1.) MMORPG, does not support talk about Real Money trading, however I will say this. If you ever purchase currency in an online game follow the following.
a.) Never talk about discussion or RMT in game, if you have purchased currency they already know who you are and that you purchased the currency they will not IM you other than ask you to "Open Trade", or "Hi Friend"
b.) Always put an item in the trade window to make trade look legit.
c.) Never buy from a gold spammer in the actual game buy from a trusted service I can't give you links here because of the rules obviously.
d.) If you ever do get caught, Denial is you're friend, as No game company should know you have purchased gold it would be illegal for them to know what you do outside of the game without you're consent.
e.) If anyone asks for the currency back, or asks about you buying gold, or a problem with the transaction, do not reply with anything, or be like, Do I know you? or LOL What? Because its likely a GM trying to get you to admit you did business with a third party gold seller.
I mean after all the best way for gold sellers to cover their activity is to use multiple accounts in transactions make multiple trades with many people auction house and items to throw off the Trade-Logs which often happens so its impossible for a GM alone to just ban you're account for RMT and accuse you because they would have to accuse a lot of people.
f.) I support Real Money Trading in all games as long as it is legit transactions, no third party hacks, bots, or spammers, RMT will always be in MMORPG's except for games where there is no such thing as currency, or credits even then players will sell real items for money like they do in EVE, and DarkFall.
If you're account was actually hacked, then yes I would watch for phishing links in email, and setup a square enix authinticator, as well as run anti-malaware scan, virus scan, and download comm-view and check that connections are allowed and sharing data with the internet.
Contact Square Enix, if indeed the account was hacked they will likely restore it last thing they wan't is a bad reputation for their company.
Set you're firewall to ask permission for every program that access the internet this is a mistake people commonly make using a trusted internet data-base can cause security issues.
Originally posted by Sk1ppeR There are literally seminars of how passwords are a bad security designs. They are not secure. Not in times when you can literally program GPUs and have brute force speeds 150 million attempts per second and that for a single 200$ GPU. 2-Way security is what has to happen everywhere. Maybe even face recognition. But those silly guidelines they have for passwords are just ridicilous. The least they can put an IP Address block. Or...since you use their client, it could sent some unique token that's generated off of your hardware's serial numbers with added entropy, this way you would have to grant access to every computer of yours. This is still, not a perfect solution but a hacker will have to try really hard to get into your account.
And yet, having 2 sometimes 3 accounts per game, and having played EVERY MMO since NWN on AOL
I have NEVER had an account hacked.
Wonder why the hell that is...
Om Fucking G, could it be because I don't share my accounts, or buy gold, or buy power leveling, or EVER use any player made mods, or ever try and modify the game code, or ever do anything other than log in and play the game the way it is sold.
Could it be because I am not a lying sack that does something illegal gets a banned account then starts screaming it was hacked to try and cover their own ass?
But omg there are all these evil hackers just trying to steal your accounts...
Sorry I just do not buy it, if the problem was as bad as some claim, the odds would have gone against me at least once in the past 20 years and it NEVER has.
Granted I have had a crap load of phising emails trying to steal my password, but anyone with even an IQ score above 1 knows not to open phishing emails.
I have ZERO sympathy
Back in my teens I used to do allot of dodgy shit and had 0 account security (everything was shared between games) and yet I only ever got hacked once...once and that was 8 years ago and on only one game. Now if you wanna be a smartass about getting lucky and not being picked up by a hacker's fancy that is your own issue but stop acting like you're better when the only thing differentiating you from any fool with no security is about 15 minutes worth of extra work for what I can only imagine is a far more appealing bounty.
1.) MMORPG, does not support talk about Real Money trading, however I will say this. If you ever purchase currency in an online game follow the following.
a.) Never talk about discussion or RMT in game, if you have purchased currency they already know who you are and that you purchased the currency they will not IM you other than ask you to "Open Trade", or "Hi Friend"
b.) Always put an item in the trade window to make trade look legit.
c.) Never buy from a gold spammer in the actual game buy from a trusted service I can't give you links here because of the rules obviously.
d.) If you ever do get caught, Denial is you're friend, as No game company should know you have purchased gold it would be illegal for them to know what you do outside of the game without you're consent.
e.) If anyone asks for the currency back, or asks about you buying gold, or a problem with the transaction, do not reply with anything, or be like, Do I know you? or LOL What? Because its likely a GM trying to get you to admit you did business with a third party gold seller.
I mean after all the best way for gold sellers to cover their activity is to use multiple accounts in transactions make multiple trades with many people auction house and items to throw off the Trade-Logs which often happens so its impossible for a GM alone to just ban you're account for RMT and accuse you because they would have to accuse a lot of people.
f.) I support Real Money Trading in all games as long as it is legit transactions, no third party hacks, bots, or spammers, RMT will always be in MMORPG's except for games where there is no such thing as currency, or credits even then players will sell real items for money like they do in EVE, and DarkFall.
If you're account was actually hacked, then yes I would watch for phishing links in email, and setup a square enix authinticator, as well as run anti-malaware scan, virus scan, and download comm-view and check that connections are allowed and sharing data with the internet.
Contact Square Enix, if indeed the account was hacked they will likely restore it last thing they wan't is a bad reputation for their company.
Set you're firewall to ask permission for every program that access the internet this is a mistake people commonly make using a trusted internet data-base can cause security issues.
There is no such thing as "legit" 3rd party RMT. It is ALL illegal by definition.
You cannot "legitimately" re-sell something that can only be obtained via illegal means. You are automatically guilty, because you are dealing in stolen goods.
If you are prepared to buy stolen goods, you should also be prepared to deal with the consequences.
Once its all said and done just get the SQEX Token app for your smart phone. Its free and works great. Oh and if you ever buy currency again just make sure your account email address isnt the same as your paypal address that you pay them with. Ya know?
