Guild Wars 2

Mcl is spot on. And people do remember stringing words and substituting letters is not secure either.

But a forcing of a single account won’t take on many attempts, maybe just a known password and several variants before moving on – pinging a single account won’t get you far as I would assume ANet will throttle such attempts. as mentioned before this kind of attack can only really be done at a local level. Thus most attacks on games like this are from first/second/third attempts before getting a hit.

My password and email address is unique to GW2, if it somehow got compromised then the problem is with me/virus etc. Also I wouldn’t care as I know ANet can just rollback the changes. This isn’t a bank where someone can just transfer all my savings out and screw me over.

On the other hand I would care if the GW2 database got dumped as I would likely lose personally identifiable data along with it, so I would hope and assume email addresses, addresses, credit card numbers and the like remain securely encrypted/hashed as required.

Because such a leak isn’t an if, this day and age it’s a when. Just think of the value a list of all GW2 account email addresses would be to gold spammers, MMO advertisers etc.
Actually I haven’t read the privacy policy (in memorable detail if I signed I did..) but maybe ANet already have permission to sell that list.

As Mike stated, if you use a unique password for your GW2 account you are basically safe. Even so if someone hacks your account no lasting damage can be done and ANet can fix you up.

The concern people should be having is much the other way around. Should your credentials be taken from the ANet servers and successfully used elsewhere, you could be in deep trouble. Again using a unique password protects you from this but hopefully ALL identifiable information is strongly encrypted/hashed and salted as required so no user identifiable information can be extracted from a database dump.

I’m talking email addresses, date of births, addresses, credit card numbers and obviously passwords. There is more value in the non-password data than people think – and it will go walkies; only takes a misgruntled admin or virus worm and it’s out in the wild.

Edit: for example should bill.gates@microsoft.com exist in a dump, I somehow doubt this will be the last credit card/password/expiry date they try to force.

In EVE the equivalents would be:

• even at level 80, a level 20 item is useful to you so all parts of the supply chain are desired.
• items are destroyed out the game making saturation less of a problem. I would like for repairs not to be pure money but maybe require a vial of blood repair kit (5 kits from 1 blood and an orichalcum bar for example) created by an armorsmith to repair your berserker heavy legs.
• gathering is a unique, time consuming and dedicated investment making supply a valuable proposition. Think cooldowns on certain rare crafting ingredients used in WoW and Rift. Gathering skills should have been limited as well.
• localized trading means opportunities shift, I have no idea how ANet could implement this but making trade server based and then have an option to move and sell stock on another server would be cool.

I’m not sure the economy in GW2 will remain healthy. It’s gonna go in a direction, and it will probably only benefit an extremely small proportion of the population that puts the size of their coffers and market nous ahead of just playing for the sake of playing. But then maybe that’s what ANet wants, people to feel they need to spend subscription levels of $$$$ each month on gems/gold to be able to enjoy the game.