Wednesday, June 12, 2013

World of Warcraft: Boo Hackers!

Stochastic commented on my Monday post about the guild bank saying he didn't take the guild gold and had cancelled his account. He'd been hacked in the interim and someone else must have made off with the gold. I'm glad the hacker didn't kick everyone out of the guild and try to sell it, but I guess that probably would have meant continuing to use a hacked account for far too long.

I opened a ticket in game just to see what they'd say. There was no category for 'friend got hacked and the hacker used your stupid guild stealing feature to steal our guild bank' so I improvised and used the 'item restoration - other' category. It took them a couple days, but they responded this afternoon.

We've got Stochastic's account locked down, we restored the gold to him as he's the guild leader, and I removed Sairoy and promoted him back to GM. Anyway, the gold is available whenever he's able to log in and deposit it. As you said he stopped playing, you can let him know, if you have a way to keep in touch, that our billing department could probably give him a free day of time when he's ready to log in and deposit the money, if he'd like to do that. Hope that's helpful! ^_^

So, huzzah? It's not clear from the response if the hacker also stole Stochastic's personal gold (I have to assume the answer is yes) or if Blizzard restored that too. The good news is that we don't have a dummy character as guild leader anymore and I don't have to worry about someone logging in and taking the gold I put in the bank so I can hit the muscle memoried repair button. If we ever played again and needed the gold (maybe next expansion?) it'll be on Stochastic's account. The gold itself was never actually the problem though, at least for me.

Stochastic probably should run a malware/virus scan if he hasn't already and change at least his Blizzard password? Blizzard seems happy to give him a free day to give us back the gold, but since we don't actually need it I wouldn't worry about patching/reinstalling the game at this point just for that sake.

No comments: