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This could happen to any of us.... So what are our rights?
Miner-2049er
Member Posts: 435
Just for a second imagine if the next time you log onto your MMO of choice you cannot play, and then you never get to play again. All your accomplishments in the game are lost and you have apparently no recourse whatsoever.
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Three weeks ago I logged onto my Aion account and it had been compromised. Not sure why, and I don't know how, but things were clearly not where they should be. I contacted NCSoft immediately and I am emailed that the account is 'temporarily suspended' to prevent further access. I am then asked a few questions to verify my account which I do immediately.
That was three weeks ago. I have now emailed them 4 times and not had a single reply. I have checked the addresses and my spam folders countless times but nothing. I simply cannot believe that after playing their game I have been apparently been cast aside. I have not done anything wrong on the account and I cannot see that I have been phished.
Anyway, I'm not that worried about the account anymore. If a company is this unprofessional I will stay well clear. I still keep checking my emails though because I simply cannot believe this actually happens to average players for no reason at all.
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Looking forward my main concern is should I even bother with this genre if this can happen? I had invested a lot of time into my Aion character(s) and it's all been wasted. In honesty I was about done with the game, but what if I wasn't?
DO we have any rights at all when playing?
As players we invest a lot of our time into this hobby, is there anything we can do if our account is just turned off?
Does anyone know of a complaint upheld against a MMO company for an incident like this?
This could happen to YOU.
TLDR; Imagine if a game company suddenly closes your account and gives you no reason at all. Is there anything you can do about it?
Comments
I have never had this happen, but no the players don't have any rights when it comes to this. The game companies are careful to write their EULA's so that the customer doesn't own anything. The write it so it is more of a renting thing. When customers are able to play the content that the company owns. You don't even have to have done anything and the company by all right's is able to revoke your account.
Customer service is an MMO's largest expense after launch.
.
Guess NCSoft is trying to save money by skimping on customer service.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Wow.. I am surprised to hear this after my experience with the same situation. I went to log in one day and could not. I contacted NCsoft and advised and they responded promptly and advised that I would have to provide some information to verify this was indeed my account. I was able to answer the questions and they changed the PW on the account so that I could log back in and change my main PW. Well, the day after I got my account back, it was banned due to illegal activity.
Needless to say I was a bit...peeved. I called ncsoft this time and waited on hold for about 25 mins before speaking with a very helpful rep. He was able to see that I had just gotten my account back and was able to lift the ban and I was back in game within 2 hours. He apologized to no end and stated that they were cracking down hard on the gold spammers and that is why so many accounts were banned.
I then received an email from one of the communtiy leads from NCsoft who had marked the account to be banned. She again apologized and advised me to let them know if anything was missing so that they could assist.
Although the situation should have never happened, I was really impressed by NCsoft's support team and response. If what you say is true (and I'm sure you have no response to lie) then I am truely saddened that they have lost their step in this department. Or maybe I was just lucky.
Either way, I would strongly recommend to you to call instead of emailing and wait on hold as long as needs be. Good luck my friend!
I'm glad this came in soon because i knew it would.
I cannot prove I'm not stupid, and you've already assumed I am, but what if this happens to you tomorrow. When you post about it everyone will believe the same.
Perhaps someone has used a random method to determine my password - unlikely.
OR
Maybe someone working for the company has sold a batch,
Maybe something went wrong with the security during the transfers and someone had got on.
Server merges had just occured and I had been forced to change my character name. Maybe there was a database error during the change and somehow the password field was wiped.
I honestly don't know. But I expect I was as sure as you are that it wouldn't happen to me.
Thank you for your helpful and informative post. I shall give this a try.
Tough loss , but not surprising. NCSoft always had serious hacking problems and obviously they don't care much about it as long as they get their cut off gold sellers.
My advice to you would be to flush NcSoft , it's garbage and their reputation has been tarnished over the years , just the ignorant keeps playing their products.
I am not assuming or stating that you are stupid. All I am saying is that you failed to protect your account information from being compromised. I don't know if the account information was retrieved by an expert hacker, and infected/cloned website or program, or a phising mail.
Many of the people who have had their accounts compromised are probably much smarter than I am. However, being savvy to avoiding hacking and phishing attempts is a completely different matter. Most probably in any case the security breach was not on NCSoft's server side. If there was a breach, most likely the human factor was involved. However, my presumption is that you were either caught off guard by a cloned site, or a phishing mail, if you are sure all your software is 100% legit.
