Guild Wars 2

My friend’s account has been hacked. He submitted a ticket, but the hacker is still logged into his account. His email has been changed so he can’t log into the forums to post. Can a customer service rep help? I will give info if yes.

It happened to me too yesterday. This is what i did: Go to Services => Support = > My Stuff, and there should be an option to remind you your username. At that point it will ask for a valid e-mail adress, your details, and most important your GW2 CD-Key. You should still be able to login for support.

And so you know, there will not be any sort of item refund for everything your friend has lost.

Thanks for the reply, Dot. His account is now offline, so either they cleared it (someone was online with his characters for about an hour) or they banned the account. I’m betting on cleared.

Well, they haven’t banned any account. At best, if A-Net has suspicious activity on an account, they will suspend it until an investigation is done. Also, you might be able to get some stuff back from this account if you head over to the auction house and see if there are any items still on sale (I found just 1 sadly). Sorry for his loss.

Nope, not banned, they are back on his account.

Is happening to my friends son right now too. Hacker is currently active on his account and there is nothing we can do but sit and watch. The hacker even took the toon to another server.

i am also banned but why i dont know , i hope they gona unban me i wanna play again , im not paying 70 euro for not playing ….
i had like 5 mails about chinese people trying to log in.

they beter fix a new security system

The system is working fine. You need to submit a ticket and be patient. Theyve already said that queue times are long atm, due to the huge amount of tickets in the system about various things.

Each ticket has to be investigated and answered. Theyll get to your ticket, just be patient. If its longer than 5 days, then create a new thread or post in the stickied thread.

The system is working well? It is not working at all. Neither do i have to accept the login mentioned in the mail nore does the mail contain a link to deny the access. It looks like this E-mail verification doesn’t do a thing.

It’s meant to be a smart IP verification, similar to wow.

However, people have said that when they were compromised, they never recieved emails. This is due to the email itself being compromised and the gold farmer deleting the email.

I’m sorry, but the system is not working fine. They changed his email, which I haven’t even been able to find out how to do. He received an email saying “hey, your email has been changed, hope it was you” but with no link for him to verify that it was he who changed the email. This is a huge flaw. His email is not compromised, his account was. He submitted a ticket within 5 minutes, and the hacker is still on his account, over 14 hours later.

My account was banned earlier this week for “unauthorized access attempt”, when there was no attempt at all (best I can figure it was a dynamic IP address issue). I know they can instantly ban accounts, because it happened to me. Why hasn’t his account been banned/suspended until it can be fixed?

I find it unacceptable for ArenaNet to blame their customers for their security flaws. If they knew this was going to be an issue, why did they choose to use email addresses as user names? (And they knew about these issues from GW1). Why not have a system that forces you to choose a username with unique features, such as must use upper case, lower case and at least 1 symbol, just like passwords? I imagine that would force many people to create unique and brand new usernames. Or add a 4 digit code to the end of our user names like they did with our display names? There are options out there, and ANet needs to start problem solving creatively rather than blaming customers for reusing passwords when they are reusing the email addresses.

My friend and I have been playing mmos since 2001, and neither of us has ever been hacked. 11 years, no hacks, and then GW2, which has thousands of hacked players.

The website up until very recently allowed you to change your email at will as long as you were logged into the site. ArenaNet saw that it was a vulnerability and disabled it.

I’m not exactly sure how anyone can think the system is working fine. The lack of customer real time service is appalling.

I’ll admit this is the most bizarre CS I have ever had experience with, and it’s a bit odd to be playing a game that does not have a restore feature, phone CS, Authenticator or some form of security ( EQ, EQ2, WoW, SWTOR, all have authenticators or some type of extra protection) and they seem to make the snidest comments without even realizing they are doing it. However this is a free to play game, even though if you look at other F2P’s they have a dual security by way of a log in pass then a pass for individual charas ( see Requiem, RoM ect).

I’ve personally only got one email about someone in china trying to access my game (after reformatting my PC due to installing new hardware) and I quickly changed my password and have never seen it again. Apparently all I would have needed to do is click on the link provided and it would allow access, thankfully I don’t click on something that says “Hey china is knocking at your door”.

@Femgame: this is not a Free to Play, its a One Time Fee to Play game.

