Account Insurance

I know account insurance sounds goofy but hear me out. Currently if you get hacked your SoL. Your characters get deleted and all items stolen. ANet cannot restore your account since they don't have the resources to do so and money fuels resources so I think they should offer account insurance in the GW store. I know many people do not like micro transactions but I think this would help many people out. What this entails is you pay like $20 and then if you get hacked you just contact ANet to prove ownership of the account and have it 100% restored. After that the account that had all your original items gets banned. People get their stuff back and ANet makes money. Any opinions or other ideas are welcome.

Lol. If i understand you correctly i should be able to pay for their in ineptitude to keep their servers secure.
kinda topsy turvy don't ya think.

/notsigned

The only way to get hacked is to either download some stupid shit that's going to keylog you, or you share your information, or someone hacks your email, which again goes back to sharing information. It's no ones fault but your own, you deserve whatever you've lost. On top of this, if Anet were to ever agree to give people back their items after being hacked, than this would destroy the economy.

Hurr durr, me and buddy buy account prot, give him stack of armbraces, delete chars, QQ to anet, get chars+ Stack of arms back. Just as bad as duping. The point is, you can't agree to replacing peoples items without taking away those items. And if you think it's that simple. it's not. I doubt they track items.

I can't be certain of this but i'd hope that each item has a unique ID.

As for OP's suggestion, this should be free or non-existent, paying for such a service is a lot different to the cosmetic microtransactions we have at the moment.

To this day I never have been hacked on a MMORPG, apart from my little brother stole my dragon longsword on runescape years ago, I pretty much know what I am doing on the internet most the time, and anyone who does get hacked probably doesnt knw what there doing anyway and It would be anoying no dout, but a waste of time for the hacker anyway.

If the insurance gave me a new account with all the 4 titles and unlocked, i'd happily start playing again. Some ppl work on their gw account and sell them, so its not a personal achievement to them, if hacked yea i'd be mad but only for a few days and by that time i am at the ring of fire on my chars with a decent name now

Like life, i'd love to start again knowing what i know now.

"Thanks for buying our game! Now give us more money or GTFO if you get hacked because of the security issues on our side!"

Yeah... that totally sounds fair. Not. Enough with this not-so-micro transaction crap already! :/

more often it's got everything to do with player "ineptitude" rather than any fault of arenanet's.

anyways, OP might've gotten his idea from world of warcraft. there, if you get hacked blizzard will most of the time restore or compensate for what was stolen. guild wars just might not have a system that's even able to do that.

anyways, it's kind of like natural selection and i'm with darwin on this one, can't agree with OP's idea at all but just be smart about your email/password. while half of these ideas may be plausible, unfortunately at this point in the game they're just pipe dreams.

if every item as a unique ID, which it does, do you really think it'd just be like copy+paste to restore stolen stuff? come on, take at least two seconds to think about it before clicking submit reply.

i'll at least give anet the benefit of the doubt to use cut+paste. derp.

if they even had something like this its like hey we cant be stuffed to fix our security hope yours is good otherwise your boned

There is absolutely nothing NCSoft can do about idiotic people being responsible for their own account compromises. You can claim NCSoft has an unsecure system but in reality the users are at fault. Continue reading below. I personally have held complete ownership of my NCSoft / PlayNC Master account since 2006 with absolutely no issues.


Here's an idea,

1) Don't share your account with anyone.
2) Don't get phished, prime examples are Here and here's the Wikipedia Article.
3) Don't download file's from untrustworthy websites, this goes for the vast majority of torrent downloading websites / news groups which promise Free Games, Free Movies, Free TV Show Episodes, etc.
4) Run a Virus Scanner weekly. If you consider yourself an advanced user or Nerd (I am), or you know what a Commodore 64 is chances are you're intelligent enough to not get infected.
5) Drastically important. Link your Guild Wars account to an NCSoft Master Account to take advantage of the new security update which locks your account to a specific IP. You can get more information from this Wiki Article.
6. When registering on Third-Party non-professional "Guild", "Clan", "Community" forums or essentially any website create new passwords or alternate between a few passwords you've created. A prime example is what I currently have, For my GMail and Banking I have a single 32-character, upper-case, lower-case, numbered + symbolized password. While for websites like GuildWarsGuru, Forums, etc I use a 6 - 12 digit number / letter only password which upper / lower-case letter combinations. I also have a few other passwords for critical areas, Computer Logons, etc.

Passwords shouldn't be hard to remember but they should be hard to guess, having a password like one of the below options is just plain idiotic, anything that happens to your account as a result of using one of these common passwords is your fault and only your fault.



Source: Toms Hardware



So now that I've posted the obvious here's what I have to say, I've been playing online games since birth, I've also studied in various computer related fields. The idea that people are "Hacked" is somewhat absurd, in 95% of the cases I've helped with be it Steam Account, Battle.net Account or NCSoft Master Account related "Hackings" there is absolutely no "Hacking" taking place. In reality what has actually happened to the vast majority of people that claim to have been to hacked is that they either

A) Shared their account.
B) Gave their account to a user that phished them (This is extremely typical)
C) Downloaded an infected file that resulted in them being Keylogged, common examples in the Guild Wars communities are - Interrupt Bots, Farming Bot's, Infected Re-mirrored TexMod downloads, etc.
D) And finally, have navigated (Or received a link to) a website that was designed specifically to look like a particular website (common in Steam Account Theft) which a user enters there password into. Most of the time this scenario is also accompanied by someone claiming to either Work for a company or free somethings are being offered (commonly games or money).

So look at it this way, the best insurance is educating yourself about Personal Computing security. Download an Anti-Virus & Firewall application (I recommend Comodo Anti-Virus / Firewall which are completely free), change your password frequently while using Upper-Case, Lower-Case, Numbers, Symbols and Length as possible password strengthens and for another layer of protection Link your Guild Wars accounts to PlayNC / NCSoft Master Accounts.

/rant over.

PS: I have never been "Hacked", I haven't had a Virus, Trojan, Keylogger or any other form of Malware for 10+ Years, I also have never shared any of my accounts and have remained completely in control of everything by using common sense. If something is to good to be true, it probably is, follow this simple rule and you'll generally be safe on the Internet.

I get why most ppl feel its not a good idea but the consequences of getting hacked are pretty harsh so I posted to see what others would think and its what I expected nonetheless. Everything on sardelac is pretty much a pipe dream since ANet supposedly cant take anything from the forum because of intellectual properties and fear of getting sued.

BTW I have never been hacked so no Darwin Award here