Very Sad

I think the HoM is tied to the account itself, so even if chars are deleted the HoM achievements are probably ok.

I would certainly hope not and I think we are fairly safe in saying its unlikely.

They may not be able to restore accounts for the comparatively few people who are hacked but if the hom system fell down they would be forced to act.

The stuff in your HoM is safe, as long as you still have access to your account.

Wait, what? Characters are less important than achievements that won't serve any kind of purpose at all for another year?

I have long held the belief that all tech support or customer support desks should work "/huggles!" into the signature line of anything they send to us.

Hey, you're ewed-scray, but *hugz!!* <3 :-)

I don't think support departments need to pass around huggles... but my employees are expected to demonstrate compassion and to acknowledge the fact that many of our players put their hearts and souls into their accounts - and thus treat the players accordingly.

In most of my dealings with NCSoft support, I've walked away thinking to myself, "you wouldn't last 15 minutes under my employ." Note that I said most of my dealings with them... that's by no means the same as all.

A little compassion and acknowledgment of the frustration/sense of loss/anger/mistrust/etc. that a player is feeling and/or conveying goes a long way towards building a persistently positive relationship between the support department and the players, and thus between the company as a whole and the players.

Support is the front line face of any gaming publisher... most players will never meet or communicate with the developers, artists, etc. The face support shows is the one the community judges the company (and often the game as a result) by... NCSoft would do well to remember that, but that seems to have been lost on them unfortunately.

To be fair, that's no surprise, it's lost on most companies.

sucks they couldnt restore the account to a previous state, I thought they could do that

(only reads the OP)

Sucks, but really, you said yourself you weren't secure with your account. You're still 50/50 and have Gwamm. Customer Service couldn't do anything for you because they really aren't allowed to. If they jsut gave all your stuff back that would be like a mod-duping fiasco. People would be claiming thier stuff was hacked by shoving all their crap onto an alt account, if a mod assisted in any wa that wasn't advice, well. Too bad really.

It's your own fault, and it's not like you lost anything that will forever ruin your account. Either start over again, wait for GW2, or move on to another game.

I feel for your situation. But I've got to agree with Anets approach.

Figuring that it probably costs them ... what? say $60. an hour for a tech to deal with any given
customer problem. And they make about ... $10. profit per game sold tops. If they have to
spend even six minutes on one account they already lost all the money they made on that sale.

So they have to pay someone to retrieve logs on your account history and try to figure out all
the things you had on it. Then they have to go through your recent history and determine
wether your account was really hacked or you gave the information to someone so they could
distribute your stuff to friends and you can get it all replaced. This would be very expensive for
them.

On top of that. As soon as word got out that people could get their hacked accounts restored
there would be a vertual epidemic of every con artist, scammer, and 10 year old kid with nothing
better to do with their time reporting their account being hacked in hopes of getting free stuff. It
would cost Anet thousands of man hours to go through them all.

I suppose that if you were willing to reimburse them for the cost of investigating your claim it'd
be easier for them to spend time on it. But even then I'm not sure they could do it because of the
difficulty of determining wether you gave the information away or it was stolen.

I think the answer is pretty obvious. I could just guy my account and give everything to a friend and then get ANET to "roll back" my account.

$8-10/hour generally. And most gaming companies who actually do full account restoration have mechanisms in place that allow the $8-10/hour support personnel to handle any restorations without requiring developer, dbase manager or programmer intervention.

It doesn't take anywhere near as long as you think it does if the restoration structure is in place.

GW's setup apparently doesn't include such a structure. If there's anything I'm actually critical of ANet for (and I tend to be very supportive of them and admire their policies and practices overall), it's that they did not build such a mechanism into the game to start with... by 2005, the exploitation of accounts was well underway in the industry... NOT having a rollback/recovery option (not to mention much better security) just doesn't make sense.

Unfortunately, it's still one of the most frequently overlooked areas in game design & development. It isn't just ANet, it's actually most companies.

there's various ways. My account was hacked via a virus (I'm assuming it scanned for usernames and passwords being entered anywhere, as GW wasn't the only game I had hacked from the virus).