But like everyone else that has played MMO for years now, this has been a really sketchy start for GW2. The ability to recover player assets has been a major feature in all MMO’s and some Online games out so far. If this were 2001 I’d say fair enough, you can’t predict everything, but its 2012 and there’s no need to re-invent the wheel here. All that had to be done is create this tool from the very moment they even planned on creating an MMO. No matter how safe a system is, a hack will occasionally happen, and people will want their stuff back since it represents Time Played.

There is a roll back feature in the works as well as an authenticator. I still feel that if this was a security issue on Arena Net’s end there would be a much higher % of the game population hacked. I’m not saying their security couldn’t be beefed up, just that as some posts are saying that they have an issue with their security letting players be hacked. I setup a new email for each game I play which then has a unique password (they need to create less games I’m up to 13 e-mail accounts) So far I only ever received one email to verify my home location for logging in and that’s it. So I believe that the vast majority are re-using email address’s and passwords, I’m not saying this is the case for your issue just for a lot of others. My own sister always uses the same password for everything despite my various attempts to stop her. Anyway this is all my opinion mind you and I’m sure there are many different ones out there.

You can’t honestly ask someone to create a new e-mail address for every single site they register to.I did get hacked, i use a single e-mail address for MMO’s (GW2, WoW and EVE + a few F2P) but I have unique passwords to each, and also unique to my E-mail account. After this event tho, I did create unique E-mails for each, just to be on the safe side, but until GW2 improves on some aspects, I feel my experience with this (otherwise immensely enjoyable) game has been severely ruined.

PS: No keylogger was found on my system, since i know someone would suggest it.

I never asked anyone to use a new e-mail address for each game. It’s just what I do.

I’ll just be perfectly blunt here and say that it is the CUSTOMERS’ fault, NOT Anet’s fault, that accounts are being hacked. If people were smart enough to use strong, unique passwords everywhere, this wouldn’t have happened. Period. I use unique passwords everywhere, and I have yet to even have one unauthorized access of my account. “asd123” or “123456” is not a strong password folks. Use uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols, and have a length greater than 10 characters. And boom, whaddaya know, you don’t get hacked.

tl;dr: It’s not Anet’s fault, the people who were hacked are entirely to blame.

I need some help my friend’s account has been hacked. His email has been changed and he can’t login… please help him

Sure you can’t blame Anet for getting hacked but you sure can blame Anet for the total lack of real time assistance. Do you have any idea how frustrating the last 24 hours has been to sit here and watch hackers in my friends sons account and not able to do a single thing about it? You can’t run a 24/7 game and not have some form of 24/7 assistance. Whether it be just volunteer in game mods that can temp disable accounts till real staff can look into it or whatever.

@dotMCL

I’m by no means letting them off the hook for this one. I personally have not been hacked (knock on wood) and I am appalled by CS response to those who have been hacked and also by the lack of security on their part or even the implementation of a restoration service. The game itself is beautiful but what’s the point of playing a pretty game if at any second you could lose everything and have no hope of regaining what you worked so hard for?

After all the hacking witnessed in other games you would think they would have foreseen this and instead of “restoration is being implemented sometime in the future” it would have been one of those immediate things. I could care less if the TP is down or if my class is slightly broken, I would rather have better security and services then have the others worked on.

Like I said before I got a notice email AFTER I reformatted my PC and re-installed the game. The sites I view are my college, my bank, MMOchamps and Youtube. I am also one of those paranoid individuals who runs a sweep every evening and morning just to be sure. All accounts have separate emails and separate passwords from my gaming account, so something here is certainly not right.