What a useless piece of advice. The OP is human. Humans make mistakes. You may as well turn round after a murder and say "solution - don't get killed".
Of course it's good to give concrete security advice, and we can hope to reduce the number of compromised accounts, but assuming that account comprises can be completely eliminated by advice such as the above is foolish.
The thing that keeps our accounts active on MMOs is the promise of future payments either via monthly subscriptions or RMT for F2P games. Companies want to continue to receive our money, and so should provide good service.
It sounds to me as if the OP is getting poor service with Aion. I don't play the game, but is there some other way he can seek help other than by email - e.g. is there an online support forum? Once the OP has taken reasonable steps to get his account back, and he hasn't received satisfactory service, then he should abandon the game, and advise his friends to do likewise.
D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium
Now I'm not particularly sure about the rules of MMORPG services, but perhaps when you plan on going on hiatus for a while, you could request them to freeze your account until such time that you ask that it be unfrozen?
Just throwing a few punches at thin air...
As for rights, I believe all game content as well as your account are property of the company or business that provided them to you, AFAIK. Yes, that's even though you are held responsible for its security and so on and so forth.
I only know Stardock to have entitled their customers (gamers) with rights. Doesn't follow through all the products they offer, though.
You probably have a right not to be billed for the days you were refused to access your account.... but that's about it . Playing an MMO is more like going to see a movie or going to a video game arcade... you are paying for the service of being entertained... you don't actualy have ownership of anything..... though with cash shops, depending upon how the goods sold in there are advertised.... I guess some-one could potentialy make a case for ownership of virtual goods. Depends on how they advertise what you are paying your money for..... If they advertise that they are SELLING you something...then you potentialy have some property claims.... if they advertise that they are LICENSING YOU ACCESS to use thier services (which is what most MMO's and other online services do) then you don't.
Not fun to loose access to a character that you got attached to.... on the other hand, if you enjoyed the time you were playing him... then that's really all that counts, isn't it?
That's essentially what I wanted to say. I think it is infantile to come whining on the forums here regarding your compromised account. Most likely the weakest link in information theft scenario is the victim. People just do not like facing up to the truth.
If I had my account compromised, I wouldn't make a post about it here, attempting to portray myself as an innocent victim when the most likely reason for account theft is poor system/password security on the end user end. Rather, I would investigate what caused the breach and take the unfortunate occurence as a lesson learned and do my best to get my account recovered.
It seems like every single person that gets their account jacked these days wants some collectivty empathy and pats on his or her back by posting a useless thread on the forums. When asked if the fault could have been at their end the answer is always 'No, I'm a computer expert and a smart guy, I did everything to protect my information.' Sadly, in 90+% of the cases this is not the case.
I am not trying to rub salt into the OPs wounds here but really, these service providers have teams of security experts monitoring their databases, site and game transactions and any actions that are related to their customer accounts. So, who do you think is most likely to be the person with the security leak/breach, the team of security experts with a college degree in the field or Mr. Joe Average?
one thing I know is latelly they customer support is slow, possible after the physical change of the server they still have things to be done.
but for you comment on it can happen with anyone, I play online for over 12 years and never I had problems with my accounts, course I never use the same char name as my login name, my passs don't have less then 12 digits using upper and lower cases, plus anyone stupid enough to send me a e-mail trying to phish my account are welcomed on my anti-spam and I love to report this kind of things to the devs on any game I play,
really till now I was banned at least 5 times, so I should use a random link normally one write sceure(not a typo) in the link.
its also helps I don't use any facebook,myspace anything like that so my chances to be hacked is low or almost none(I also play behind a router and firewall)
Couple things...
1. Don't buy gold(I'm not assuming you did, just sayin')
2. Avoid using the same username/password combination for more than one online account. If you find you can't do that, then don't use the same username/password combination for your important accounts that you use for, say, MMORPG or other gaming forums. Hackers grab U/P's from low security forum sites and sell them to gold sellers, who then try those U/P combinations on the major MMO's to sell the characters' mad lootz.
Pretty bad, sure... but imagine if they started running them on all major online banking sites...
More on number 1: Imagine how many people gold sellers sucker, should you be a fool using the same U/P on the gold selling site as they do on your MMO's! So you have another reason to not buy gold; you're funding an industry that's quite clearly trying to rob you.
That'd be like the US trying to buy oil from... never mind...