I was fortunate though. I'm a crappy GW player, and 2 years agao when my account was stolen I didn't have squat. NO elite armor, a few rare mats (no ectos, saphires or rubies though), no mini's, nothing worth stealing my account for.

So they made an assassin, got her up to level 4, and tried selling gold (which got the account frozen).

Like I said, I was fortunate. I HAD 20p total before my account was stolen. After I got it back, I had 50p ... small victory I suppose. I actually e-mailed NCsoft and explained to them that I had stuff from the gold seller and asked them to rollback my account to before it was hacked.

They told me sorry our system is designed to do this (they'd have to rollback the entire world or something), and enjoy the extra $$$.

I'm in the same alliance that the OP is in (hi from Chrissi!), and rest assured everyone who was reading AC yesterday was offering up money & mats (and yes, he flatly refused the money).

I still may not have much in the game, but I'm sitting on a small mountain of platinum that I offered up. My offer still stands btw.

And also, I understand taking a break due to this - even though I was 30p richer, I was still disheartened by the fact that I did lose stuff (even if it wasn't all that valuable - I lost stuff). I took awhile, and I rather wandered aimlessly in GW for a short while.

Joining our alliance turned it around for ME personally. Now I don't play much to do stuff in the game, I play to help others and just chat with a bunch of older farts like myself. That's what got me up and running.

Take a week or a month, but come back. You KNOW all you gotta say in AC is "Does anyone have x item" and a bunch of us will respond - because that's just how our alliance rolls - and you know this as a fact.

Finally .. don't forget the new character names ... just roll one with a name that gives a firm middle finger to gold sellers. You know you want to

/walloftext

the simple solution to these problems is to exercise better security with your personal information and to use different passwords for different logins. you can be angry at NCsoft or ArenaNet all you want, but ultimately it was your mess up that got your account hacked.

your choices now are to try to rebuild your characters, or just wait for GW2 since you still have your HoM.

Lol at whoever thinks my post was something else.

To the OP:
The summary of my (ex)post is: Sad too. Banned Account. Dealt with support too. Support is Horrible. Still banned. Scale it all you want. Not even Gaile can pull this one off.

Question as to what is important to anet and ncsoft as to what is more important to the players.

When anyone is hacked they can always take the attitude it was their own fault and few will blame them except those who were hacked.

But if someone had all their characters deleted and this caused their hom achievements for that account to also be lost then there would be loads of trouble and it would hit gw2 sales.

I don't believe they want that to happen.

Nice points. If you'd read the entire thread, however, you'd understand that my stuff back isn't the main issue here. The main issue is how customer service handled the entire matter, and how and what they communicated to me.

I'm a big boy. I get it. My stuff is gone. But there are ways to tell people their stuff is gone and there are ways to let people linger for a few days hoping to get their stuff back, only to come back to naked characters.

A simple amount of sympathy or understanding on the part of a customer service department would have completely changed this experience for me. It would have saved them money because the back and forth we had wouldn't have existed in the first place.

Don't tell a customer that you're going to restore an account and then just give it back to them. Tell them we're going to get your account back to you, as soon as you prove that you are you, but whatever was taken can't be resorted for these reasons. It could be a form letter, but it wouldn't have left me waiting for days and hoping, only to come back to the mess I did.

Subsequent conversation was even worse. Their response to my query was not only unsympathetic, but showed a complete lack of care for my emotions as a human being.

So, I'm not saying I need to get my stuff back. I'm saying that I could be a person playing the game right now, instead of a person leaving it.

In addition my wife used to play with me and we've spent tons of money on pretty much everything ANET has come up with. The games themselves, historical mission packs, costume packs, character slots, chest panes...if Guild Wars right now isn't staying alive on people buying the game, they're getting micro transactions.

I was almost done with the game, when they offered the mercenary pack and I thought, wow that could be fun. See all my guys, or many of them, on screen at one point. Yep, I'd have bought the mercenary pack, and probably got one for my wife too.

That's two sales they obviously won't be getting, plus new costume sales, plus whatever other incidentals we might spend.