I’ve posted before here when I was hacked earlier in the week and I can attest as its been said here and many many many other posts that CS is far below what you might call “Industry Standards”…as someone said this is 2012…MMO’s have been out for some 15 years now and any company big or small knows that the number one thing you start out with is security…Without being racist or territorial or whatever you wanna call it every single person that buys, plays, makes, or even just reads about MMOs today knows that the very second any game goes live or for that matter even beta you are gonna get an immediate onslaught of Asian based hacking attempts…its just an accepted fact of MMOs today. And then for Anet to come out with a game they spent at the least 6 years developing and not have better security and more importantly CS with the ability to not only provide live 24/7 support but a restore and replace system is completely unacceptable…did they think in the history of MMOs online they were gonna be the very first one ever that no one was gonna try to steal peoples accounts and thus steal their gold, items, and anything of value on that account once it was accessed? I think not…they had to know this was coming. Now as I stated in my previous post I will give them props when they are due…CS has drastically improved the last 2 weeks or so…my account was hacked and I had to log in on my sons account and sit and watch my own character stand in town spamming gold selling crap…even got the person to speak to me in what I will call broken engrish as best…so if I can track down my own character within minutes of logging on on another account I feel certain they too can do this….that is IF and WHEN they have real live CS personnel…but to take in millions and millions of dollars up front in payment from paying customers then to say well now your on your own…if one of these hundreds maybe thousands of hackers actually succeed their reponse is yea we know its a problem right now…yea we know what they are doing…but too bad…you hundreds of hours of work and efforts are just tough @@@@…everything you own and worked for is gone and well…too bad. Hell on my account even my Collectors edition items that I paid 20 bucks extra for was deleted by the hacker and even that simple thing cannot be replaced. When the reviews are written and are being written now every day on web sites it will be said What a beautiful amazing game….but right now dont spend your money because when you are hacked and odds are right now it will happen to you at some point…as it was stated in the email we all have gotten at this point…We understand your frustration but we do not have the tools to replace items or gold that some dirtbag stole from you because we couldnt do what everyone else does and secure your account…but hey….visit your local Karma NPC and it will help you replace items you lost,,,,really??? Yep thats it…you paid us 79.95 to autobot email CS and well…go earn more stuff to be stolen and MAYBE by then we will have a system in place to fix it for you….truly sad in 2012….

Man, all these complaints about someone trying to accessing our accounts is getting scary. I got a few too. Changed my PW today and am hoping I can log in tonight. Six years playing WoW and I have never seen so many complaints about unauthorized access before and rampant hacking so quick.
Sounds like there is a hole somewhere and it may not be on our end. Who knows. The game is new and I am sure all this will be worked out in the future
Fingers crossed

@Slurry: Yea bro, pro tips from you… sadly my 16 character unique password with random numbers, letters, upper case and all that was easily passed. Fanboys will be fanboys I guess…

@dotMCL: I’m not anything close to a fanboy, nice try though. I won’t get into all of my issues with Anet/GW2 here as that’d be off-topic and a waste of time. But sure, if you’d like to call me a fanboy, I guess I can be one so that you have some way to vent your anger.

Did you use that same password anywhere else? Was the password to your email associated with your game account as complex? Was THAT password used anywhere else? Do you maintain your computer to ensure you don’t have keyloggers or any malware? There’s no way that your account was hacked by no fault of your own. If Anet had any fault in the hacks, then ALL accounts would be compromised, not a select number of accounts.

Am I saying Anet’s response to the hacks has been stellar, perfect, top-notch? No, not at all. Certainly they could do a better job in that respect. But was it Anet’s fault in the first place that accounts were hacked? I’d argue no.

So after 2 days i finally get my account back. and i’m being told this “In regards to any missing items such as gold or items, we are currently technically unable to provide restorations or any direct assistance in reclaiming what was lost. We understand that you may have become attached to the characters that are missing items, so to get you back on your feet and playing once more we would suggest seeking out the ‘Renown Heart’ NPCs that have had their tasks completed. They tend to provide useful gear for small amounts of Karma”

So the money i actually spent to buy gems is gone.. but please continue to buy more. we just wont restore it.

And for the trolls. I have never bought gold or used farmers or anyone to level my toons. i don’t serf the net without taking precautions. i actually use two different anti spyware and virus protection. In the 7 years I’ve played WoW I’ve never once been compromised, yet in the first 2 weeks of buying this I got hacked.

There is no way that this many people in that short of time were all hacked.. my question now would be did their system get compromised and now they won’t admit it??

For a group of people that totally despise Blizzard.. maybe they should take a few pages out of their customer service handbook, and remember who it is that is keeping them alive.. service like this has been known to be the downfall of a company. Never had service this bad. and the only form of communication is a email?? hell it took them 14 hours to respond to the 1st one and when they did it was to ask me to resend the info the i sent in the original ticket and then another 14 hours for THAT response just to get the above statement. …just…..wow

So Ealara are you saying your email address and password you have used for GW2 has NEVER been used anywhere else before?

Because reports are saying that hackers are using a list email and password grabbed from a few fan sites and other game providers..

Some how the hackers are able to change the email addresses of these accounts they are hacking and us people that own them can not…

art.. that has no bearing on anything, it would be absurb to have to get a new email addy for every game i bought, so your thought process is moot. I use a different PW for each game though.. of course they are.. but you need to look at he bigger picture. and i use and authentication device on WOW. But that is no excuse for the response they have given.