Guild Wars 2

I recently had my account hacked. I and my wife play this game together, and we have a two-person guild. Needless to say, all the guild bank stuff (which was upgraded to deep cave, etc) – mostly mats, sigils, halloween bags, snowflakes, toymaker tonics, ho-ho-trons, and stuff like that is gone. The guild bank log (why do they even have this if they don’t use it for anything?) clearly shows my account logging in on one day and taking all the stuff.

While the characters were rolled back (over a month, by the way, when the account access was last week or so), no other items were replaced.

As a bit of googling and other searches show, people have been telling Anet to institute simple account coinlocks and guild bank security (including good ideas like passwords, etc) for at least two years, nothing has happened.

Moreover, it is Anet’s data – our personal and account info – that is the high-value target, and which Anet is responsible for safeguarding.

The game is punishing in the amount of mats needed for any crafting, and yet gameplay punishes you more now for trying to collect mats. We used to have the fun “champ trains” and “world tours”, but game changes; the majority of which are clearly designed to eliminate costs to Anet, rather than to boost player satisfaction, have taken those and other options away from us – reducing the acquisition of materials (especially event-related ones) to a horrific hell of a grind.

Although I have never had an account in any game hacked before, I have been in touch with folks who have since the days of EverQuest 1. In ALL of those games, personal attention by a CS rep resulted in careful, personal investigation of the events, and, if properly authenticated, complete restoration of lost items, and/or alternative appropriate compensation. Unhappily, that was not my experience here.

I am now simply convinced that the lack of action, and general attitude by the company in regards to gameplay, inaction towards player-driven direction, and lackadaisical response to player concerns is institutionalized at Anet, and that it is futile to expect any positive changes.

On the other hand, some game companies recognize this sort of fault, and endeavor to make improvements. It is those innovative folks who will be receiving my game dollars.

This isn’t a case of Anet not doing their job or a lack of action. You even said they did a rollback for your account; the fact that they did this shows that they did, indeed, research the problem and helped you out. Anet’s policy on guilds is that they’re out of their control, and, as a rule, they don’t close guilds, restore items to the guild bank, restore closed guilds, etc.

In other words, keep all valuable items in your personal storage, so if hacked and stolen, a rollback will get them back to you. Anything kept in guild storage will never be returned to you.

I know this from personal experience. I have had people steal from my guild storage, and was told there is nothing that can be done about it.

How many times should they restore a Guild vault? How many times should the same high value item(s) be replaced?

Once per Guild? Once per member? Who should be responsible for Guild security? Should the economy be protected, and if so, how?

You say ‘people have been telling ArenaNet’… and they didn’t do it.

People have been telling ArenaNet to institute mounts, open world pvp, capes, free transfers, etc., etc. You didn’t really list the reasons given (the Dev responses in those threads you are referencing) for not instituting what, at it’s core, was the player’s lack of security in safeguarding their account and items. What some players want/demand/tell is not always good for the health of the game overall.

Sorry for your loss. Good luck.