f13.net

So, we're trying to install WoTLK for the wifey, and try to log into her account. No dice. So, we figure we're just remembering the password wrong -- it's been at LEAST a year, maybe longer.

So I go ahead and reset the password through her email, and then try to log into her account management to put in her WoTLK key. And get..."This account has been permanently disabled".

That was...a surprise. So I send a message to the proper folks at Blizzard stating, to wit, "This account hasn't been used in 12+ months and it was because we stopped playing. Why is it permanently disabled". Of course, I suspect the reason -- someone grabbed her password and managed to do something annoying. Like sell gold, or spam "FAG!" for hours on global, or whatever.

So I go to the armory and check her profile. She's level fucking 79, but the account won't come up. She doesn't HAVE WoTLK. She left that account a 63 or 64. So someone used her account with WoTLK. I go through her emails -- I find a notice around 12/26/08 mentioning her timecard is about to run out. She apparently never saw that.

So, best guess -- since the account still seems tied to her proper email address, and there appears to be no shenanigans there (but no telling if said asshole was considerate enough just to delete WoW emails -- my wife does have some 900 fucking unread messages, so she's lazy as hell with her email on that account) -- is that someone managed to get into her damn account right after WoTLK came out, resubbed her using a time card (we use a CC), leveled her from 63 to 79, and then got her banned sometime around when the timecard ran out.

WHY is a question I cannot answer. HOW is a question I cannot answer -- that account was fallow.

In any case, I've got emails in to wowaccountsupport or whatever it is. Anyone have any experience with this? Any suggestions on what sort of time frame to fix this clusterfuck? Will she be able to have her 'toon restored to it's state when we stopped subbing off a CC and, apparently, switched to some moron on a timecard? Will we have much of a problem fixing this, or should we just wipe and burn the account and associate her keys with a new account?

Any advice? Suggestions? Thoughts? Because I'm a bit pissy right now about the whole affair. I'm hoping, desperately hoping, that Blizzard keeps records good enough to go "Aww, you switched off of monthly reoccuring back in 5/08. It reactivated later that year, on a timecard. That wasn't you? Well, we can roll your characters back to their 5/08 state -- you'll lose certain enchants -- and should have it restored and your account back up by Friday".

But I bet it won't be that easy. But I can hope.

Who the fuck steals an account, upgrades it to an expansion, and levels someone to 79? That's a fucking ton of work there, especially since it seems to have been done in less than three months. Why? Just to sell gold? Why get it banned?

My account was hacked and then stripped. I was able to get the password back but had to wait about a week to get all the stuff back.

It was pretty quick actually - not very much in the way of interaction with Blizz, but I did get all my stuff back.

(They disable accounts after a couple mistries on the password. Was about 2 days to get them to resend the password.)

Based on my experience, hold out - you will likely get access back. Dunno what the bizniss will be with the expansion tho.

Probably someone that thought they got one over on your wife's account and figured she was never coming back. Or they were trying to get 80 to sell it and were trying to do it before the time card ran out.

If you're worried about security, you could get a security dongle.  Don't know if they can revert the character, though it's possible you'll get a free Wrath expansion out of it if that's the case.  I do not know the specifics, but I do know several people whom have been hacked and got things sorted out in fairly quick time.

If any new accounts are involved, I'm still looking to get a Zhevra... >>

As someone who used to deal with this kind of thing I would say that it's highly unlikely you'll get the account unbanned. 'It wasn't me, it was my little brother/my friend/some hackers' is a pretty common response to a ban and it never flies. Ultimately most operators take the view that you are responsible for anything that happens on your account and are responsible for its security. They don't want to get into he said, she said stuff so the fact that your wife wasn't operating the account at the time is not a reason to unban it.

If you're hacked then Blizzard will try and return the account to whoever legitimately owns it but I can't see them overturning a ban. At a guess, whoever was using the account was macro-farming for an RMT operator and it got caught.

Many possibilities, phished the information Im assuming? Get an account farm as much gold on it as possible,use it as a mule to facilitate other transactions,use it for advertising in game,resell the stolen account to a third party and let them deal with the issue when it eventually gets banned. Impressed they will even restore an account to a state a year ago, especially one that was banned? They must have changed tons since ive played.

