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I think it is a great move by Turbine. My particular post was just bemoaning the timing. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by RJFerret
However, I do question the idea that 24 hours is the most likely time to discover such thing. For me, I hadn't logged in for a few days.
But unless someone plays every single day, 24 hours would not be the most likely time to find you've been hacked.
Looks like steps in the right direction but my biggest hold up is the 7 day period.
What about folks like myself who have a VIP Account that might be away for 7 days or more and get thier respective accounts compromised during that timeframe? I could be gone anywhere from one week to 9 months, how does that figure into the 7 day thing? And I'm not talking about folks that just don't login for that timeframe, I'm talking about folks who, like me, are in the Military and could be gone for that long and not know thier account has been compromised. Like mine just was this past month I was gone. Is there any way for Turbine to do so something then or are we just out of luck?
Not very many games do this, it's not like Turbine was doing it differently from everyone else. It was sort of standard when this game was introduced, and hacking of accounts was rare back then too.Quote:
Originally Posted by anne2826
The big snag that I think most companies worry about is that players will lie about this. Then the hard part is how to verify this, or whether it's worth putting up with the scams.
Awesome. + rep for taking care of the community. This is a win for LOTRO players.
The potential for abuse is definitely one of the many possible issues we considered while creating both the policy and the internal processes for verifying the validity of a claim. This is why there is such a harsh penalty provided for those found to be abusing the policy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lohi
This really is good news. My account was hacked in October, and while Turbine acted quickly and reimbursed a fair about of gold to me, I would have rather had my items and banked crafting mats, which leads to my question. If your bank gets 'cleaned out' would this policy now cover that as well?
Keep up the great work!
This is a good thing for all players, but there is still one thing that I don't understand. If the data is overwritten after 7 days, why is it that Turbine cannot "rewind" your toon to the beginning of that time period before you got hacked and lost everything? Seems to me that the information is there, so they should be able to do it.
If they can undelete characters from years ago its not a backup issue... probably a cost issue. There should be an option to pay to get a "Undelete" style restore to get all your worldly possessions back if your account is hijacked and its been longer than 7 days.Quote:
Originally Posted by Khafar
Thanks Sapience, this is definitely a great step forward, and I hope to hear about more focus on this in the future.
I suspect that Turbine wants people to report compromise of their accounts within seven days of their discoverying it was compromised. After all, if your account was compromised on given day you would have virtually no way to know it had happened until you logged in to play. OTOH, if you find your account was compromised (i.e. all the saleable items were gone) and then went on playing with donated gear from other friends or kin for a long time, it would complicate the "reimbursement" issue if you then reported the losses say weeks or months later.
7 days seems a bit short for the casual player that this games seems to draw. If the "Standard Compensation Package" could be granted past 7 days, this seems like it might cover a large amount of the hacked accounts. It's still kind of a big 'Screw You' to the folks in the military though (Thanks again for protecting our freedom to play a game that puts money in the pockets of the people that seem to care less about you :-).
I'm hoping that along with this new policy, they've also added some simple security measures to prevent the accounts from being hacked in the first place. As is, you can sit around all day (week, month, etc) trying incorrect passwords and the account isn't ever locked, not even temporarily from what I can see. The hackers already have half of the information, since our usernames are now our forum names. I'd rather be griefed because someone tried the wrong password a few times have some bums on the other side of the world brute force my account at their leisure.
I've also lost a few good kinmates, my wife included, because they didn't feel that the time it would take to get all their gear back was worth it. The gold that they give as a reimbursement only serves to inflate the AH prices, driving up the demand for the gold sellers.
Returning items instead of a lump sum of gold is definitely a good step in the right direction. Making gear unsellable is another good step. Let's hope that they can get out of this 'toddler stage' soon and either get some crutches by figuring out a way to do complete character rollbacks, or take up sprinting by preventing the hacked accounts in the first place.
So I guess that, as my account was hacked on the 9th, I'm out of luck.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sapience
I'm off to find out how soon I can start giving Bioware my money instead.
How about those of us that have already suffered!
I lost the best LI I have ever seen in game to some #*&% deconning it when they hacked my account!
Seven days isn't long enough for people who take breaks. I still have issues with the guidelines for replacing things and wonder what the standard replacement policy exactly is, in regard to level and reinbursement outside of what was written there. No rollbacks? What about people who lost LI's?
Unclear. Unacceptable. *shrugs* Just my two cents. But I kinda hoped and expected something more. :/
I'm sorry Turbine, but you get no kudo's from me for FINALLY after all these years implementing a system that's still sub industry standard. Also what good is a 7 day window when your initial petitions sits unanswered for at least that long. By the time you hear back it's already too late.
And to all those saying that account compromise wasn't a major problem. This is prooof that the problem WAS quite prevalent.
I want to thank Turbine for changing their policy for the better.
Getting hacked, having all your banked crafting mats sold for pennies, your saved armor and clothing gone, your gold and shared storage items, your personal house ransacked, even travel rations vendored is a real kick in the gut. I never thought it would happen to me and was floored when it did last Thursday (February 17 at 6 PM Pacific time). Yeah, we own pixels and virtual gear but as someone said it represents time. I do appreciate the change, even if my account was compromised before this went into effect.
Kudos to Turbine for finally implementing something like this... it's great to see.
