Petition to Turbine: Please Revise Hacked Account Policy

[Arbalister]

So Now turbine has instituted a Paid undelete character service(http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...e-Paid-Service!), but yet somehow they can't restore hacked accounts???? How in the world does that makes any sense to anybody????

Read the rest of that thread. Its in there.

[MrsAngelD]

Read the rest of that thread. Its in there.

I have followed this whole thread, and I still don't get why they can't restore hacked accounts.

[Darmokk]

So Now turbine has instituted a Paid undelete character service(http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...e-Paid-Service!), but yet somehow they can't restore hacked accounts???? How in the world does that makes any sense to anybody????

It's easy to save the information on delete.

On a live character you don't know which old copy to keep as the character changes.

[Zarador]

So Now turbine has instituted a Paid undelete character service(http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...e-Paid-Service!), but yet somehow they can't restore hacked accounts???? How in the world does that makes any sense to anybody????

A Deleted character is restored "As Is". You get back the character in the exact condition that it was in when it was deleted. Nothing more. If you sold everything or destroyed everything or even just gave it away before deleting, it's gone forever.

A "Hacked" account on the other hand claims that someone maliciously broke into their account and did damage that they want restored. No way of telling easily if that happened by the hands of a stranger, friend, family member or even the person claiming the loss.

Big difference!

[Cindir]

It's easy to save the information on delete.

On a live character you don't know which old copy to keep as the character changes.

So just have Turbine save the character every Sunday at midnight. How many people who were hacked would have been happy to get the saved state within the last week? I think almost everyone who gets hacked would have most of their important items then.

Even charge $10 for it. Surely people who worked for years on a character would be relieved to pay $10 and get it all back.

And yes, it would be some work for Turbine to do this.

[Arbalister]

So just have Turbine save the character every Sunday at midnight. How many people who were hacked would have been happy to get the saved state within the last week? I think almost everyone who gets hacked would have most of their important items then.

Even charge $10 for it. Surely people who worked for years on a character would be relieved to pay $10 and get it all back.

And yes, it would be some work for Turbine to do this.

While I agree that this would be a workable idea...

Think about how many people come to the forums to scream any of the rare times the servers crash and they get rolled back even 15 minutes, all the "irreplaceable items I just bought" posts...all the "I just sold 10 gold worth of X, now I've got no gold and the items are still gone" posts. And extrapolate that to the person who gets hacked on a Saturday night. :-P

[yzerman1990]

When the other option is to be completely empty but for a pittance of gold and skirmish marks for redemption, a week old rollback is still a better policy.

[Zarador]

This thread continues because hacking is a serious problem, and it certainly is not always the fault of the customer. <snip>

I informed him that I was able to login the Forums using his account info, but for some reason could not access the game or myaccount.turbine.

Clearly, hackers use multifarious methodologies to compromise accounts.

~or~

People are sloppy with how they handle their own account security and wind up being "hacked" in the end. Of course, as you say, it's not always the fault of the customer, but I would would bet quite often that it is.

Without sounding cold and callous, turbine provides us with a product in exchange for a monetary gain. They expect us to secure our end of the possession of the product since researching to determine if a customer was actually the victim of a hacker costs them a bit of time and that costs money.

No offense, but obviously your brother shared that account information with you and you in turn used his information to log in to the forums. It just points out how people can be lax with secure information.

[Arbalister]

When the other option is to be completely empty but for a pittance of gold and skirmish marks for redemption, a week old rollback is still a better policy.

I don't disagree - but you know as well as I do that it won't lower the number of complaints. And, we'll get new ones - "My friend got hacked and only lost one days worth of stuff, and I lost a whole week!" :-)

[Darmokk]

So just have Turbine save the character every Sunday at midnight. How many people who were hacked would have been happy to get the saved state within the last week? I think almost everyone who gets hacked would have most of their important items then.

Even charge $10 for it. Surely people who worked for years on a character would be relieved to pay $10 and get it all back.

And yes, it would be some work for Turbine to do this.

I am with you. I was just giving a possible explanation why Turbine acts the way they do when other MMO companies seem to have no problem restoring characters from various states of disarray.