Nah he is like many others that got their accounts BRUTE FORCED because some companies are incompetent of protecting their users. IP Address lockdown, security code only active for XX seconds, regional lockdown ... NONE of these systems are in Final Fantasy XIV. The only security is the user's password, which could very well be "123456". And there you have it, an account gets hacked. No malware bullshit, no keyloggers, no wiretapping. Simple as that. Not to mention that probably SE didn't implement a "ban for XX minutes after XXX failed attempts and notify the user to change their password" system. It's pitty. I hope they've taken more serious steps in ensuring their user's data on their backend in case of hacking. I really would hate to see the events that happened to PSN an year or 2 ago
And just to rub more salt to the wound, a B2P title (you would expect less of them since its not P2P) already has all these protections )) I can literally give my account email and password here in these forum for my Gw2 account and NONE of you will be able to log in. But yeah, keep supporting P2P for the "premium" service xD
If what SE is doing the past few weeks is a "premium" service, I don't want any of it. They actually made an iOS app while having shitton of issues to solve
It is a far better game compared to GW2 (in my opinion of course), FF and it refuses to use item mall; that's enough for me.
What I do know for sure about protection: if you fail writing your password like 5 times , you are lockout from the system for X minutes before being able to try again. Happened to me several times due to accidentelly having caps lock on.
Um *cough* have you ever actually checked that "Item Mall"? Or you just diss a game because it has one? xD The item mall doesn't lock you out of ANY type of content.
There are varying degrees in which an item mall is annoying.
GW2 does not commit the biggest offence, i.e. Pay To Win item mall.
So here is a list of negative aspects of an item mall and how GW2 does in those:
1. Pay to Win; No!
2. Item mall being connected the ingame economy; Yes!
3. Item mall affecting at least one focal aspect of the game itself: Yes, namely vanity (which is one of several foci in GW2).
It is important to point out that vanity is not a focus in neither League of Legends nor Path of Exile and I can for that reason accept those games selling vanity through their item mall.
The thin moment that you my friend are missing is that you can buy gems with ingame gold, just the way you can buy PLEX in EVE Online. So really, not even the item mall is being locked away from you. I bought extra bank space, costed me like 50g at the time, now it's cheaper, but then again, I didn't give a dime for it. Bought some backpack, again, with gold which i got from various activities IG. Sure its harder than just handing my CC data but well, worth it Especially considering there are no monthly fees. The bang for the buck is just mind blowing. Yet I find myself compelled to shell ~5-10 bucks each month not because i need the gems, but because I enjoy the fair plan of ANet and I show them my gratitude with that. There are months that I do not pay for one reason or another but I support them mostly monthly because i want to Because they are not greedy company. You can see the love they put in their product
Same thing happened to me as the OP. This is the first time I got hacked even though I have played MMOs more than 10 years, and I work as IT engineer. I am fine with suspending my account to investigate further but sending me an email to accuse me of being illegal and terminating my account is beyond ridiculous. Lawsuit will follow.
Moreover this is suspicious. Topics like this are popping up the last few hours all over the internet (see the topic "I am done" on this very forum) and the official technical support forum. Just yesterday they put out a notice about improving the security of accounts. Coincidence? I would bet that they had a security breach but would be too much of a PR hassle to admit it at this time.
And to all these people that saying this game is good, sure it is until you get to end game where the economy is broken, bots are all over the place abusing the broken economy and people are using exploits to finish dungeons.
You lost any and all credibility when you mentioned a lawsuit. Give me a break, really? I can guarantee you'll be representing yourself if you indeed go through with one, because even the most inept of attorneys would laugh you right out of their office. Suing a company because they sent you an email which could be at worst considered slightly rude is simply ridiculous.
Good luck with whichever game you try next.
They accused me of breaching the company's use of terms and privacy policies and thus terminated my account which I paid for.
If you think this is just "rude", then it shows how much you know about laws.
But then again you are defending Square Enix in the other topics too about legitimate concerns so your response its not surprising.
And if you believe that any lawyer would help you sue a company over a $30 video game then you're even more clueless then you claim me to be.
I'm defending Square Enix because I've seen this happen all too many times. People do something stupid, get hacked, then scream & make baseless accusations against the game's developer / publisher rather than admit their mistake. Eventually it comes out that yes, the individual(s) in question did in fact use the same username / password / email for another MMO or a fansite, fell for a phishing email, or purchased / sold game currency at a third party site.
It happened with Diablo 3, Age of Conan, The Secret World, World of Warcraft, Fallen Earth, City of Heroes, Guild Wars 2, and pretty much every other game released in the last ten years, as well as now with FFXIV.
The only reasonably popular game released during that time period which had an actual case of security being compromised on the company's end was Rift, and that breach was fixed very quickly.
Your argument with regards to the length of time you've been gaming without incident is just... well.. silly, and quite naive. It's the same thing as claiming to have never been in an accident while driving drunk for 20 years, or sharing needles for 20 years without contracting a disease, or running through a zoo's lion exhibit with meat strapped to your body for 20 years without being attacked, or... well, the point is made. Just because fate has smiled on you so far doesn't mean your information hasn't been compromised, it just means anyone who may have gotten hold of it didn't utilize it.
I've been hacked twice, possibly three times (NCSoft account was banned with no explanation given as to why). It sucks, and can be a royal pain in the ass. The first time I sounded much like you do, but once I found out how it was done, realized that it was indeed my own fault.
WoW got hacked because I used a mod with an installer program which was less than benevolent. To their credit, I got the account back within a day of the breach. Scrubbed my PC down, got an authenticator, and haven't had a problem since. Oh, and I'll add that it didn't get hacked until the account had been inactive for about five months.
My SOE account got hacked because I mistyped the URL for one of their sites. Apparently it was a common typo, because I investigated after the fact & found that the 'bad' URL led to a site with the exact same layout & appearance as the official one. They got my info because I didn't double check the URL, and logged into the false site. The genius behind it was that after 'logging in', it ran a script which then sent me over to the official site & somehow logged me in there with the 'stolen' information, leaving me none the wiser until mysterious charges started showing up on the account (luckily not with my CC). Again, I will complement Sony for their handling of the situation, as it took all of a 20 minute phone call to get things straightened out. I was angry at the time, but in retrospect I really do have to give the people behind such a thing some credit for being clever.
After that, I installed Noscript & Adblock plus, and have had no problems.
Getting hacked is a bad experience all around, but you need to take responsibility for your own mistakes. Petulantly blaming the company just makes you look foolish & irresponsible.
