Character Locked = Undeletable. Then... what would you do? [Pics included]

/Signed .I don't care as I know someone who had their account hacked twice and had to redo all their char again.I don't want that going through all camps again.

Basically, read what Gaile said, if you are smart with your info, don't do anything against the TOS or EULA, you will be fine with your account.

IMO, if you are dumb enough to get phished or download a sketchy 3rd party program, you deserve to lose your account.

Agreed, you shouldn't have ANYTHING compensate stupidity.

The only thing that concerns me - is if one of my mates turn into a total divv, or someone guesses my Accname/Pass.

/signed

And I've another suggestion: hide the account name (email) on logging screen. If some badguy install a keylogger on my computer he would be able to do a screen capture and then have both email AND password.
So, just hide our emails, there would be a big security boost.
And plz, dont say things as "the user made a fault because his firewall/antivirus/antirootkit/antispyware/windows update/etc wasnt up to date".
We're talking about Microsoft Windows. We, gw players, arent security professionals, and cant have a hack proof system. Just impossible, security != windows in my humble opinion. Do you have ever heard about 0 day exploit ?
Plz hide the email.

Account: *******************
Password:

Thanx

Gaile got that in before I got to post anyway I always keep my account safe as my pass words are in my head not written down and I am the only one who knows my account info.There isn't sole who does.I scan my system 3 times a week with spybot and keep my fire wall on.It seems like my accounts have been safe since playing from beta.I do know someone who had their account hacked twice.He lost everything.

Nobody can see your password, it's always hashed, like ***************

I don't think it's practical or necessary to hide the user name, because that's a very small part of access. Your unique and complex password is by far the greater measure of security and unlike some password protocols, the one in Guild Wars allows a good number of symbols and numbers so you can make it very unique and very complex.

Consider: Players requested we save (in the log-in screen GUI) the name of the account that was most recently accessed, so that everyone could avoid having to input that user name every time. It was a nice little addition, and I think everyone approves. However, many people have multiple accounts (I have nine) and they need to see which account they're accessing. Therefore, in my opinion, hashed user names would not be practical and, again, I don't think that would be necessary.

The password cant be seen. It can be keylogged.
The email cant be keylogged. It can be seen, thus captured by prtscreen (near f12 on my keyboard).
Both tasks can be done easely. Far more easiest than hacking our computers... And every day thousands of computers are infected by different kind of malwares.

Plz consider my suggestion farther.

ps: for multiple account users, generic hidden names "account 1", "account 2".., could be used. Many solutions to solve this problem. Ive heard so many stories about hacked account (especially in pvp, while you must join Vent/Ts servers and give away your IP to unknown administrators). Every time somthing unusual happends on my comp I ask myself "Will my account be still there ?".
With hidden accounts, it would be much more difficult to steal an account that way.

You're asking us to protect you from third party programs? That is not feasible, reasonable, or possible. Each player needs to protect himself or herself from malware, including downloading or attempting to use third-party programs that may contain trojans or keyloggers.

You do not need to give out your IP to any TS or Vent server admin all you need is the addy and or password to access the server.I wouldn't give out my IP to any one on the net especially in a game.

"all you need is the addy and or password to access the server"

When i launch my Ts server i can use Etheral to know other players IP... Every admin can read the log files, thats common sense..

@Gaile: no, I, and most of us, dont use third party programs. Im talking about worms, like Blaster. It infected millions up-to-date computer by exploiting an OS vulnerability, in a few hours. Other worms still exists, and smart hijackers wouldnt send them "nowhere", but only to interesting targets (computer no owned by Symantec, with a GW player speaking on a Vent server...). Thats what I would do if I had a unknown worm and wanted to make money with... and keep it still unknown.
By the way, you arent bored to type and retype an email address each time you log another account ? A menu like the district choice wouldnt fit better ? Im sure you would love that update

That is only the admin but it can't do anything about hacking into a computer and i can see everyones IP on the board I Administrate and can trace it to their ISP.That is as far as it goes and the same applies to you.You can't trace it though I believe and ISP have safety protocols put in place.