And even though I'll still buy Guild Wars 2, because I am a fan, if you don't think this makes me think before investing money into microtransactions you'd be wrong.

And it wouldn't have even required my stuff to be restored to have kept me happy as a customer. But a bit of sympathy wouldn't have gone amiss.

Since I've repeatedly acknowledged my own liability in this, what's your point?

That it's okay for customer service to act like they don't care at all? That it's okay for customer service to spend days restoring my account, only to find it in the state it's in without even a warning?

That it's okay for them to pretty much act like nothing at all has happened?

That it's okay for them to ask me to go find the original codes for every game on my account, before telling me that even when I find them, I'll come back to a mess?

The issue here is less getting my stuff back and more how customer service treated this situation badly enough for me to not want to play anymore.

Thanks for commenting.

Hey, I did get on a create a couple of brand new characters from my storage characters that are now empty. I did this while putting costumes on naked characters.

And yes, Mara is a great alliance and I have many friends there. I might log on from time to time to chat with them. But the list of stuff that's missing goes way beyond the ability of the guild to replace, and frankly, I don't want anyone in the guild to have to.

As I see it, other games have mechanisms in place to replace what's lost. If nothing else, the dedicated stuff in my HoM should be returned to me somehow, even if it was somehow locked so it could never be traded or salvaged, I wouldn't care. I didn't break the rules. I didn't scam the company. I'm a loyal player. I've been called a fan boy by many.

Customer service took what was a loyal player and made him question his loyalty. This can't possibly be good for Anet on any level.

As of today my decision not to return looks pretty much a given. I just can't look at the places in the inventory where my everlasting tonics were or the characters that used to have very cool and expensive or rare minis. I won't farm to buy stuff I already had, because that's going back wards to me.

I was at a point in the game, where the reason I was playing, aside from talking to guildies, was to build up money to get the even rarer stuff I wanted to collect. I might have gone and bought an EL trapdoor tonic. I would have saved for an unded mini I didn't already had, smite crawler was in my sites next. I was going to doing Nick every week with the stuff I'd already spent years saving, so I wouldn't have to farm, on the off chance that I was going to get a Yakkington (my wife did) a gwen doll or a brown rabbit even.

And a lot of that stuff I got that I didn't need got passed to others in the guild. It was fine.

But I won't go back to farm it, because I hate farming. That's why I bought four character slots to save all this crap.

What is that, $40 bucks of wasted money? Nope, at this point, I can't bring myself to come back.

Are you saying how players feel shouldn't be important to Anet? How likely they are to make a micro transaction, or invest time and energy in the game world? I find that hard to believe.

Sorry for your loss but...

This is perfect for getting back on your feet I would think, Zkeys sell for a nice chunk of change.

Well, I've said all I want to on this matter, I guess it's a done deal, no matter what happens. I do hope that somehow Anet gets wind of this, not so much for my case (I'm a lost customer for Guild Wars right now), but so in the future they don't lose customers who do support the company with microtransactions.

In the end, I've joined up with a new game, and I'll play that until Guild Wars 2 comes out.

Thanks to everyone who's commented on this. I hope you never have to experience what being hacked feels like. For those who have, you have my sympathy. For those who have been treated apathetically by customer service, you also have my sympathy.

Have fun in Guild Wars, and I'll be seeing some of you in Guild Wars 2.

Saw this after I made my "final" post, though I'll still respond to people cause I'm polite. lol

I just don't enjoy PVP. I can do it for short bursts of time, but in the end, the rewards don't justify for me the time spent, Particularly since I maxed my Luxon title.