Again, good luck. Hope you get things straightened out, or find a game you feel is worth your time and money.
Most times when a player is hacked its their own faulth. Why would a hack personaly attack a pc that plays final fantasy do all the effort to gain 1 account ? So you can /delete personal hacker. So its either a keyloger or phishing mail.
These can be detected easy with any decent free malware protection or virus scanner. Unless you did some nasty RMT on your account wich i think you did.
So what did we learn today ? Dont RMT boys and girls you might lose your account.
if by some miracle you did nothing wrong and got hacked by a guy who loves final fasntasy and targeted you and did all the effort to get a hand of your stuff wich is prolly a 0.001% chanse then i am sorry to be this harsh. Truth is that the chanse is as low or eve lower then a burgler stealing shit out of your house.
1.) MMORPG, does not support talk about Real Money trading, however I will say this. If you ever purchase currency in an online game follow the following.
a.) Never talk about discussion or RMT in game, if you have purchased currency they already know who you are and that you purchased the currency they will not IM you other than ask you to "Open Trade", or "Hi Friend"
b.) Always put an item in the trade window to make trade look legit.
c.) Never buy from a gold spammer in the actual game buy from a trusted service I can't give you links here because of the rules obviously.
d.) If you ever do get caught, Denial is you're friend, as No game company should know you have purchased gold it would be illegal for them to know what you do outside of the game without you're consent.
e.) If anyone asks for the currency back, or asks about you buying gold, or a problem with the transaction, do not reply with anything, or be like, Do I know you? or LOL What? Because its likely a GM trying to get you to admit you did business with a third party gold seller.
I mean after all the best way for gold sellers to cover their activity is to use multiple accounts in transactions make multiple trades with many people auction house and items to throw off the Trade-Logs which often happens so its impossible for a GM alone to just ban you're account for RMT and accuse you because they would have to accuse a lot of people.
f.) I support Real Money Trading in all games as long as it is legit transactions, no third party hacks, bots, or spammers, RMT will always be in MMORPG's except for games where there is no such thing as currency, or credits even then players will sell real items for money like they do in EVE, and DarkFall.
If you're account was actually hacked, then yes I would watch for phishing links in email, and setup a square enix authinticator, as well as run anti-malaware scan, virus scan, and download comm-view and check that connections are allowed and sharing data with the internet.
Contact Square Enix, if indeed the account was hacked they will likely restore it last thing they wan't is a bad reputation for their company.
Set you're firewall to ask permission for every program that access the internet this is a mistake people commonly make using a trusted internet data-base can cause security issues.
There is no such thing as "legit" 3rd party RMT. It is ALL illegal by definition.
You cannot "legitimately" re-sell something that can only be obtained via illegal means. You are automatically guilty, because you are dealing in stolen goods.
If you are prepared to buy stolen goods, you should also be prepared to deal with the consequences.
There are some games that support Real Money Trading.
Entropia
Second Life
Diablo 3
APB ( Before G1 Owned it)
EVE Online, Supports Plex Trading Still Real Money.
Not all Real Money Trading means an account is stolen, not saying FFXIV supports RMT because it doesn't but if you know what you are doing buy from a reputable source, and make all transactions secure you won't get banned, not asking anyone to do RMT of course because it does violate their EULA, I just know from experience because in 2001 I purchased GIL many times in FFXI when I used to play it and didn't have time to play I never got banned, or warned.
Not all Money obtained in a game is obtained form bots either there are some companies that actually Obtain the gold or goods legally then resell them yes its still illegal by all means but what I am saying is they don't use third party bots, hacks, cheats or such so there is no way they find out of course you have to know where to buy the items or gold though.
I personally do not encourage, or suggest people do RMT in games unless the game allows it, but I am not going to yell and make a big deal about those who do as long as they are not spamming up my chat what they do is their business.
?By saying I support RMT, I mean in general I just don't care what another player does its their business, as long as the items are obtained by another player and legally traded for real money lets say real life friends or something I am not going to make a big deal, my only problem with RMT is those who use illegal bots, or hacks, or spams chat which completely destroys the game experience for everyone, although not all companies do this.
As far as account hacks, It is possible that you're account got compromised via phishing, Wrong URL Mistyped, or friend unless many others have been compromised as well. The exception being you installed an ADD-ON I remember when my wow account got compromised twice in a row Blizzard restored it, but the problem that caused it was the add-on I was using had a keylogger and it came from curse so every time I logged in they got my information and I had to add a blizzard key token to my account to prevent it.By saying I support RMT, I mean in general I just don't
So far WOW is the only account besides my Second Life account which has ever been compromised by a hacker and it was because of using add-on's on wow which were scanned for virus and so on but didn't detect which again they all came from curse gaming. ( The only other hack I had was with Second Life, but their security is a failure a user can brute-force login's because everyone knows everyone's login name just not the password which is why I don't bother to play Second Life anymore they refuse to offer more security, and its true some companies are at faults of their own for not providing good protection, although Square Enix & Blizzard both offer key-tokens so why people are not using them is beyond me.
Back when everyone and their brother was having their Rift account hacked and the forums were filled with "It must be your fault!" with an extra helping of Trion silence before a player came out and showed just how bad the game's security was, I made the mistake of thinking "Well, hell, maybe now people will be a bit less quick to jump on the 'it must be your fault' bandwagon."
Nope, apparently not.
It often is the customer's fault, I'm sure. And God knows Blizz did a pretty good job of showing just how often people lie about their security precautions back when D3 launched -- though I suspect that's just as common for those who haven't been hacked as those who have. But the security in these games, especially the closer you are to launch, is not always the greatest and if you expect most companies to admit to anything being their fault, ever, you're delusional.
Anyone that believes that any game company will just randomly ban thousands of player accounts "on a hunch" has some serious thinking to do.
In my many years of reading game forums, anecdotal info suggests that companies "almost never" ban the real offenders or bots, but are always quick to ban the innocent. Really....
Nobody is going to be randomly banned. Something flagged that account as suspicious. No company will tell you what raised the flag, because they have no way of knowing whether you aren't in fact a hacker or gold seller testing their security.
