looks of some of the items on the 2nd account, you're still richer than me, lol.

In my opinion, restoring should have been Anet's policy from beginning of the game and at least start the restoring possibility from now on. Too many hours wasted & players experiences crushed already.

It's never too late to change attitude from 'oh well, better luck next time', to 'don't worry, we'll restore your character to the same spot before hacking accident'.

In addition, account system in Guild Wars clearly needs many improvements. Why should we settle with the cliché 'Hackers are always one step ahead of us'.

just to be sure noone understands my post wrong. it was pretty long, might have lost the important part:

I'm not asking to restore my old account as it was 1 week ago. Just asking to manualy recreate the same mesmer, with maps and titles. I'm not asking for any item nor a single gold coin back, because i understand that many people would ask for items and cash, most of them with malicious intentions (ex transfer all ectos to a friend then call for a.net to restore those ectos because they've been hacked.)

economy is not affected at all giving me a naked mesmer back

You know well that i am not aruging about the validity of titles and their purpose here, but since you are angry for having your account hacked, i can understand that my analysis was of no help to you but perhaps to warn others.

Why i had such strong impressions of your forum habits were merely partly due to the fact that i spend way too much time here but more so because in your posts you drew alot of (maybe too much) attention to yourself and made an impression amoung forum goers as a rich and prideful player (not saying that it is a bad thing) and by drawing these attention to yourself, it not hard for a hacker whos spikeful about your success ingame to make the effort to target you specificially for effect, that perhaps was what i was trying to say. And NO in case you were thinking, i am not the one who did that to your account.

Hope you get your account restored and use a 8 digit + PWD with both letter and numbers (changing them monthly is advised but few do).

Just so you know, I'm fully aware of what you were asking. It takes a lot of time and effort to aquire all the titles and mappage you had. I'm saying that most likely you should just try to re-do it all, it's your best bet.

Otherwise, I'm all for Anet 'reversing the damage' so-to-speak, if they so choose to do so.

sure i tried. but it's just not funny anymore to play it for me. nor i'd go for titles again even if i had the will to play the game anymore after 1400 hours erased like this

I can see no good reason for A.net not to allow character rollbacks. Items and money yes, there should be none given back for obvious reasons but as Guinevere said what is the loss to the community for one character to be restored. If anytihng given the ammount of time spent by this person it's quite obvious it would be a loss should Guinevere leave. How many more hours of pay would you really have to provide to allow this kinda thing A.net? Can individual restores corrupt server data? Is there some other reason for not have a character restore option.

I wouldn't wanna restart a character with all those previously existing titles, (respectable) achievements, efforts, uncovering a map, getting tons of ectos, gold etc...but let's be honest, even if it might sound (but not intended to) offensive.

Doesn't this show or prove how easily things (let's not consider the possibilities Anet might have in restoring accounts/chars) in the virtual world lose their meaning? With a few clicks you are robbed of 1400h+ valuable invested lifetime and the illusion of real achievement. Spending so much time and effort into something which existence is not totally in your own hands, I'd say it's a risky deal most people don't really consider - until they're getting hit.

I haven't heard of any security issues with ANet, so I would be surprised if they were the cause (although there is always a first for everyone). If they were somehow the cause then I'd like to know. If you bought your account (or upgraded) through PlayNC, THEN I think you have something to be worried about. NCSoft cannot be trusted with security, this is a fact that was brought up in a recent lawsuit and forced them into settlement (you don't settle for that much unless there's some cause). Nobody should be trusting NCSoft with regards to security. Having said that, ANet doesn't seem to be having problems.

As far as the 'theyd have to do it for everyone' crying that's so common, well then add an option to 'do it for everyone' in the same sense as she's asking. Restoring the character without any items, but with the same birthday, titles, etc. Hell, they could add it in the Game Store (yeah you have to deal with NCSoft's security there) for 4.99 or something for the trouble. There's no reason they can't do it for everyone. Admittedly, items are a problem and there's no easy solution for that. She's not asking for items though. It's really too bad you don't live in Korea or Japan, you might actually have a court case (since there's a precedence established recently in those locations). For someone dedicating that much time to it, it's not 'just a game'.

if buying account slots via their store counts, then sign me in :/

Front page on guru:

Account Security and PlayNC

Submitted on September 20, 2006 by Inde

Gaile Gray dropped by our forums today to let us know that PlayNC account security is going to be increased in the next few days with recognition to GuildWarsGuru.com for bringing the problem to notice.