Not being funny, but they're trying to be professional by not giving emotional responses. My guild has had an issue with an individual who has been talking crap about us, harassing guild members and so I contacted ANet about it. I got told to advise my guild and alliance members to all put them on ignore. To me, that's not dealing with the issue and I'd rather have seen some direct action taken against the individual (which it was for other matters I was informed by ANet in later emails), but as they told me they couldn't find the chatlogs, there was little they could do. Considering this person got people who didn't know me to whisper me with abuse when I got various legendary titles and was attacking my guild members in local chat whenever they got the opportunity, don't you think I was pissed? But I understood that ANet were limited in what they could do given the circumstances and that to give a more emotionally involved response would be showing some form of player preference. Imo you're expecting too much in the way of hugs and sympathy from the STAFF of a game. Customer support is there to give practical advice, not be a counselling service and in all honesty (coming from someone who has played MMOs for years as well as gaming for years), your reaction IS on the over-emotional side. They are just pixels, whether you paid for them or not. Are you saying you value that Celestial Compass more than anything your wife got you IRL?

Other games may have been able to restore items due to the way they track trades/drops/player inventories. From what I've seen in my time playing Guild Wars, they don't have the same mechanics as in other games. I accept the fact that if someone hacks my account, I will lose whatever is on it. Some people only get gold stripped, some people have their inventories emptied, some people have their characters deleted. I would have expected your reaction had you logged on and had all your characters deleted. They restored your account in the sense that you got it back with all the purchased content still in place and your characters. If that was because they restored the characters, then props to them for doing that. They could have just given you the account back with nothing on it whatsoever and said "Well, that's just too bad". You wouldn't have to start ENTIRELY from scratch. Can't you at least count that as a blessing?

You WERE prepared because you had it as a possibility from the moment that you lost access to the account. If you were coming to terms with the idea over those 4 days, how were you not prepared?


Well in actual fact, they DID restore your account in that you have all your campaigns, paid for content and characters at the levels and with the titles that they had when you got hacked.

tl;dr version:

I'm sorry it happened but you admitted yourself in this thread that you were lax with securing your account. They at least gave you the account back and you had your characters, titles and HoM in tact. If you don't want to earn the items back, don't. But you ARE being over-emotional about this. If you hadn't been given the account back at all or your characters had all been deleted, I'd have had a bit more sympathy, but right now this seems like a "BAWWWWW, I got hacked because I wasn't tight enough with my security and now I can't be arsed to re-earn what I lost and I'm going to blame those meanies at ANet for not giving me my items back".

For the system that they have in place, they did what they could. Showing emotion towards players can be construed as bias, therefore they are going to seem cold and clinical. I actually think that giving you links to PvX etc was more than what most customer supports would do. The response is usually "Tough shit, there's nothing we can do. Secure your account better next time". It seems you haven't experienced other customer support services in other MMOs :P I actually think ANet's response to this was good given the situation. They're not going to be treating everyone with kid gloves. Would you rather they had given you a link to a website for coping with losses instead of PvX? Be realistic. They think that people have a degree of objectivity and that most people don't have as much attachment to their characters as you. From what you've said about their responses, they gave the appropriate responses befitting their jobs and the situation.

As I said, be thankful your loss wasn't greater and move on, be that re-earning your stuff or moving on to another game. Also as much as this game may be your escape, it's still only pixels at the end of the day and I think you are a little too attached to them, which is not healthy.

I apologise if you think I'm sounding harsh, but I'm being realistic. I've lost accounts on MMOs before due to the game shutting down, having been hacked myself in another MMO and do you know what I did? I had a small QQ about my loss, tightened up my account security and then got back into getting myself back to where I was. I think there are many other people in GW who have done the same, not to mention those in other MMOs. The only time I would throw blame at customer support is if they didn't do something that I knew they could do. They restored your account to the best of their ability. As stated before, there are many reasons that your items could not be restored, but your account HAS been restored. I don't see how their response indicated anything else or was inappropriate.



On a side note, there's an edit button that means you don't have to post 3-4 times to say everything that you want to say.

Bellatrixa:

Thanks for responding, I'll be brief and I won't quote you. Your entire post pretty much ignores everything I've said.

The simple fact is I could have been told up front I wouldn't have my stuff back and that would have prepared me. The word restore is a very bad word to use if you're not going to actually do anything but give me control of my account back. They said restore my account, not restore it to me. They didn't explain what that meant and that gave me hope.

A bit of hope is a dangerous thing. I'm a communicator and always have been. I understand that words have meaning and that clarity can avoid later problems. Some people don't. You're apparently one of them.