However, I have to wonder why it took so long. Considering how many people have been hacked over the last number of months especially... this delay in taking action isn't what could be called intelligent PR or savvy marketing. I do understand the fear that people might have abused any reimbursement policy, but in my view the customer dissatisfaction that resulted can't have been worth the caution. In fact, I suspect that negative publicity on the subject is a large part of what inspired the change.
I'm also wondering if forum and ingame passwords will ever be divorced from one another again. Surely prevention (and not just on the part of users) is at least half the battle.
But still.. these are promising first steps. Let's hope they continue in a good direction.
This, pretty much. Although it's not really so much that the GMs are bad people, they're just not competent enough to handle this sort of thing. The guy who was handling my case sounded like it was his first day on the job, making no comment on anything but apologizing over and over and over. He sounded rather intimidated, and a week later just sent me a few gold in the mail.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaylen
So like I said, it's not that they're rude buttheads like WoW GMs and Gamestop employees, just wet behind the ears.
Frankly, I would have rather been given some turbine points or a free month of play. I wouldn't have minded rebuilding if I didn't have to pay extra to do so.
This almost completely describes what happened to me, right down to the 20 gold. They even had to sell my mining pick and rations, so I couldn't even post on the AH, mine, or travel anywhere, I had to beg my kin (thank god I had a good kin, someone without a kin would have been red in the face with anger).Quote:
Originally Posted by Laurefinde
Still, LOTRO hackers are more courteous than WoW hackers. Most of my gear was left intact in lotro. In wow, even if gear can't be sold, they kick you while you're down and delete all your raid gear for no reason other than to get you riled up.
I think this is another case of Turbine listening to the player community and responding in a positive fashion. Thank you for the changes; it gives me a bit more peace of mind. It may not be perfect, but it is better than it was. As the landscape changes, I'm sure this will continue to evolve as well.
Speaking from the perspective of a mobile gamer (that always has a different IP address), I would love to see a soft token for two-factor authentication be implemented. I'll even pay extra. This way your account can be tied to the hardware you play on, versus the logical location. Just a thought.
Well as someone who was one of the first under this new policy let me tell you how they handled it.
On the 21st after having been logged off for 12 hours I saw my account had been hacked. Opened an ingame ticket and 10 minutes later had a GM ask me to open one per alt. Which in my case was eight tickets.
Heard nothing until 5pm on the 24th (note updates would be nice so we know that the tickets are still being worked on)
At 5pm EST yesterday I saw that the alt i was on had his ticket closed and received an email for 5 gold.
I logged my main in and watched my email get flooded with a ton of stuff. The main was the first open a ticket and he got the following
His inventory
His bank
The shared bank
and the return of my kinship house banks
A note here. Inventory management can be rough when your account cant mail stuff because it's full. But heck it was a problem I was more then willing to deal with given that everything was returned except for my 1st age runekeeper bag and 2nd age runekeeper stone. Both of which had been broken down and not sold by the hacker. But the gold i got as compensation will allow me to buy another.
Logged into each of my other alts to find their mail all full and everything returned. Crafted items, components, rares, even grey items they had in their inventories from that days quests. Plus each alt got some compensation gold as well.
The only things I would change would be to update the tickets more often even with "We are still working on this issue"
Oh yes and by the way this also happened. On the 23rd at 6pm I got banned from the game for suspicious activity. That my account was listed as a possible hacking target. Apparently those checks didnt notice the eight tickets I had open for this. Called Turbine whose customer service was very impressive and they unbanned my account after a lot of proof that i was who i said i was. Again very impressive.
I was angered by being banned for something I didnt do but was happy to see they were obviously working on it.
Overall as an MMO played since 2001 and an ex-SOE subscriber I am very impressed with this new policy
Yeah, pardon my sarcasm but this is so great to hear only months after my own account was hacked and I lost three years worth of time, money and effort. I had seven lvl 65's characters cleaned out, a 1st age Guard belt with 6x T6's on it that I blew scroll after scroll on. Yeah, the in game gold was much better than the belt I invested literally months into. Buying and grinding all new 2nd ages for all my alts and starting all over was so much fun, it was so boring having all my li's maxed out and tweaking them to my specs.
This is something that should have been built into the game from the very beginning. Rather than an example of Turbine 'listening to their customers' it's just another example of poor planning form the start.
It's nice that it's *finally* being done, but pardon my bitterness at it happening just months after I lost everything.
Thank you!
Maybe we can work on that 7 day limit someday and it'll be perfect.
I had a friend in kin chat yesterday tell me his acct was hacked and he was getting everything back and I was like :confused: . But now I see this and I'm so happy for him. And I don't have to worry about my own account any more.
Again, thank you!!!
Does Turbine moniter/log IP addresses? That to me would be a very good indicator as to whether someone is lying or not. Logging in from a different computer in a home network would not log a different IP address (subnet address, yes, but not physical IP address), so no real chance for abuse there. A quick check in the logs from the past week would reveal whether there was a second login or not. If there was, great, here's your account restore. If not, then either you're lying about the attack, or it was outside the amount of time Turbine keeps address records for.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sapience
Question:
Should I make 10 tickets for my 10 characters, one each for the thefts, even if it was over a week ago that my account was compromised? I sent one ticket with the information of all my characters but I just got back the kinship gold that was stolen from one of those 10 (50 gold) and nothing else for the other characters. Do we need a ticket per character?