They haven't done anything. I just found this out today. About all I've got going for me is that our family has three accounts (mine, hers, my sons) all charged the same way -- reoccuring charges to a single credit car. I shut mine down April of 08, shut hers down a bit before that. My son's has been active since January of 08. I'm hoping that since whoever got the ban banned it off a timecard, months after I stopped paying for it -- and that my wife has like a 2 year play record that has not even a warning on it -- will help.

I dunno. Other than that, well -- I'm pretty sure to get another account I'll have to buy all three goddamn boxes for her, which really pisses me off. Levelling her toons back up isn't that big a deal.

As for how I found out it was 79 -- Armory has that, just not the detailed character information (so I can't see if, for instance, it's a totally stripped character).

I have no idea if they can restore it with the ban being 6+ months old. I can't even get INTO the account to see when the ban occured, or when the moron started playing with it.

I'm hoping, if nothing else, now that I've resecured the account (changed the password, basically -- on it and her email account, just in case he got that somehow and was stripping out messages) -- that I can at least recover the account even if the characters are totally wiped. I'd prefer to get the characters back, obviously, in the condition I left them. I have no idea if that's feasible, with the whole thing being so old.

Like I said -- someone hacked it, played it for two or three months, then got perma-banned. And we never noticed, because we weren't playing and, to the best of our knowledge, the account was frozen like we left it.

Sorry I misread, no way is that account going to be restored. While Blizzard policy is far from standardized (or was when i played), you gotta fuck up pretty bad for the account to be perm banned. Its pretty much exclusive to RMTing of some sort or saying some criminally heinous smack. And since they played it awhile its almost certainly the former. Its a black/white case closed situation if its RMT. Your account,your responsibility even if its hacked. Ive heard of people retrieving an account that was completely taken over by a hacker, but after the judgment is made you are pretty fucked.

Basically everything IainC said.

Well, shit. Hell, I think I can even pinpoint when the fucker was hacked. I found a password recovery request in my wife's inbox on 12/26/08. She wasn't fucking PLAYING on 12/26/08. She hadn't played in months. The account was inactive. Of course, 12/27/08 has a "your sub time will run out in three days". Not sure what's up there. Maybe that's legit and it was for my kid?

Which begs the question of how the fucker got the password -- she does have it tied to her hotmail account, which I suppose means that's compromised. Which makes me glad I forced her to change that password too. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

So assuming I can't get the ban overturned -- which apparently involves faxing ID's and stuff -- I guess I'm stuck rebuying the original box and a TBC key, and just creating her a new account? And hoping this teaches her a lesson about password security?

Seriously, if I had access to the fucking payment logs -- even with the account suspended -- I could tell WHEN the goddamn fucker got the account, and tell what's compromised adn what's not. At this point, I'd settle for that.

I wouldn't be so sure that you won't get the account back. Blizzard does keep VERY good records and I've personally never known them to screw up something like this.  It will probably be a longer investigation, since they have to verify that your CC-based sub expired, then it was reactivated from some other IP and the other IP bought WoTLK, etc then did the thing to get banned.  Then you came back on your original credit card and IP and found it like this.

That's a lot to verify but seems pretty unlikely that you'd have the foresight to play entirely from another area of the country or world while you were planning to do something to get banned, then try to get unbanned by returning back to your original geographic location.

I've had several friends hacked and they all got their stuff back fairly quickly even though the account was pretty clearly used for gold farming. The permaban is another wrinkle but I'd give Blizzard a little faith until proven otherwise.

My account got hacked a while back, and was banned for gold spamming.  After a couple emails back and forth, and them checking the logs for IP addresses, my account was reinstated, and they even gave me a zergling pet in the mail for my trouble.

I don't see them not lifting the ban, based off what you said.  As for the level 79, and all that?  Dunno.  I don't think they could roll the character back, but they might unflag the account as WotLK enabled.

Hope everything works out, though.

That's about the entire reason I'm holding out hope and waiting for a response, rather than just buying a new set of boxes.

Is it odd that the account was taken, upgraded to WoTLK, grinded up to 79 and then perma-banned? It wouldn't surprise me if the ban was for either gold selling or buying, or botting.