NCSoft has a history of compromised database servers and piss poor security. Aion had a huge problem with accounts being compromised altho ncsoft only admitted to a small portion being from hackings. NCSoft has been a terrible company to deal with on the customer service side of things for a really long time. Ther have a terrible reputation with game management as well. Their blanket ban policy and refusal to give specific reasons and or provide any logs or screenshots to prove their case when they do ban people or the many communications from NCSofts GM team changing the reason for the bans its ridiculous. They do all this in the name of banning bots that they let take over Aion for the first few months of the game and they still dont ban gold spammers or bots just ban players.
Every time someone posts about what their rights might be one of these posts appear.
It almost like someone has a vested interest in convicing gamers that the EULAs and ToS are somehow the highest laws in the land?
Well, no.
EULAs are a contract. And like all contracts they can be challenged.
How far you get, how hard that is, and whether you are successful (and to what degree) depend on many many things.
Where you live? (Which country) What the problem was? What resolution you want? How much money and time it would cost to take various actions?
But as soon as money changes hands - you most certainly have some rights.
If that was not the case, I could ship you all an 'MMO' ( which was just some code I have written that doesn't even install or run) cover it with an EULA and charge you all then keep the money!
Can I do that? No. At best I would have to refund the money at worst I might go to jail. So EULAs are not a 'we get your money and you STFU' type deal at all.
In the case above though, you may only be entitled to a refund, pro-rata of any subscription paid.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
same with blizzard, really you can't say its any dev fault if a account is compromised if in the most of the cases is the player is to blame, several times in my years of gamming I saw people knowing the login and passs of his friends to log on his account, several phishing e-mails and people fall for it, the internet was never meant to be what it is today, so the security is almost null, over the time we start to raise the security lvl,
but also you can notice one thing, all security methods we do is normally on our end or the receiver end, not in the mid/ during the travel of that info, you can blame others, but in the end you know who is really the one you should blame,
I gotta tell ya, if that's the extent of what you do, and/or your focus you WILL get hacked, someday. It's not the size of the password, or whether they know what your character name is. Hackers aren't focused on individuals, sitting at the MMO login screen trying to figure your pwd out, they're focused on large volumes of data. And if that U/P combination(even if you weren't the one to put it there) is on any other website, you can get hacked.
Blame all the people who illegally buy accounts/gold/items in games. If people didn't do that, there wouldn't be any gain from hacking accounts so players would be a lot safer. But those who do buy illegal virtual items always take the stance of "It's not like it hurts anyone so why do you care if I do?"
The latest batch came from the asian F2P sites. Folks hacked in, got huge batches of U/P's and sold them to gold sellers, who then used them on all the AAA MMO's in hopes that the players on the free games also played those.
wrong msg....
There is always a chance with any MMO that it will close. . shut down etc. As soon as I decided I was only going to play WoW until I hit top level years ago. . I stopped playing. . there was no point then. These things are all vi rtual and can be lost at any time. It is hard enough to quit when you have invested time in them.
I take them a lot less seriously now. If they aren't fun I don't play. I would suggest getting about as attached to an MMO as you do to a piece of cake. . sure. . it is awesome. . tomorrow when you come home your mother in law might have eaten it. Sure. . you can go get some other cake. . but not the cake you had. . the one you wanted and were thinking about all day.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
I did not put everything I do there too you know, just the most common mistakes I saw during my years, and yes I also change my pass in a certain time frame and other things, and really only my open info is the same, the ones I use in games are others, also I would never put anything personal on the internet, i also did say almost none, its impossible you have a 100% secure line here
Number 2 here is a possibility in my case, so perhaps this is how I got stung. Thanks for the suggestion.
I don't buy gold.
To be honest my main gripe is that the company is not even responding to my emails.
I've been playing MMOs for around 6 years now and never had any problem whatsoever with compromised accounts...
Know why?
I keep my Windows up to date (legit version as well)
I keep my anticirus software, email protection and firewall suite up to date (legit version)
I never use links I receive in eMails (I delete those eMails and go to the official site manually)
I don't use Internet Explorer
I don't use addons (yeah, those are a source of compromises)
I have 3 different semi-standard account names, dito for game names and use 3 different passwords I use with mixed code
I NEVER LET ANYONE USE MY ACCOUNT AT ALL AND I DON'T SHARE ACCOUNT / PASSWORD EITHER
...and the list goes on and on...
I'm not telling OP breached his own account by not being careful, but if you do the things I do, you're very sure your account is save...
If your account has been compromised then you are a fail.
Think about how anyone could possibly hack into your account? It is impossible unless you are a security fail.
You fail.