As simple as week ago won't do since you don't know when the legitimate user is coming back. Some smart thing would be in order, namely to have -say- 7 backups round-robin but do not overwrite a backup with the current state of affair if the amount of stuff and gold went down considerably. Unfortunately Turbine seems to want to keep any kind of coding effort to the absolute minimum these days.

[sirwillow]

I am with you. I was just giving a possible explanation why Turbine acts the way they do when other MMO companies seem to have no problem restoring characters from various states of disarray.

As simple as week ago won't do since you don't know when the legitimate user is coming back. Some smart thing would be in order, namely to have -say- 7 backups round-robin but do not overwrite a backup with the current state of affair if the amount of stuff and gold went down considerably. Unfortunately Turbine seems to want to keep any kind of coding effort to the absolute minimum these days.

I love how you seem to have insider knowledge of what their "coding effort" entails, what the priorities are, and what they are capable of. So I take it that you've worked there and seen how it works? No? Oh. Then I hope at the least that you've got coding experience on a major project like an MMO and know what that can entail. Or that you know if they are even capable of doing something like this, but for some reason I find that doubtful.

I'm always amazed when people who have no clue what a company is doing, what is capable of being done, and what resources something would require start speaking out as if they have inside knowledge and how everything works.

Would I like to see them have a plan in place that would allow them to restore hacked characters to a previous point? Sure. Do I know how much work that might entail? Nope, not a clue. Do any of us know if they are already working on something like that? Nope, none of us do on that point either (though I would say that both of these recent additions seem to indicate that they are heading that way).

I can say this- if you tell players that with the budgets they can do one of two things- make new content or make it possible to restore a previous version of a character (not undelete one, roll one back), the vast majority are going to want the content. While those that have been hacked are loud and vociferous (and understandably so), the reality is that they are a very small number and percentage of the player base and (this is the painful part) the vast majority of them are at fault for being hacked because of mistakes they have made in protecting themselves (whether they are aware of it or not).

I know, it sounds harsh, but that's the cold hard reality. Again though, I see some hopeful signs for you. Their new ability and policy of restoring lost items, and of undeleting characters (though not restoring anything to them that they didn't have when deleted) are steps towards what you and others hacked are hoping for. But it may be a while, if they ever get to that point. We just don't know what kind of resources that would entail.

[Zarador]

Again though, I see some hopeful signs for you. Their new ability and policy of restoring lost items, and of undeleting characters (though not restoring anything to them that they didn't have when deleted) are steps towards what you and others hacked are hoping for. But it may be a while, if they ever get to that point. We just don't know what kind of resources that would entail.

Agreed!

Not to mention the fact that many of the "hacks" don't occur on their end. While I have no proof of that, I go with the logic that "hacking" into a company for a small number of accounts worth very little from a monetary standpoint is not worth the risk. Simply scroll up a few posts and one person's brother laments how he was able to log into their forum account with the information they shared and outraged that the security of the game was compromised clearly on Turbine's end (ironic).

Were the process expedited and simplified, it would lead to more such restitution being provided by Turbine at their expense to correct the security compromises experienced by the action/lack of action by the end user.

Having spent years administrating security for various retail establishments I can tell you that everyone pays for the actions of careless or dishonest people. It's reflected in the quantity and quality of services as well as the cost of goods.

So what are the two most proposed choices in these threads?

1. Put on more staff at their expense to fix problems that might not be an issue caused by Turbine.
2. Simply reimburse anyone for anything they claimed to have lost as a result of a "hack" even if the lost items were not a result of a "hack" and just are just an attempt to swindle & defraud.

The later would create an influx of unscrupulous players that sell off or give away items and then demand a roll back after being "hacked".

[Sapience]

Reviewing our policies and improving our technology in an effort to improve both your in game and customer support experiences has always been among our top priorities. We appreciate that sometimes this process can take longer than we both may wish.

That is why we're very happy to inform you that, after many months of review and the creation of new technology, we will have an announcement for you next week regarding compromised accounts.

Please be patient during the next week as we are still refining some of the technical aspects and putting the finishing touches our our new policies. We think you'll be quite pleased.