If they ban you, they have most likely lost a customer, and in the case of a sub game, your ongoing sub fee. So they will make a reasonable effort to make sure they don't accidentally lose money.
They have all the data and logs regarding your ACCOUNT activity. You don't. Strange as that may seem, if your logon details are stolen, your ACCOUNT could be doing all kinds of strange things while you're asleep in bed.
Gold seller activity and cyber crime in general is constantly increasing. There's very little risk to the criminals, and the potential for huge gains, with little effort. With the spread of Cash Shops in games and the ever increasing use of "virtual currency" by games, it is becoming more lucrative to hack player accounts, because turning the account assets into real cash is becoming easier and easier. Those player accounts are looking more like "virtual wallets" every day. Therefore you can expect that hacker activity will become steadily more aggressive and ever more persistent.
Exactly Myria. I was going to respond to Swedish_Chef with some pretty basic knowledge about lawyers but I wont bother since it seems hopeless.
The point to all this, it's that the customer support service is literally destroying this game.
And if you think that we are just 5-10 whiney kids that have nothing better to do than post in MMORPG.com forums then just wait and see what happens in the next few days or hours.
I wish SE would named and shame these people publicly like some more recent MMOs did. I think it's hilarious to watch people cry foul only to have things thrown back in their faces. It works just as well the other way. Company apologizes publicly and people move on.
D3 has had ALOT of security problems. So many that they created a little security key that WE had to buy. I will say though, I never have been hacked. I do not loan out my accounts and info to people, ever. When you do you take a risk of them getting your info. It's easy to login to someone elses account and write down their info when you give them your info.
For this site however, your comments and fervor are misaligned with the nature of MMORPG. We here are to promote games being played and those yet to come. A thread like this one opens up a dialogue that practically invites people to give you a hard time. An argumentative discussion without basis in fact. You're interpretation of what happened and others about what they 'think' happened are better served on the sites where your game lives. If your issue involved gameplay or content of the game in question, then it belongs here. To many people seem to want support for their predicament or to harsh on good games for their own personal experiences with CS. I do not see how that helps in any way when the other 99% of people do not get hacked and enjoy this game.
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
Exactly Myria. I was going to respond to Swedish_Chef with some pretty basic knowledge about lawyers but I wont bother since it seems hopeless.
The point to all this, it's that the customer support service is literally destroying this game.
And if you think that we are just 5-10 whiney kids that have nothing better to do than post in MMORPG.com forums then just wait and see what happens in the next few days or hours.
If that were the case, no MMORPG would be running anymore these days.
SE is in the middle of a launch With FFXIV With over 325.000 People playing at the same time!
With all the launch issues, account issues (tons of People registering their keys on the wrong account, etc) their entire Customer Support is overloaded!
It´s the same With every new game launch! Go try and Call Blizzard support back at WoW and Diablo 3 launch or when WoW launches an expac and see how long you are in line waiting Your turn! Or how long it takes to get an answer via email.
Same when RIFT launched. Same when EQ2, LOTRO and SW:TOR launched.
And now it´s the same With this launch.
Just try and Reach them during off hours (like early morning) and you won´t have to wait so long to get through! Instead of trying to Call during Prime Time when everyone and their grand mother is trying to Reach them.
First I am sorry your account got hacked. Second, most peoples accounts that get hacked is their own fault. Using the same email all over the web and the same 3 passwords. Being a IT guy it drives me nuts trying to tell people who are educated to be smarter. Make a new email with hotmail thats really hard for someone to figure out, then create a alias email under that account. Now never use the email from your hotmail account.
DO THE BELOW AND YOU WILL NEVER BE AT FAULT FOR YOUR ACCOUNT BEING HACKED!!!!!!!
Open an account with hotmail with say with the log in name 90807060d0g10@hotmail.com. This is the email you never use. Now make an alias email you will never use on the net just for registering your new MMOs with. Say for ff14 you use ff14@outlook.com. Never use this email anywhere else on the net. Next make an alias you use for just using on the internet. yourname@outlook.com. Now when a hacker breaks into a forums servers and steals a bunch of emails and password you used on that forum. Then trys to use it to break into your game he does not have the right email to get into your MMO account. Next they try hacking into your hotmail to reset you game password only they have your public alias email you made. So they dont even have the right email to hack into your hotmail account so they cant reset your MMOs password. You got be smart! If you are this wont happen to you.
Part 2, password. When signing up on forums use easy passwords you never use anywhere important. Like 9596, if a hacker gets that who cares. For your banking online use something harder like a string of word that have nothing to do with you. If you like fishing dont use fishing in the password. So lets say carbroekdown as your password. Now replace the A's in the password with 4's and add an exclamation randomly in the middle of it. c4rbrokedo!wn. Now for each MMO you play make a unique password like this and make each game have its own alias email from hotmail under your hotmail account. Try hacking that.
D3 has had ALOT of security problems. So many that they created a little security key that WE had to buy. I will say though, I never have been hacked. I do not loan out my accounts and info to people, ever. When you do you take a risk of them getting your info. It's easy to login to someone elses account and write down their info when you give them your info.
For this site however, your comments and fervor are misaligned with the nature of MMORPG. We here are to promote games being played and those yet to come. A thread like this one opens up a dialogue that practically invites people to give you a hard time. An argumentative discussion without basis in fact. You're interpretation of what happened and others about what they 'think' happened are better served on the sites where your game lives. If your issue involved gameplay or content of the game in question, then it belongs here. To many people seem to want support for their predicament or to harsh on good games for their own personal experiences with CS. I do not see how that helps in any way when the other 99% of people do not get hacked and enjoy this game.
D3 did not have any Security problems! Battle.net´s Security was not breached and people´s account info and passwords (which are stored in database With encryption) were not stolen!
Everyone during that time that claimed their account was hacked, while they had a secuirty token Attached to their account got BUSTED! All were lying, had no token Attached to their account at the time they were hacked!
HELL! Some were even caught joining the rage parade against Blizzard, while their account wasn´t even hacked!
Or have you also forgotten about that idiot that wrote an article on a well know gaming site about his account being hacked With Security token Attached, pulling Blizzard through the gutter, claiming that the Company was hacked and compromised?