If I found her toon still at 63 or whatever, but all her characters naked with empty banks -- I'd get that. Finding it at 79 on the Armory and banned, I don't get. Was someone botting it up to 80 to sell the hacked account? (Botting would get you banned, and wasn't there a nice wave of bot bans late last year, early this year?). Maybe the moron bought gold. Why wasn't the registered email address changed from her hotmail account, though? Why make it possible for me to recover the password at all?

I mean, I told it "I can't remember my password", typed in her hotmail address, got the link, reset the password just fine. The guy we were going to start playing again thinks it was some moron who bought access to an account with a level 60+ already on it (IE: Bought the password and logon name), paid to upgrade to WoTLK so he could create a Death Knight and dick around for a month or three with the WoTLK stuff and probably got banned for buying gold (she had very little for a 63 -- less than 300) before he hit 80.

Cadaverine:
If they can't roll the account back, she'll probably decide to just nuke all her characters. She's really pissed that, effectively, someone stole all the shit she worked for and then fucked it so she can't go back to where she was. Or rather, I'll probably have to do it for her. She gets upset about that sort of thing, and logging in to find her toons naked -- or worse yet, geared and leveled by someone else -- or new toons created -- will just piss her the hell off.

I have NO idea if they can roll the character back. On the one hand, it seems like a giant hassle. On the other hand, the sort of DB's an MMORPG uses and the automatic logging means they probably have tools and backups designed to do just that. Probably more expensive and time-consuming than they're willing to do, but at least back when I played, Blizzard seemed to generally be on the "better than I really expected" end of customer service.

I appreciate the responses.

I'd guess its very likely they were bot-leveling it to 80 to sell it, and got caught botting.

This, or they were farming gold with it and needed Northrend. Does the character have gathering skills?  It's also quite possible the story you stated (some moron bought a character at 60+ then tried to buy gold).

My friend who got hacked had one lower-level character stripped, but his 80 had everything intact and was being used to farm ore, presumably to sell for gold to RMT.  It's really pretty random and I don't think they usually systematically strip all characters and their banks.

Very curious to hear how the story turns out.

They can roll a character back, but im not sure how long that information is kept around. And unless they have changed something you need to have access to the original email address to change it to another one, or directly talk to someone and have it changed. But in that case you need to know the original account information. I believe the full names and phone number stuff is XXXXXX out in your account for this reason.

Its possible they will reinstate your account but the amount of time that has passed and how long they had access to the account makes this seem unlikely. If your account was logged onto by a strange IP for a day or two while they spammed gold messages changes the situation a good deal. It also takes forever to be banned for botting even after they are 100% certain you are botting they will still wait and then ban them all in one chunk so it looks good. The account would also be 80 in a week or two. It doesn't even tell you why it was suspended? Sift through the emails guaranteed there is one detailing what happened.

The "why the account was suspended" emails almost certainly came into the junk folders and were never seen. I've rectified that -- whitelisting blizzard's email addresses -- but until Blizzard contacts me I can't even find out why it was suspended. I'm guessing those folks don't work the weekend, so I probably won't know until sometime Monday or Tuesday. (I'd imagine I'd get at least a 'Your account was banned for X' message).

We DO have access to the original email address -- that was never lost. Like I said, I used it to reset her password when I couldn't log into her account. (In retrospect, I couldn't log into her account to upgrade it to WoTLK because someone had hacked it and changed the password). Judging by the last email I do have from Blizzard to her account -- a notification of a password change and an upcoming "running out of play time" message in late december 2008, it looks like someone hacked her account right after WoTLK came out, and probably used the account less than a month before they got banned.

I can't really hold out hope they keep logs going back a year or more. That's a ton of fucking data. :)

Ya I meant whoever had taken over your account couldn't change the email unless he had all of specifics beforehand (full name,phone etc). Since you have to confirm it through the original email or talk to a human and be asked specific questions that somebody wouldn't know just looking at your account page.

That explains a lot. Thanks.

No, but there's a fair chance they keep an archived account state when shit happens like a change in billing type or password, or they flagged the account's data to be preserved once GM's started investigating.

Not to be an arse, but are you sure it wasn't just your son loaning the account out to a friend, since it wasn't in active use?

One thing I've found with Blizzard CS (in the EU at least) is that it's very hit and miss. One CSR can be helpful with the next can be completely intransigent on the same issue.