There is an old "we want more catacombs" thread, and Anet took some of those ideas directly from the thread and put them in EoTN. So yes, they do. posted above this- that should be plenty of evidence :P


/signed x3

I can't understand why people are trying to place responsibility for their own computer's security on ANet's shoulders. If your computer has a virus/worm/trojan, whatever, and it gets a hold of your logon info, it's the user's fault for not having appropriate security in place. If there's a vulnerability in Windows, then you should be complaining to MS and/or making sure to have all the updates.

The *only* suggestion I could make would be to have the game use a virtual keyboard, on-screen, to enter the pw with, thereby eliminating the ability of a keylogger to to grab it. I've seen some bank websites use this, and it seems to help. Either way, if someone can get into your account, regardless of whether they can delete your characters or not, they can still sell your items and transfer the gold...

Id love this, i would kill myself if anything happened to my ele

Another thing people fail to realize is that if you don't use the remember my e-mail, you have to type it in every time and then it is in fact vulnerable to keyloggers.

Sadly, I'm with Gaile - take the necessary precautions to protect your account and nothing will happen.

/notsigned

/signed

This feature would be very much appreciated, even if purely for peace of mind.

/signed this would prevent my friend from deleting my chars to make pvp chars. =.=

This would be a cool add on and I am sure people would use it since it is better to be safe then sorry. You could always just not share your account info or use and 3rd party programs.

im 50/50 on this.

It would be good since then I won't go back on my word. (My brain is normally on its dark side)

But if a person hacked ur account and just locked all ur chars ,then what would you really do?

/signed. bla bla bla 12 chars etc.

brilliant idea

/signed all the way

Would you use it?
-Definitely
Would you ask Anet to implement this?
-Been meaning to
Do I need to buy me a stock of fire extinguishers?
- I hope not :P

/signed. Good idea, I would like this for accidental deletion too. E-mail confirmation would be a sensible alternative to this. But I would like either to be optional.

That's an aspect I had not considered. If this feature were added, we'd get additional support tickets asking for unlocks that were put in place by the account thief, in addition to the other types of support we'd be asked to provide.

Let me offer a solution then:
To lock or unlock a character you would need to provide a code, mabe your password, maybe something else.

Really I wouldn't like this just as security measure but against me from accidently deleting my character while trying to delete a PvP instead.

And really would it be such a bad thing if this was implemented? Of course there are flaws but its the concept that count, not the examples and methods that were stated.

I really like this idea. It would add an extra piece of security to my characters. I don't care about items in the end. I care about titles that take hours of my life to get. I care about my achievements in the HoM, which is still recorded even after you get rid of the item. So, even if someone managed to get into my account, steal all my minipets and gold, and delete all my elite armour, I would be satisfied in knowing that it wouldn't really matter, since they couldn't delete the character itself, and the achievements are safely stored in HoM.

However, I do agree that maintaining account security is the burden of the owner of the account. If you download a third party program that contains a keylogger, than you have no one to blame but yourself. I feel uncomfortable downloading any third party programs, even if it's something as simple and seemingly harmless as texmod. I did extensive research into any reports of someone's account being stolen due to texmod (or a false version of it), and couldn't find any, and only then did I download it.

I'd suggest, if you are afraid that you are going to somehow get a keylogger, you might consider downloading a password safe. Password safes are cool. You can store all your passwords in there so that you don't forget them. You can generate entirely random passwords for things, and use them. So you need to remember one password to access your password safe, and then all your other, randomly generated, hard-to-crack passwords are right there at your disposal. And you can copy and paste your various passwords to login, which means keyloggers cannot register what they are.

And the brilliant thing about the password safe? Even if someone managed to find out your password for your safe, they'd still need to get a hold of the file that stores all your passwords to log into your password safe. Getting onto someone's computer to steal a file is a lot more difficult than getting someone to unknowingly install a keylogger.