That guy got so openly BUSTED and humiliated by a Blizzard employee, who went in and investigated his account. Not only did he had no Secuirty Token Attached to his account. His account wasn´t even hacked and never was!
Just another attention seeker joining in on the Hate Parade against Blizzard at that time and try to make fame With it! Well... he is no longer writing any articles anymore nor showing his face on the internet for a good long time.
Im not going to say its your fault, but Im REALLY glad they are doing something about it. The problem is getting out of hand. If I was a new player logging in for the first time and saw what a spam wasteland the cities are, I would log off in a minute and never give this game another chance.
Same thing happened to me as the OP. This is the first time I got hacked even though I have played MMOs more than 10 years, and I work as IT engineer. I am fine with suspending my account to investigate further but sending me an email to accuse me of being illegal and terminating my account is beyond ridiculous. Lawsuit will follow.
Moreover this is suspicious. Topics like this are popping up the last few hours all over the internet (see the topic "I am done" on this very forum) and the official technical support forum. Just yesterday they put out a notice about improving the security of accounts. Coincidence? I would bet that they had a security breach but would be too much of a PR hassle to admit it at this time.
And to all these people that saying this game is good, sure it is until you get to end game where the economy is broken, bots are all over the place abusing the broken economy and people are using exploits to finish dungeons.
This is golden. PURELY GOLDEN. Please keep us up to date.
Can you give me an example of this "cataclysm" of MMO? I've played quite a few P2P MMOs and none ever had such epic fail: WoW, Aion, TERA. Well Aion did have some problems with bots early on but they fixed it in a spectacular way. GMs blasting bots away with their specific skills. BAM and you're banned. Even F2P games like C9, Dragon Nest (by CherryCredit not Nexon) didnt suffer that much from gold farmers.
I didn't bother reading the thread because I don't feel like I have to.
It's the OP's fault - pure and simple. Account security is always the responsibility of the individual and if SE's databases were compromised we'd already know. Furthermore, there is a FREE security token download for mobile devices to further improve your account's security. If you choose not to use the tools available to you then you can only blame yourself. That style of security is basically unbreakable.
So please, spare us the platitudes and complaints.
@OP - thanks for bringing this to the forefront. To everyone asking why bring it up? Well you're a consumer just as we are, anytime things like this happen it should be inflated beyond belief and grab as much attention as possible. We have to keep these game devs hinest somehow and voicing your concerns, experiences, and fair opinions is one way to do so. Always always keep your money in your pocket too. There hasnt been much value in any of the bad games that are being produced over the past years, unfortunately those bad games are still making money.
Heard it all before, waaah waaah waaah, big bad company blocking my account.
While at the same time you would be just as upset if they done nothing to combat RMT and didn't block your account when they noticed weird logins.
You seem to have enough time and care enough to come post about your account being locked on random third party forums but you didn't say if you followed it up and called them or anything or even what evidence they had that the account had been compromised.
Please don't bother trying to blame them for your account security either. I run a email address for each game complete with a unique password that isn't the same as the email addresses password for all my game accounts and I don't get any mail to the email addresses other than the official emails from the game itself. No spam, no phising, no advertisements from random people - just the emails from the company themselves. The second you use that email address or password elsewhere is when you put yourself at unnecessary risk.
They even offer two factor authentication with a security token or an app for mobile phones and the best part is there's a bloody link about it all on the launcher next to where you put your password every time you log in to the game.
Your account security is your own responsibility. People need to grow up and stop blaming companies for their accounts being 'hacked'.
+ 1 Couldn't agree more. There are bigger issues on planet earth going on right now... I suggest the OP scans his or hers computer once a week and lay off the porno sites or any other dodgy sites out there and buy a authentication key. They're cheap and easy to use and I never been hacked in any mmo with one
Nah he is like many others that got their accounts BRUTE FORCED because some companies are incompetent of protecting their users. IP Address lockdown, security code only active for XX seconds, regional lockdown ... NONE of these systems are in Final Fantasy XIV. The only security is the user's password, which could very well be "123456". And there you have it, an account gets hacked. No malware bullshit, no keyloggers, no wiretapping. Simple as that. Not to mention that probably SE didn't implement a "ban for XX minutes after XXX failed attempts and notify the user to change their password" system. It's pitty. I hope they've taken more serious steps in ensuring their user's data on their backend in case of hacking. I really would hate to see the events that happened to PSN an year or 2 ago
And just to rub more salt to the wound, a B2P title (you would expect less of them since its not P2P) already has all these protections )) I can literally give my account email and password here in these forum for my Gw2 account and NONE of you will be able to log in. But yeah, keep supporting P2P for the "premium" service xD
If what SE is doing the past few weeks is a "premium" service, I don't want any of it. They actually made an iOS app while having shitton of issues to solve
It is a far better game compared to GW2 (in my opinion of course), FF and it refuses to use item mall; that's enough for me.
What I do know for sure about protection: if you fail writing your password like 5 times , you are lockout from the system for X minutes before being able to try again. Happened to me several times due to accidentelly having caps lock on.
Um *cough* have you ever actually checked that "Item Mall"? Or you just diss a game because it has one? xD The item mall doesn't lock you out of ANY type of content.
There are varying degrees in which an item mall is annoying.
GW2 does not commit the biggest offence, i.e. Pay To Win item mall.
So here is a list of negative aspects of an item mall and how GW2 does in those:
1. Pay to Win; No!
2. Item mall being connected the ingame economy; Yes!
3. Item mall affecting at least one focal aspect of the game itself: Yes, namely vanity (which is one of several foci in GW2).
It is important to point out that vanity is not a focus in neither League of Legends nor Path of Exile and I can for that reason accept those games selling vanity through their item mall.
The thin moment that you my friend are missing is that you can buy gems with ingame gold, just the way you can buy PLEX in EVE Online. So really, not even the item mall is being locked away from you. I bought extra bank space, costed me like 50g at the time, now it's cheaper, but then again, I didn't give a dime for it. Bought some backpack, again, with gold which i got from various activities IG. Sure its harder than just handing my CC data but well, worth it Especially considering there are no monthly fees. The bang for the buck is just mind blowing. Yet I find myself compelled to shell ~5-10 bucks each month not because i need the gems, but because I enjoy the fair plan of ANet and I show them my gratitude with that. There are months that I do not pay for one reason or another but I support them mostly monthly because i want to Because they are not greedy company. You can see the love they put in their product
I did not miss it, I specifically stated it by "Item mall being connected the ingame economy; Yes!". I see it as a negative, you don't.