If you get nowhere first try then try again.

If it does come to a completely new account then definitely do the Recruit-A-Friend thing, it'll ease a lot of the pain.

This. 

My account also got hacked and rather than go through the hell that is CS, I just had a friend send me a recruit a friend invite.  It makes the trip from 1-60 trivial... like 40-50 in a few hours trivial. 

Plus you get a zhevra mount and have people like me and Lantyssa burn with envy.

You should get your other Sister to join WoW, I'm sure they'll implement the "Super Duper Extra Special refer a friend" offer the week after.  :awesome_for_real:

Man, lots of people have gotten their WoW account "hacked", how do you even manage that without downloading something naughty or responding to the constant stream of phishing emails? Closest experience I ever had was people purchasing an account and then trying to be shading and jyping me through Paypal.

Someone else mentioned your children being responsible, I was kinda wondering the same thing. Kid knows your mom has quit and lends the account to a buddy or something?

I've always wondered the same thing.  I had a friend get hacked 3 times in 6 months, even after changing his password twice.  There I was pretty sure he had some malware tied to his computer.  I had another guy get hacked and he was religious about changing his password.  Me, on the other hand, until I moved over to the Battle.net account system had used the same password for 4 years without a problem. 

Although now that it's tied to a public e-mail for the username (stupid fucking system) I'm changing it regularly.

I was thinking along the same lines, sounds more like your son was using the account.

In my experience the method was almost always social engineering. The number of password grabbers and trojans around is a relatively recent phenomenon. Commonly, the 'hacked' account would have been lent to someone else who was laxer with security than the original owner. I remember one instance where an entire guild in DAoC got hacked simultaneously. Of course what had happened was that they all had each other's passwords so that they could log in absent guildies for ML credit, buffbots etc and one guy had a sheet with all the logins and passwords taped to the PC he used at the local internet café....

Sometimes it was a close friend or relative of the victim taking advantage of weak passwords on a webmail account and finding account details that way. The number of times I had to look into hacks where the account was registered to <main character name>@hotmail.com and the password turned out to be something retarded like the guy's forum name (or vice versa) was amazing.

I'm not saying that's what's happened in Morat's case but, until recently at least, actual hacks using malicious software etc were pretty rare.

Certain goldfarming companies are known to use weaknesses in Flash-based adverts to infect people's PCs with trojans. How do they know which websites to use? Well...WoWhead, Allakhazam and Thottbot are all owned by goldfarmers so it's not exactly difficult to target. Or they can just hack random popular websites instead.

And if you think I'm being paranoid: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6526851.stm
Please also note that a hacked WoW account is worth more nowadays than a stolen credit card.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, mostly because my son doesn't know that password, and judging by his WoW playing habits and the conversations he's had with his friends in my presence, none of his friends play WoW -- they're all Xbox junkies.

He'll be 13 in a month or two, and if this had happened a year or two from now, I'd be a lot more suspicious about him. We've always been religious about passwords and him, mostly because both mine and my wife's PC's contain data we don't want him to see, and she's paranoid about him being online in an MMORPG without parental supervision.

But I don't consider it being an arse to ask that sort of thing -- it's more than a valid question, and teenagers often don't really think about sharing accounts and passwords. Or "borrowing" their parents stuff.

As for how the password got stolen -- I dunno. As simond notes, there's a lot of useful WoW stuff owned by goldfarmers -- and my wife has used Allakhazam and Thhottbot a lot. She also used a number of add-ons, and it's possible she wasn't as careful as she should have been. And, lastly, her password was really weak. I've been warning her about that for years. 6 digits, all characters, variant of a friend's name.....

REALLY crappy password, and I wouldn't put it past her to use it the same name/password combo for a guild website login/password. In fact, I'd say someone managing access to a defunct guild website is a really likely path.

Y'know, you're probably on to something here.  Did she do a "see you around" post when you all quit? If so, some individual may have given it a shot, knowing you weren't going to be coming back.

The Thott trojan is probably how my friends got hacked.  They were all avid thottbot users, even after I warned them the last time Alla/ Thott were 'hacked' in a similar way.. and I know they both use IE.  :oh_i_see:

Firefox (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/) with NoScript (http://noscript.net/).

