First, GaileGray, I understand that your hands are tied until the developers have things set up on their end and we all appreciate your work here on the forums. That being said, I too was hacked and the fact that they were able to change my email address without a authentication link being emailed to my original email is the first and greatest lack of security by ArenaNet.
My account had a password that was unique to only my Guild Wars account, which tells me they could have only accessed this through ArenaNet servers.
The lack of foresight by the developers to already have an account restoration system in place is just further proof of poor security planning. Haven’t accounts for games been hacked since the days of Ultima and EQ, yet the developers did not consider adding this until now?
However, the largest slap in the face to paying customers is this unilateral stance of ‘you lost your items, too bad’ especially when some people paid real money for in game gems.