Unfortunately, I am too lazy to use the password safe that I set up

/signed totally.

With this, I wouldn't have deleted my warrior accidentally (it can happen ~~) 6 months ago. -_-'

I would rather have 10 locked characters than 10 deleted ones.
You can buy new char slots, you cant buy 4000hrs of work.

/singed

Would be a nice way to prevent my main characters from being deleted.

If I had it I would use it on all 16 of my characters.


I regularly change my password for both GW and PlayNC. I also have a good Virus Checker, however I know litle about computers, don;t have much understanding of what is safe and not safe, and even though I don't have third party programs I often have reports of Malware attacks and people attacking the computer from my virus software. As I don;t do much of anything I find this pretty strange.

I have no idea of how anyone would get myinfo but I'm worried that they can. I also didn't keep reciepts for the games as they went missing through several moves, though I do have the serial keys. Many that play these games probably are like me or even worse have no knowldege about how to be safe or wht is dangerous.

This idea is one useful to prevent accidents happening. Being worried about having someone come onto your acount and lock all your characters seems a bit silly as it would be far more devastating to have them deleted.

Obviously if you turn up on your account and someone has broke onto it yo may have no equipment gold or items anymore, but at least you would have characters that have leveled to where they are, have gone so far in their titles etc etc.

I'll start by saying:
Thanks everybody for input/ideas/criticism.
Thanks Gaile Gray for your answers.

I want to make clear I always talked about "stolen" accounts, not "hacked server".
I trust GW servers security. IMO account theft happens when players do some mistake at some time that makes their account "insecure".
So, just to clarify that nobody here is blaming ArenaNet for any account theft.

Here is what I do (I treat all my online accounts with the same care of my credit card account):
- I use a unique password for my account (not easy to guess, like e.g.:"atr094y4lfp3n", changed every 40/50 days).
- I have a mail account that I use only for GW.
- I keep an up-to-date antivirus, both software and hardware firewall, an antimalware set on "Paranoid Mode".
- I never install cracked software, or software of unknown origin.

I tell my friends to do the same... but... from time to time it happens to me to go at a friend's home and see:
- An MSN account used as login information.
- The same password (which is their favourite movie) used for MSN, a dozen of forums, and GW.
- A crappy or nonexistent antivirus, a misconfigured firewall ("that thing is annoying, can't use Emule!").

This to say I'm computer savy enough to know how to keep my account safe, but some other people aren't.
I know that it is their fault if something goes bad.

This idea was born from a taunt to one of my friends "You're lucky your account hasn't been stolen yet. For people like you Anet should make your character undeletable".

ArenaNet can't protect users from third party programs, nor from being bad at computer security, I've just been asked to post this idea. If it can't be done, no problem, we understand that additional features require time and effort and that currently the developement teams are working on GW2 (which I'm looking forward to play).

Thanks for passing this to a dev team.
I don't know about the complexity, in the opening post I just speculated about a couple of ways to implement this stuff. My proposal was such that UI and graphics staff would just need to add one or two buttons in the character selection screen, while the coders would need to add one or two fields in the database and a process that checks against them before a deletion request is processed by the server. I apologize if this is too simplicistic; stuff like this works on small web applications, I don't know if they could be applied to a complex software as GW.
We'll wait to have further information (even if it is just a "NO!").

As I said, if it can't be done, that's no problem.
We understand that.
We just tried and asked, we are not developers... who knows if the idea can be implemented?
Anyway, just the fact that you cared to answer means a lot.


I can't thank you and the devs enough for all the attention you put towards players.
For all the work you do.
For writing lenghty responses (in your free time, too).
For having a lot of patience with players and their absurd requests.