Originally posted by evianwater I love these forums, because the big-company apologists come out in droves and attack the customer. Best PR department I've ever seen for companies like SE, SOE, and Blizz
I don't expect you to post an answer to these questions, They are for you to think about since everyone always answers the same way anyway. And yet the truth would probably reveal one or more of the following to be the cause.
Was your FF14 password unique to FF14 alone and not used in any other online resource?
Was your own PC 100% free and clear of spyware/malware etc?
Did you take advantage of the OTP solution SE offers?
Honestly, your account security is your responsibility and while compromises do happen, SE does need to address them on a case by case basis. So your account was stolen. What's SE supposed to do? They locked your account. If you are innocent, they will get to the bottom of it. It's par for the course. This is the 3rd such thread in 2 days where players are bitching about SE's decision to bad the gold spamming account. I for one am glad they are not ignoring it. And a few days of aggrivation is a fair trade for a lesson in the importance of account security.
Comments
1.) MMORPG, does not support talk about Real Money trading, however I will say this. If you ever purchase currency in an online game follow the following.
a.) Never talk about discussion or RMT in game, if you have purchased currency they already know who you are and that you purchased the currency they will not IM you other than ask you to "Open Trade", or "Hi Friend"
b.) Always put an item in the trade window to make trade look legit.
c.) Never buy from a gold spammer in the actual game buy from a trusted service I can't give you links here because of the rules obviously.
d.) If you ever do get caught, Denial is you're friend, as No game company should know you have purchased gold it would be illegal for them to know what you do outside of the game without you're consent.
e.) If anyone asks for the currency back, or asks about you buying gold, or a problem with the transaction, do not reply with anything, or be like, Do I know you? or LOL What? Because its likely a GM trying to get you to admit you did business with a third party gold seller.
I mean after all the best way for gold sellers to cover their activity is to use multiple accounts in transactions make multiple trades with many people auction house and items to throw off the Trade-Logs which often happens so its impossible for a GM alone to just ban you're account for RMT and accuse you because they would have to accuse a lot of people.
f.) I support Real Money Trading in all games as long as it is legit transactions, no third party hacks, bots, or spammers, RMT will always be in MMORPG's except for games where there is no such thing as currency, or credits even then players will sell real items for money like they do in EVE, and DarkFall.
If you're account was actually hacked, then yes I would watch for phishing links in email, and setup a square enix authinticator, as well as run anti-malaware scan, virus scan, and download comm-view and check that connections are allowed and sharing data with the internet.
Contact Square Enix, if indeed the account was hacked they will likely restore it last thing they wan't is a bad reputation for their company.
Set you're firewall to ask permission for every program that access the internet this is a mistake people commonly make using a trusted internet data-base can cause security issues.
Back in my teens I used to do allot of dodgy shit and had 0 account security (everything was shared between games) and yet I only ever got hacked once...once and that was 8 years ago and on only one game. Now if you wanna be a smartass about getting lucky and not being picked up by a hacker's fancy that is your own issue but stop acting like you're better when the only thing differentiating you from any fool with no security is about 15 minutes worth of extra work for what I can only imagine is a far more appealing bounty.
There is no such thing as "legit" 3rd party RMT. It is ALL illegal by definition.
You cannot "legitimately" re-sell something that can only be obtained via illegal means. You are automatically guilty, because you are dealing in stolen goods.
If you are prepared to buy stolen goods, you should also be prepared to deal with the consequences.
Not sure what to tell you, but most folks here been there done that and will show no mercey.
MAGA
The thin moment that you my friend are missing is that you can buy gems with ingame gold, just the way you can buy PLEX in EVE Online. So really, not even the item mall is being locked away from you. I bought extra bank space, costed me like 50g at the time, now it's cheaper, but then again, I didn't give a dime for it. Bought some backpack, again, with gold which i got from various activities IG. Sure its harder than just handing my CC data but well, worth it
Especially considering there are no monthly fees. The bang for the buck is just mind blowing. Yet I find myself compelled to shell ~5-10 bucks each month not because i need the gems, but because I enjoy the fair plan of ANet and I show them my gratitude with that. There are months that I do not pay for one reason or another but I support them mostly monthly because i want to 
Because they are not greedy company. You can see the love they put in their product
And if you believe that any lawyer would help you sue a company over a $30 video game then you're even more clueless then you claim me to be.
I'm defending Square Enix because I've seen this happen all too many times. People do something stupid, get hacked, then scream & make baseless accusations against the game's developer / publisher rather than admit their mistake. Eventually it comes out that yes, the individual(s) in question did in fact use the same username / password / email for another MMO or a fansite, fell for a phishing email, or purchased / sold game currency at a third party site.
It happened with Diablo 3, Age of Conan, The Secret World, World of Warcraft, Fallen Earth, City of Heroes, Guild Wars 2, and pretty much every other game released in the last ten years, as well as now with FFXIV.
The only reasonably popular game released during that time period which had an actual case of security being compromised on the company's end was Rift, and that breach was fixed very quickly.
Your argument with regards to the length of time you've been gaming without incident is just... well.. silly, and quite naive. It's the same thing as claiming to have never been in an accident while driving drunk for 20 years, or sharing needles for 20 years without contracting a disease, or running through a zoo's lion exhibit with meat strapped to your body for 20 years without being attacked, or... well, the point is made. Just because fate has smiled on you so far doesn't mean your information hasn't been compromised, it just means anyone who may have gotten hold of it didn't utilize it.
I've been hacked twice, possibly three times (NCSoft account was banned with no explanation given as to why). It sucks, and can be a royal pain in the ass. The first time I sounded much like you do, but once I found out how it was done, realized that it was indeed my own fault.
