Restoring lost items and characters

The problem is funds - anet doesnt have the funds or staff to fully investigate and redo ( or w/a ) the items and if they take any staff from gw2 theres a public outcry as gw2 will be delayed.
Blizzard well lets see x players paying x monthly x12 = money aney doesnt get because we dont get charged monthly to play a game we already paid for.

Think of the hackers/scammers as owning a chopshop - then trying to find which car had your nut which you so want back - crap example but it shows how big a job it is.
Also how much time and logs do you need to get thru - what you may think is an easy task actually isnt always as easy - when mr X was hacked and his items were sold is the time of day known , a big factor is How many players were online at that time ... maybe when gw2 comes out the 2 staff members may have got thru part of the logs.

Yes its bad when this happens but then again its a game and even in real life theres ppl who have been robbed/burgled and never got their items back - but ingame its easier to get most things again when real life it isnt.

I understand what you say Jasmine....btw, if you buy a stolen item and anet or ncsoft tell it to you and they say that they give back money spend for it i dont think is a problem.
If this is a problem, just create items, give back to scammed player and stop.
I dont think that in other games they check ALL TRADES, and they restore ALL items..they simply create new items and give back to scammed guyz..easy & fast...all talk about economy, guyz..we are speaking about a video games..if you sell a unded Zhed and you ded it the price of petroil dont raise eh -.-...So i dont undertand all those problems for restoring an item..If its hard check all logs/trades etc (i can agree if its hard) just create an items with a line command and stop (anet or ncsoft programmers,not by yourself).I dont think that when i was scammed on Zhyper MU, they chek all logs/and trade for get back my wings, they just look my ss and create a new pair, and deliver to me..stop..then they ban the guy, thats sure.
Where is the problem?and please dont say Economy.
When you sell a game,when ppl spent money,when you offer a support service you need to help customers with all problems not with 50% of them, really that suck...
Maybe you can investigate better if we speak about very rare minis and unique items, but for example 50/100/stack of ectos or items like Emerald blade/vs/obsidian or Zkeys, or minor minis (kuuna,gwen doll) or EL tonics...no problem restore 1 of them...
maybe for something like oni or zhed or other things you can try to restore all trades, but for the rest no EXCUSE.

In real life is different, you country cant get your money back even they are stolen,there are a lot of problems beside it..but in a vido games lol..you just need 1 command line..no one loose money,not your country or not you lol.

It is possible for them to restore items, but as a general rule, they don't. They've only restored very special items to a limited number of people in the past.

They don't do it because they don't want to set the precedent for restoring items to accounts whenever they're hacked. Restoring entire inventories has never been done, as far as I know.

That is not a good rule...GW is the only game that dont do it in case of hack/scam...btw you have confirmed what i said, they CAN but the dont want do it..Gz....
I have a question : How much time they Ban a scammer?And in case of Hack?

I agree that it shouldn't be a problem, although a lot of pple will be dissapointed, but I bet it would provoke more QQ then any sf nerf/missed update ever will. Maybe I'm just a pessimist, lol.

I don't fully agree: if anet adds another mad king guard mini (there 20 now) the prices of those will get down, so, even though all the 20 pple who had one still have their, it lost it's value a bit, so, if they planned to keep it, nothing really changes, but if they intended to sell them, now they lost some money. Thus, depending on how many items are created anew, a powertrader might lose a lot. Ofc they will still have their items, but those items for them were just a money currency and now they are worthless. Of course, it's just a game, and it's an ingame money... but that applies in the same manner to the items that were lost due to a hack.

I don't know about the scam (never been banned for that :P), but it's a perma ban for a hack (no, nevr been banned for this either ).

In this case, if we speaking about a very rare minipet/tonic, maybe they can investigate and spent more time to resolve the problem..checking logs/trades etc...but if we speaking about a kuunawang for example, just restore it...1 extra of them dont change nothing....1 extra EL cottontail or EBlade dont change nothing too, and you helping a scammed guy.