This aspect was considered in the opening post among the "cons", and in a subsequent answer in the thread (post #37 page 2 of this thread).
My answer to the poster was: "would you prefer your character deleted, or your slots locked for 6/3 months?"
If (in the remote occurrence) someone stole my account and locked all my char, I would wait the 6/3 months for them to get unlocked, thanking that Anet had made such a security option.
Some of the posters here seem to share this opinion.
(Obviously, if I had my account stolen and there was no such "lock", I would be cursing my own unawareness not Anet, since it is not ArenaNet's fault if I am careless with my login information)

This is especially pertinent if everyone knows they have a choice. A disclaimer stating that you dont' HAVE to lock your characters, but unauthorized locking will not be handled through the support department and you will simply need to wait until such time as the character is automatically unlocked.

This would help in a numer of ways as 1) it would make it immediately visible to you if someone HAD hacked/logged in to your account without your authorization making it possible for you to immediately change your password.

and 2) while it's annoying to have you favourite character locked for a few months/weeks/days, at least your hard work is still safe.

I still say it's a brilliant idea!

Gaile, what about locking characters so you don't accidently delete the wrong one yourself? You might accidently select the wrong one and without thinking, type in his name. I know a lot of people use characters with similar names, like their chars all have the same last name.

But when you select a character to deletion, it is show on screen.
Who would make various characters of the same profession, with the same appearance?

Very very good idea.

I have a few suggestions though,

-You need to use a password to lock them, and if you want to pre-maturely unlock them, you need to use the same password, BUT it cannot be your current guildwars password (Because hackers and stuff)

-Instead of just "Do you want to lock this character?" it should be, "If you want to lock this character, type 'Lock Character' into the field below."

-You can set your own amount of days for it

And that's it =]

/signed

Vodka, I think you are on crack. That's why you del ur char by accident lol. It is your prob not Anet prob lol. As far as I know none of the online game have this kind of option! lol! Anet has made the option so you HAVE TO type in your char name in order to del your char for that SPECIFIC reason already. lol

/notsign lol Cool but really if you make that kind of mistake you are kinda fail in life for not paying attention of what you are doing.

Dear NamelessBeauty, excuse me, do you fail at reading, or just have a short attention span?

I'm sorry for you, but if you just cared to read the second line of the opening post (I'm not talking about the entire post, just reach the second sentence of the first post of this thread) you would have avoided making a fool of yourself.

Here's it for you:

How can you do this kind of mistake? Do you pay attention to what you are answering?

Yeah.
Cheers.

P.S. - I want to add that English is not my main language, but proof that I can express myself in an understandable way and in a somewhat corrct form is that the other posters understood without problem what I meant.

I dunno, maybe someone rerolled a pvp char that looks like one of their RP chars.

QFT
Also, what about a limit? like, you can "Lock" only a few of your characters, like 2-3.

And the amount of work this feature needs isn't NEARLY as big as other things Anet released, and this is much more important.

/signed

/signed

Sometimes s**t happens you know?

From the OP:

LOOOOOOOOL!
Awesome Epic Failure.

Before telling people that they are on crack, you might want to check the following skill:

Reading. (Skill - Unlinked). Activation 0 - cost 0 - Recharge 0.
Upon activation this skill allows you to understand written text.
This skill once acquired and activated can be kept up undefinitely.

Acquisition: Can be bought at skill trainers in a place named "school", or can be obtained as a quest reward by filling up all the entries in the "Learn the alphabet" book.

---------------------------------------------------------

Passing to more serious people (---> people that reads before posting)
Cool! Congrats! That's a neat addition to the original idea.
Maybe make "you can lock X-1 characters", where X is the number of slots in your account.
As many people have just 1 pvp char they reroll from time to time then it is useful against vandalism.




BTW COOL! Gayle Gray considered this idea. She proved me wrong (I didn't know Anet watched the threads in Sardelac!!!)
You guys at Anet are awesome!
Anyway... cool!

The only people i can see having a use for this is people who'd share their username and password with 'close' friends, and don't want em to do anything stupid while they're looking around the account.

Is what you really want a "guest" option into your account where the guest isn't granted permissions for things such as character deletion?