WoW got hacked because I used a mod with an installer program which was less than benevolent. To their credit, I got the account back within a day of the breach. Scrubbed my PC down, got an authenticator, and haven't had a problem since. Oh, and I'll add that it didn't get hacked until the account had been inactive for about five months.
My SOE account got hacked because I mistyped the URL for one of their sites. Apparently it was a common typo, because I investigated after the fact & found that the 'bad' URL led to a site with the exact same layout & appearance as the official one. They got my info because I didn't double check the URL, and logged into the false site. The genius behind it was that after 'logging in', it ran a script which then sent me over to the official site & somehow logged me in there with the 'stolen' information, leaving me none the wiser until mysterious charges started showing up on the account (luckily not with my CC). Again, I will complement Sony for their handling of the situation, as it took all of a 20 minute phone call to get things straightened out. I was angry at the time, but in retrospect I really do have to give the people behind such a thing some credit for being clever.
After that, I installed Noscript & Adblock plus, and have had no problems.
Getting hacked is a bad experience all around, but you need to take responsibility for your own mistakes. Petulantly blaming the company just makes you look foolish & irresponsible.
Again, good luck. Hope you get things straightened out, or find a game you feel is worth your time and money.
Most times when a player is hacked its their own faulth.
Why would a hack personaly attack a pc that plays final fantasy do all the effort to gain 1 account ?
So you can /delete personal hacker.
So its either a keyloger or phishing mail.
These can be detected easy with any decent free malware protection or virus scanner.
Unless you did some nasty RMT on your account wich i think you did.
So what did we learn today ?
Dont RMT boys and girls you might lose your account.
if by some miracle you did nothing wrong and got hacked by a guy who loves final fasntasy and targeted you and did all the effort to get a hand of your stuff wich is prolly a 0.001% chanse then i am sorry to be this harsh.
Truth is that the chanse is as low or eve lower then a burgler stealing shit out of your house.
There are some games that support Real Money Trading.
Entropia
Second Life
Diablo 3
APB ( Before G1 Owned it)
EVE Online, Supports Plex Trading Still Real Money.
Not all Real Money Trading means an account is stolen, not saying FFXIV supports RMT because it doesn't but if you know what you are doing buy from a reputable source, and make all transactions secure you won't get banned, not asking anyone to do RMT of course because it does violate their EULA, I just know from experience because in 2001 I purchased GIL many times in FFXI when I used to play it and didn't have time to play I never got banned, or warned.
Not all Money obtained in a game is obtained form bots either there are some companies that actually Obtain the gold or goods legally then resell them yes its still illegal by all means but what I am saying is they don't use third party bots, hacks, cheats or such so there is no way they find out of course you have to know where to buy the items or gold though.
I personally do not encourage, or suggest people do RMT in games unless the game allows it, but I am not going to yell and make a big deal about those who do as long as they are not spamming up my chat what they do is their business.
?By saying I support RMT, I mean in general I just don't care what another player does its their business, as long as the items are obtained by another player and legally traded for real money lets say real life friends or something I am not going to make a big deal, my only problem with RMT is those who use illegal bots, or hacks, or spams chat which completely destroys the game experience for everyone, although not all companies do this.
As far as account hacks, It is possible that you're account got compromised via phishing, Wrong URL Mistyped, or friend unless many others have been compromised as well. The exception being you installed an ADD-ON I remember when my wow account got compromised twice in a row Blizzard restored it, but the problem that caused it was the add-on I was using had a keylogger and it came from curse so every time I logged in they got my information and I had to add a blizzard key token to my account to prevent it.By saying I support RMT, I mean in general I just don't
So far WOW is the only account besides my Second Life account which has ever been compromised by a hacker and it was because of using add-on's on wow which were scanned for virus and so on but didn't detect which again they all came from curse gaming. ( The only other hack I had was with Second Life, but their security is a failure a user can brute-force login's because everyone knows everyone's login name just not the password which is why I don't bother to play Second Life anymore they refuse to offer more security, and its true some companies are at faults of their own for not providing good protection, although Square Enix & Blizzard both offer key-tokens so why people are not using them is beyond me.
Back when everyone and their brother was having their Rift account hacked and the forums were filled with "It must be your fault!" with an extra helping of Trion silence before a player came out and showed just how bad the game's security was, I made the mistake of thinking "Well, hell, maybe now people will be a bit less quick to jump on the 'it must be your fault' bandwagon."
Nope, apparently not.
It often is the customer's fault, I'm sure. And God knows Blizz did a pretty good job of showing just how often people lie about their security precautions back when D3 launched -- though I suspect that's just as common for those who haven't been hacked as those who have. But the security in these games, especially the closer you are to launch, is not always the greatest and if you expect most companies to admit to anything being their fault, ever, you're delusional.
Anyone that believes that any game company will just randomly ban thousands of player accounts "on a hunch" has some serious thinking to do.
In my many years of reading game forums, anecdotal info suggests that companies "almost never" ban the real offenders or bots, but are always quick to ban the innocent. Really....
Nobody is going to be randomly banned. Something flagged that account as suspicious. No company will tell you what raised the flag, because they have no way of knowing whether you aren't in fact a hacker or gold seller testing their security.
If they ban you, they have most likely lost a customer, and in the case of a sub game, your ongoing sub fee. So they will make a reasonable effort to make sure they don't accidentally lose money.
They have all the data and logs regarding your ACCOUNT activity. You don't. Strange as that may seem, if your logon details are stolen, your ACCOUNT could be doing all kinds of strange things while you're asleep in bed.
Gold seller activity and cyber crime in general is constantly increasing. There's very little risk to the criminals, and the potential for huge gains, with little effort. With the spread of Cash Shops in games and the ever increasing use of "virtual currency" by games, it is becoming more lucrative to hack player accounts, because turning the account assets into real cash is becoming easier and easier. Those player accounts are looking more like "virtual wallets" every day. Therefore you can expect that hacker activity will become steadily more aggressive and ever more persistent.
Exactly Myria. I was going to respond to Swedish_Chef with some pretty basic knowledge about lawyers but I wont bother since it seems hopeless.
The point to all this, it's that the customer support service is literally destroying this game.
And if you think that we are just 5-10 whiney kids that have nothing better to do than post in MMORPG.com forums then just wait and see what happens in the next few days or hours.