It still may degenerate, sadly, both in a case of hack and in a case of scam (unless the scammer gets a perma ban - which is very questionable, as a scam might occur by accident and even if not, both present in their trade has part of fault) - too many pple might attempt to "fraud" anet, possibly creating a lot of trouble to the community. As long as there is no way to know truth for certain, even a video game world won't be able to be totally fair and nice, i'm afraid.

Mmm ok....btw i think that you must help all guyz even they try to "fraud"..you cant know if they are real scammed or not...you need ask proof, and if you bring proof you MUST procede with support...
In real life the thing are more complicated, but in a video games if you stole something, scammed guy dont die for hungry..scammer cant buy something in real life with ectos stolen,or with minipets..what im tryng to say is that things of game stay in game...no one care if you restore items..anet dont loose money if they give away an emerald blade or an unded kuunawang..do you understand what im tryng to say?
The fact are simple : Anet dont want do it..they dont want help...they can but they dont want...you dont ruin a game or economy to have help a customer..
In Zhyper Mu (search online,its a RPG) every day ppl send message support to forum,and every day staffs create items to gave them back to scammed guys...im speaking about over 100/200 support message per day..and game still going on,economy still there,players still there...every day they create a lot of items to help scammed guyz...in change they only ask proof.

Stuff is sold for real life money all the time, why do you think accounts are getting hacked in the first place? What do you think the gold spammers in Kamadan are advertising?
Hilarious, simply hilarious. Of course people are still playing when they simply can fake a scam and ask support for more items.

Don't get me wrong, I'd hate if stuff gets stolen from my account, but if Anet just started spawning 100/200 items a day, seven days a week... there simply is too much room for exploiting.

So you think that is a good thing scam ppl or simple dont help them..banning scammer never get your item back,and you can lose 1 year of farm in few seconds..and no one help you..i just think that in this point of view anet fail hard.

Imagine how much would this be exploited by gold sellers. An account X fakes a scan on another account Y. Account Y can present any proof required. Account in X meanwhile sold all his items for real money. Account X would be lost anyway for selling gold, but account X this time gets all his items back. So now this can be repeated with another junk account Z.
And by players, if the ban is not perma ofc: I check guru and find a person with a lot of ectos, msg him and ask him to fake a scam. We will meet ingame and I'll scam him (possibly using a second account, which I rarely play). He will send an email to anet and will get his ectos back. I will meanwhile, sell some ectos, but some shards with that money, buy a run to the fow armorer and will get myself a fow armor... possibly on all chars. I go play fallout 3 while the tempa ban expires (or another account if i have more then 1). After that, as agreed upon the guru pm, I give the guy 100k for the trouble and enjoy my new armor. Unless anet adds some other punishment to the ban, this will be very used.
In this, those that fraud anet have major advantage compared to the rest of community. Ofc, more emerald blades will make its price drop and somebody who couldn't get it before, now can. But nobody will get such a gain, in any way, as the people provoking it, specially gold sellers.

I think it's not because they don't want to help you, but simply because they can't without making things much worse.

A-net has restored items in the past, but it cost the guy $3,000, where he offered his life savings of $10K USD for his 2 GWAMM characters that were deleted for his brother and whatnot. A-net had to rollback the servers and fly the guy in, it was a big mess.

simply put, there's no easy way to do it. It's easiest to just be secure and smart, don't get hacked or give away your password - it's why even my best friend who I've known for 10 years irl still doesn't even know the email I log into GW with.

So they cant help because ppl take advantage of it? ok then, just perma ban all scammers and delete items stolen....this is the first thing to do..after this try to restore initial situation, give back to scammed guy his/her items and money/items for those player that buy items.End of story.Its a Hard job?YES IT IS, btw its anet job support customers..instead sleep and send an anwer after 3 days,check immediatly and fix the problem soon as possible.
If you start perma ban account for 1g scam,im 100% sure that scam decrease by 50% MIN...if you go on banning ppl for 2/3/4 weeks they keep scam..