Oh im completely aware of the sites being infected, but who doesn't use firefox with the plugins to filter that shit. Or something with a similar effect.  Especially with this crowd who are older and PC savvy.

My wife is not PC savvy. I mean, compared to a lot of her coworkers and, say, my dad she's like a computer guru. Compared to, say, the average user on this site? She can barely turn it on. :)

The significant others' of those posters?

(Oh, Morat got it while I was reading/posting.)

Have it. Still had to scour a keylogger off my system a couple nights ago. They didn't get anything, but yeah.

Well, this past week for example there has been a rash of account thefts due to an unpatched flash security hole that adobe has been very slow to fix. The vector was apparently through one of the big strategy websites and to prevent anything like this in the future, I just merged my account into a battle.net account (I'd have to do this eventually anyway) and downloaded the free authenticator program for my iphone and attached it.

I should have probably done it long ago since I've got full guild bank access and someone could do a lot of damage if they got hold of my account.

Just another reason to ban flash ads/sites from the internet!

It should sanitize scripts running through Flash ads unless you've enabled the Flash ads for some reason, or unless the top-level domain itself is hacked.

What's the upside of merging with Battle.net? And what's the authenticator program do?

Authenticator generates a numerical digit in addition to your password. Every so many minutes it changes based upon a math formula, but your authenticator program has a unique id which is registered against your account. It's very secure as technically and a good option for anyone with an iphone. If not get a $6.50 key fob version (http://www.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=1100000622).

It's not hard to get hacked. I bought the authenticator after I had a virus alert on a wow-oriented keylogger. I was looking for some info on something late at night, was tired and frustrated, and accidentally scrolled from a message with a real link to one with an obvously dodgy link and clicked it. Chances are that if AVG hadn't intercepted it and popped up, I would never have noticed.

I have to say that the character being levelled doesn't sound like hackers. OTOH I would guess that asking Blizzard to delete 16 levels from your character is likely to add weight to your telling the truth.

Delete 16 levels and remove an expansion pack, in fact. :)

I'll probably get her the key-fob. It'll annoy her, but currently she doesn't have a leg to stand on. And knowing Blizzard, it probably has a murloc or something on it.

Mine is blue, but I've heard of different colored ones!  :oh_i_see:

Regardless, if you're playing WoW, you should have an authenticator. There's so much assholery going on around this game it's not even remotely amusing. Anything third party is a risk and so much of what you need to keep on top of your character development and raiding depends on such things.

Get the authenticator! It's cheap and easy insurance.

Grats!

The fob isn't a bad idea.  My boss' group uses them for access to many of the super computing centers they use time on.  Just don't lose it.

It's a device which creates a key based on a cryptographic hashing function, probably one of the stronger ones since Blizzard tends to be pretty security conscious.

Yea, it's not so anymore.  There's a lot of money to be made by farmers using hacked accounts for nefarious purposes.  A lot of them use the info you give them when you buy gold to phish your ass after they've completed your transaction.  Then they'll use your account to spell their website name in dead Gnomes in front of the Ironforge bank.  Permabanned?  Oh well!

I've known serveral people who lost accounts.  The brazen offender would be seen not answering guild chat when horrified guildmates looked on as they watch the once proud character they helped build 'ping, ping, ping' disenchant everything down to naked.  This has happened to people I know tens of times that I can personally verify.

I had my Steam account phished once, and I still have no idea how it even happened.  Just tried to log in one day and couldn't, and friends said that I was actually on.  But it wasn't me.

When it's an obvious case, Blizzard has always gotten the account back that I'm aware of.  Sometimes it takes them a while, but they do a good job of this.  So if your account was legitimately hacked, you'll probably get it back.  Valve got my Steam account back for me too.

Phishing is not malicious software,a vast majority of people who get "hacked" give the information out. This is why Blizzard tends to tell you to go fuck yourself unless its extremely obvious its not your fault,or they are feeling charitable. They know a vast majority of the time its you giving the information out, usually doing something naughty. They know that you can easily reclaim the account unless you also have your email compromised (barring the thief isn't extremely sneaky).

He already has possession of the account.What hes asking is to overturn a permanent ban and roll back a character and expansion pack. Which makes the story even stranger,who would know the player was not coming back and invest in an expansion pack. I don't think their investigations are that,so much as look as look up this policy for this circumstance and tell you. Tho when I played it did not seem that their support staff had a very strict set of policies.