To play devil's advocate, this is not the first game to have security issues.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/search?q=hack
D3 has had ALOT of security problems. So many that they created a little security key that WE had to buy. I will say though, I never have been hacked. I do not loan out my accounts and info to people, ever. When you do you take a risk of them getting your info. It's easy to login to someone elses account and write down their info when you give them your info.
For this site however, your comments and fervor are misaligned with the nature of MMORPG. We here are to promote games being played and those yet to come. A thread like this one opens up a dialogue that practically invites people to give you a hard time. An argumentative discussion without basis in fact. You're interpretation of what happened and others about what they 'think' happened are better served on the sites where your game lives. If your issue involved gameplay or content of the game in question, then it belongs here. To many people seem to want support for their predicament or to harsh on good games for their own personal experiences with CS. I do not see how that helps in any way when the other 99% of people do not get hacked and enjoy this game.
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
If that were the case, no MMORPG would be running anymore these days.
SE is in the middle of a launch With FFXIV With over 325.000 People playing at the same time!
With all the launch issues, account issues (tons of People registering their keys on the wrong account, etc) their entire Customer Support is overloaded!
It´s the same With every new game launch! Go try and Call Blizzard support back at WoW and Diablo 3 launch or when WoW launches an expac and see how long you are in line waiting Your turn! Or how long it takes to get an answer via email.
Same when RIFT launched. Same when EQ2, LOTRO and SW:TOR launched.
And now it´s the same With this launch.
Just try and Reach them during off hours (like early morning) and you won´t have to wait so long to get through! Instead of trying to Call during Prime Time when everyone and their grand mother is trying to Reach them.
First I am sorry your account got hacked. Second, most peoples accounts that get hacked is their own fault. Using the same email all over the web and the same 3 passwords. Being a IT guy it drives me nuts trying to tell people who are educated to be smarter. Make a new email with hotmail thats really hard for someone to figure out, then create a alias email under that account. Now never use the email from your hotmail account.
DO THE BELOW AND YOU WILL NEVER BE AT FAULT FOR YOUR ACCOUNT BEING HACKED!!!!!!!
Open an account with hotmail with say with the log in name 90807060d0g10@hotmail.com. This is the email you never use. Now make an alias email you will never use on the net just for registering your new MMOs with. Say for ff14 you use ff14@outlook.com. Never use this email anywhere else on the net. Next make an alias you use for just using on the internet. yourname@outlook.com. Now when a hacker breaks into a forums servers and steals a bunch of emails and password you used on that forum. Then trys to use it to break into your game he does not have the right email to get into your MMO account. Next they try hacking into your hotmail to reset you game password only they have your public alias email you made. So they dont even have the right email to hack into your hotmail account so they cant reset your MMOs password. You got be smart! If you are this wont happen to you.
Part 2, password. When signing up on forums use easy passwords you never use anywhere important. Like 9596, if a hacker gets that who cares. For your banking online use something harder like a string of word that have nothing to do with you. If you like fishing dont use fishing in the password. So lets say carbroekdown as your password. Now replace the A's in the password with 4's and add an exclamation randomly in the middle of it. c4rbrokedo!wn. Now for each MMO you play make a unique password like this and make each game have its own alias email from hotmail under your hotmail account. Try hacking that.
D3 did not have any Security problems! Battle.net´s Security was not breached and people´s account info and passwords (which are stored in database With encryption) were not stolen!
Everyone during that time that claimed their account was hacked, while they had a secuirty token Attached to their account got BUSTED! All were lying, had no token Attached to their account at the time they were hacked!
HELL! Some were even caught joining the rage parade against Blizzard, while their account wasn´t even hacked!
Or have you also forgotten about that idiot that wrote an article on a well know gaming site about his account being hacked With Security token Attached, pulling Blizzard through the gutter, claiming that the Company was hacked and compromised?
That guy got so openly BUSTED and humiliated by a Blizzard employee, who went in and investigated his account. Not only did he had no Secuirty Token Attached to his account. His account wasn´t even hacked and never was!
Just another attention seeker joining in on the Hate Parade against Blizzard at that time and try to make fame With it! Well... he is no longer writing any articles anymore nor showing his face on the internet for a good long time.
This is golden. PURELY GOLDEN. Please keep us up to date.
Can you give me an example of this "cataclysm" of MMO? I've played quite a few P2P MMOs and none ever had such epic fail: WoW, Aion, TERA. Well Aion did have some problems with bots early on but they fixed it in a spectacular way. GMs blasting bots away with their specific skills. BAM and you're banned. Even F2P games like C9, Dragon Nest (by CherryCredit not Nexon) didnt suffer that much from gold farmers.
I didn't bother reading the thread because I don't feel like I have to.
It's the OP's fault - pure and simple. Account security is always the responsibility of the individual and if SE's databases were compromised we'd already know. Furthermore, there is a FREE security token download for mobile devices to further improve your account's security. If you choose not to use the tools available to you then you can only blame yourself. That style of security is basically unbreakable.
So please, spare us the platitudes and complaints.
+ 1 Couldn't agree more. There are bigger issues on planet earth going on right now... I suggest the OP scans his or hers computer once a week and lay off the porno sites or any other dodgy sites out there and buy a authentication key. They're cheap and easy to use and I never been hacked in any mmo with one
I did not miss it, I specifically stated it by "Item mall being connected the ingame economy; Yes!". I see it as a negative, you don't.
I don't expect you to post an answer to these questions, They are for you to think about since everyone always answers the same way anyway. And yet the truth would probably reveal one or more of the following to be the cause.
Was your FF14 password unique to FF14 alone and not used in any other online resource?
Was your own PC 100% free and clear of spyware/malware etc?
Did you take advantage of the OTP solution SE offers?
Honestly, your account security is your responsibility and while compromises do happen, SE does need to address them on a case by case basis. So your account was stolen. What's SE supposed to do? They locked your account. If you are innocent, they will get to the bottom of it. It's par for the course. This is the 3rd such thread in 2 days where players are bitching about SE's decision to bad the gold spamming account. I for one am glad they are not ignoring it. And a few days of aggrivation is a fair trade for a lesson in the importance of account security.