What you need to remember is that when ArenaNet released GW, they were on a shoestring budget. They did not have the manpower to start a forum or dedicate people to solving individual problems. They designed the game to not allow GMs favorites to be given items they didn't work for (a problem in WoW).

In the year after they released the second campaign they started realizing the problems they were facing and stopped trying to tweak the existing game to make everyone happy. They still had a severe shortage of employees who could be dedicated to customer satisfaction outside of skill adjustments. Remember that FTP means keeping operating costs way, way down.

Personally, when I screw up and lose something, my first thought is not "Fix it for me", it's "You idiot". I don't have my Halloween 2006 hat due to my not checking bags carefully before deleting a character. I don't blame ArenaNet. If I get hacked and my things get stolen, it will be my and my friends' problem to help me get it all again.

As has been said, it would be very difficult, especially if the hack hasn't been discovered quickly, to trace all the various trades/sales/etc for the stolen items and restore the items and gold for everyone involved. (The hackee, the hacker, the guy who bought from the hacker, the guy who traded with the guy who bought from the hacker, etc.,etc.)
Also, as has been said, some items that were still with the hacker have been restored in some cases.
I seriously doubt that any MMO would/could restore all items for everyone. They'd have to store a list of every item in your inventory every time it changed, in order to know exactly what may have been stolen. I'm sure there's anecdotal evidence of it happening, but there is no way to confirm the stories or the particular circumstances involved.
And, of course, there is the certainty of abuse if they did try to restore only your account, without tracking every other trade/sale.

Where did you get this information? Hopefully, not your cousin-nephew-niece-brother-in-law-ex-roommate-friend-ex-gf-of the sister who work at ANET?

Who care if its difficult?Who care about economy of game?I lost an item?yes,then put a command on game and create a new..end of story..catch the scammer guy and perma ban him...You cant restore my item : first of all the society suck if cant do it, second it good if you perma ban scammer instead few week ban..they start do do it again,and again and again...perma ban them and they dont scam again easy no?
Who say that is not a good thing perma ban scammers/hacker is a scammer/hacker.
If you not able to restore the items itself, give me something to "cover" it...For example : If someone hack me or scamm me, and they stole for example 1 unded kuunawang and you cannot give me back it..give me some ectos or something to cover the value to have a change to rebuy it.
If you cannot do this too then just perma ban all scammers/hackers/botters ALL....BAN them all, so you reduce "criminality".
Btw anet suck if they cant restore (or dont want) items.

no, direct quote from A-net staff on vent who I've known for a few years

You're asking for a-net to actually do a serious script that can generate items on gw1? yea right. just wait for gw2 to come out.

I think i never buy GW2..anet is not able to offer support..gw1 is enough from this society.

I once was buying an item for 100k+xx ecto. I went to xunlai chest and retrieved the ectos and 100g (instead of retrieving max, i typed "100" in the window but in the wrong place - taking xx g instead of xx k has happened to me more then once). i went to the guy, put into trade the ectos and typed "100" in the right place. But I didn't have 100k, so the game put into the trade window the max ammount of money I had - 100g. I pressed "submit trade", but realized immediatly that I made a mistake and changed offer (it took me around 15 seconds to figure out what's wrong though). The scam 100k-100g works, because often pple don't notice. It might have happened, though ofc not very likely, that nor me nor the person i was trading with noticed the mistake before the trade was made. After that, he would have reported me, probably without bothering to tell me that at all. Do i deserve a perma ban, losing 3 years of play, 11 chars, etc because of such an accident? There is simply no way for me to prove I didn't mean to do that - nor there is a way to be 100% sure that somebody who did it, did it with purpose (to avoid being contacted by the unhappy seller, one could just log out, set himself to offline or pretend to afk in a populated place like spamadan - the seller will eventually stop trying to contact you and you could spend/move the money to avoid being able later to give it back).

Now this was just an example. A lot of mistakes can happen.