I don't want to get into the mechanics or the details, but I want to thank the forum members who reported this problem, and I want to apologize if any of you felt that you weren't helped as immediately nor as thoroughly as you might have been in the initial stages. I want to express thanks to one member in particular (whom I won't name right now, but you know who you are!) who provided very helpful and detailed information which we used to track down the matter. And you will be interested to know that the appropriate action has been taken on more than one of the accounts of those responsible.

Head over to view the entire post as well as security tips from Gaile Gray and our other forum members. About Account Security. (http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...hp?t=10047808).


Now you know.

Not reading through an entire thread is understandable. Not reading through the rest of the message that's being quoted... well anyways..

Thanks for backing up my message, though. It reinforces my opinion on NCSoft. Perhaps the OP has a case after all if she was compromised through this system.

Also, if you'll notice (for people that may be worried) you still have to create or register a PlayNC account even if you have a GuildWars account, so I don't believe the two are tied together until you do that by either buying guildwars through plaync or using the in-game store.

Well, my point was that while NCSoft and Anet are not one and the same, it was a security issue with the game/publisher. While Anet did not cause the the security lapse, their "business partner" did. You can't do business in the GW store, without registering with NCSoft. They can't be held accountable, but it would be pretty nice of them to help out those affected. Doesn't quite seem fair to separate them entirely.

(P.S. I did read the entire thread, have been following it since post #1, and I did read your entire post, my point was that you can't entirely separate NCSoft and Anet.)

(from linked thread in my previous post)
She has a point. It still seems unfair to say "Techincally it was NCSoft, not us, and it was unfortunate, but we won't help."

(Oh, and I just went through another password change on PlayNC - process is still the same as it was before all of this. That "security upgrade in the next few days" has yet to take place. Obviously, all of us with PlayNC accounts are concerned).

Perhaps theres more things you should be worrying about than just a Guild Wars character, if you have had your GW password stolen then im sure they may also have your email/paypal passwords and financial details, if you think playing guildwars without ectoplasm is hard then trying living without cash in your bank account.

You made a good point. I'm sorry if I was quick, I shouldn't post so early in the morning :-) Yeah, they are a subsidiary of NCSoft America, so ultimately they're all to blame anyway.

thanks for reminding but i'm more then awareof the possible implications. there's no bank account supporting the debit card i used to pay for slots nor i use paypall.
seriously. i'd not asking for this character to be restored if i had bigger problems related with this hack to care about.

Early morning posts are always risky. Especially with headaches and impending quizzes. You'd think I'd learn not to procrastinate at my age. I'm sorry I was not clear enough in my first post.

Time for a bagel!

Sorry to hear this Guinevere. I know you spend loads of time getting those titles.

I think ANet should consider this request. Guinevere is a loyal player that has spend a lot of time getting the titles. She's not asking for stuff that causes imbalance, just the hours of time (which can easily run in the hunderds maybe even thousands) invested in getting the titles.

Maybe a bit off-topic, but they might install a feature that when you try to delete a character which has say, reached level 20 or has xx hours of playing or is xxx days old. That you'll get an email orso on the adress you use to play GW with witha confirmation, would make it harder for people to delete chars, just an idea though.

ontopic:
just..wow.. seriously, who would still have fun getting stuff hakcign someone and then deleting their main character... those people need..help..

well they shud do something bout this deleted character rebirthing (lol) and they shud be able to restore all other chararcter that have been hacked or accidentally deleted...
i mean...wtf are u suppose to do in GW after 1000+ hours if your characters get deleted...
I dont think many ppl wud start over...
sry for your account,nice titles..went down the drain...
hope anet does smt bout hackers...or they ll just send u one more proffesionaly written e-mail...

gg....