Guild Wars 2

Arena put up a message saying if you didn’t want your account to be hacked, then don’t use an old password and account name, and it came across very accusatory. More like legal and public relations CYA than an informative message.

Some people who lost their accounts were not using old accounts, they created new ones specifically for GW2. Their account emails were changed somehow without them ever seeing any request to authorize a change.

If someone tries to steal an account, and the system does not notify the original email address, then the authentication system is broken.

It sounds like perhaps the account system allowed an address to be changed before authorization with the original address, thus users never saw the unauthorized change.

I’m sure a lot of people did re-use accounts, but its pretty clear a good number of people who were careful still lost their account without warning.

A friend and I played GW2 from launch until 0530 Saturday (1 Sep 2012), had a great time. Then at 0930 she tries to login and gets the following error:

3002:1008:1:462, email address not found.

The email address has not been changed, and the account and password were unique and not used previously in other games. That seems to indicate it wasn’t one of the accounts attacked by using a database of old accounts and passwords.

During the week email authentication for my friend never did work, and I wonder if that is what is wrong. I see other people reporting the error, but no response from Arena saying what it is or what causes it.

So far there has been no response to the tickets for days.

Anyone have any information on this?