The responsibility for being hacked, is mine and I never said otherwise. The response of the customer service department, which I DID NOT POST HERE, was lousy. I'm not asking for you to vette that it was lousy. You either believe me, or you don't. And frankly, I don't care which it is.

It could have been handled much better. I'm not saying they should have restored my possessions. I'm saying they should have told me that up front. Before they sent me to look for year old numbers that took time to find. Before the wait for restoration happened, they could have informed me.

They could have expressed sympathy and still been professional. I know this because in my line of work I've had cause to do so myself. When someone loses something, anything, that is important to them, it's okay to say I'm sorry this happened. It's not only okay, it's human.

You don't see this and that's fine, but I maintain, it's the way I've been dealt with by customer service that has me annoyed, as much as anything else.

Had I posted transcripts of the convos, which I have no real intention of doing, you MIGHT have a point. Not having seen that conversation, you have nothing to stand on but a guess.

As for emotion, different people are wired differently. Telling someone they are being too emotional can only be true from your point of view. There's no meter that says too emotional or not emotional enough. I'm not stamping my feet and screaming. I'm not jumping up and down. I didn't insult Anet, or even reveal the name of the customer service representative. I'm expressing an emotion that a percentage of posters understood.

If you don't understand it, it's entirely possible that the problem is on your end. And yes, And if you're one of the people who say, well you did something stupid, you deserve to be hacked, that's a shame. Because hacking is simply a bad thing to do to someone. It's like being mugged. Maybe a person wore jewelry in a dangerous neighorhood and didn't put a necklace under their shirt, or take of a ring. At the end of the day, the person who mugged them is still a criminal and still did something to them that hurts them, whether it's their fault or not.

Fortunately, most people who replied to me in this thread sympathized, which cost them nothing and made me feel better.

Your post only makes me feel sorry for you. It's sad that you're so jaded that you can't see that there's nothing wrong with an emotional response.

Sometimes people post on forums like this, just to have some kind of validation or just to see that they're not alone. I saw that. It was enough.

In the end, less emotional people aren't superior to more emotional people, and those who think otherwise are entitled to that opinion.

Personally, I'd rather be emotional and sympathetic.

It makes you think that perhaps, you know, there's a reason behind the fact WoW is the top MMO... and it might not be purely hype. They might be doing some things right. Just sayin'.

Not at all I am just bad at explaining myself.

I am saying is there is no evidence that proves a security weakness or a dedicated group of hackers attacking the community.
There might be such a group, but there is no proof and a lot of people here assume any person that got hacked is partly responsible they either had a stupid password gave someone their password downloaded a mod for gw and it had a keylogger etc.

Its not my view but it is a common one, though I do find it strange that someone who could hack their way into computers and just steals game related items.

Anet are therefore safe to proceed as they do for even if hundreds get hacked thousands do not so the lose nothing by adopting their present attitude of "we cannot return any missing account items".

If however those who are hacked find access to all their hom achievements have gone that will be seen as bad programming by anet and there will be a big stink.

I rarley reply twice to these posts but,

Your a communicator therefore you know interpretaion of words can go a long way .

But yet you are still prolonging the posts , it wont cange a thing nomatter what.

You did not know you would not get your stuff back please, earlir you called yourself a veteran player and you did not know that if your account gets hacked you only get the account back.That yes to a new player but not one who says they are veteran,

This has always been the case are you saying nobody in your guild or alliance knew that if your account is compromised items are not returned?

You also stated that you had to search for the validation keys. That has been common practice since gw was implemented to validate your account.

Or are you saying that you would not have searched for the validation keys if you knew that items are not returnable.

Although I sypathise You still have not realised you have lost Nothing pertaining to Hall of Monuments for GW2.You still have the chars in question

therfore all the areas they have unlocked are still unlocked. So all that matters is Armour replacement ,hero runes ect its no big deal for these .

ANY skills you have unlocked are still there so heros only require runes.

I think that the question still remains everyone is entitled to there opinion but, to continue this length when it will change nothing surprises myself.