You and your opinions are wrong in almost every conceivable way. So much so that it really looks like you're trolling and doing a poor job of it.

Which part the phishing is not malicious software? Or that blizzard will tell you to go fuck yourself if they believe you have shared the account? Because I assure you both are true, as to Blizzard policy dealing with compromised accounts Ive had to deal with it dozens of times. So feel free to elaborate or kindly stfu.

Over the years a few of our members have had their accounts compromised. In all cases Blizzard fixed it and returned all the gear, etc., including what was looted from the guild bank. I'm not sure why one would think they "usually" tell people to go fuck themselves; that is not true in *any* of the cases I'm personally acquainted with.

In fact I would go so far as to say overall Blizzard has had the best customer service of any MMO I've played (not counting ones I never had to deal with CS of course).

Hell, it happened to one dude twice within a few months of each other. They were a little slower to restore him the second time, but restored he was.

Same here, everyone I know who had their account stolen had everything restored in about a week.

Exactly. Blizzard has exemplary customer service in any and all cases I have ever heard of. Furthermore, almost all hacks happen from automatic exploits such as the flash kelogger example that I just described, or from logging in from an unsecure (shared/cafe) computer that has a keylogger installed onto it. I'm not sure how you think when people give the login information out to a friend it winds up in the hands of gold farmers but you're wrong on that one, too.

The policy is if you give out your information you lose the account, period. Why exactly would blizzard have to step in to retrieve a compromised account? The "hacker" cant change the fucking password unless he also has control of the email thats tied to it. Which I am willing to assume is extraordinarily rare.

So basically all your *examples* are simply the restoration of items that were deleted in an extremely obvious way and reported almost instantly. If you don't report something is amiss till after Blizzard has taken action against your account the chances of them overturning the perm ban is almost nil (Ive never known of an instance of it occurring). If you are the one who brings it to their attention it changes the situation entirely. Them telling you to go fuck yourself is not bad CS, its that in these circumstances its the players fault and a breach of the ToS.

Ive sold dozens of accounts and have had to reclaim several,im not making this shit up.

Well, apparently they DID since Morat got the account restored to its previous state.

Maybe they just don't like dealing with someone who has dozens of accounts that seems to keep selling them, cause it looks kind of fishy.

I haven't gotten squat restored. :) Still waiting to hear from them about getting it unbanned. Removing the WoTLK key and trying to get her character(s) restored is secondary.

Still, I'll probably get the key-fobs. I use one at work, and they're pretty simple. My only concern is "How to you handle losing it?", but I'd imagine Blizzard has a pretty straightforward policy on that.

As for getting it unbanned -- everyone I've talked to (except greyeyes) indicates that Blizzard is pretty damn good about unbanning and restoring accounts. They think the fallow time between us discontinuing the account and the compromise will probably make Blizzard more likely to unban it quickly, but makes it less likely she'll get her characters restored -- it's just too far in the past, unless they routinely save account snapshots and archive them. In that case, it's probably easier to restore than a two-day old "melt your shit and sell it" hack.

But I don't think we're that lucky.

All that crap aside, I'm looking forward to playing again once my wife has an actual account to play with! I haven't reupped mine to show my solidarity, and also to get to sleep in the bed.

 :uhrr:

The things that will get an account perm banned are generally for offenses beyond arbitration,regardless of circumstance. The owner is fully responsible for the actions of the account. If this person stole the account and the email somehow then there would be a process the rightful owner could go through to reacquire it. Generally involves faxing them your ID that matches the name of the account. Its overturning the ban that is the problem,restoring the character and such is trivial.

My warrior was permabanned for economic exploitation while hacked.  Shine on you crazy diamond.

Your reply to Numtini sounded like you had. =(

Still, with every instance of it I've seen in the past, I think you'll be fine once they check the IPs and do some digging.

Worst case, we start over with a new account and I send her a zillion gold and me and a friend power-level her. She's been out of the game long enough that that's NOT quite the heartache it would have been.

I hope to hear from Blizzard today or tomorrow. On the bright side, she's cheered up considerably at the notion that the hacker got her account banned BEFORE he could sell the character. :) Someone had to pay for the WoTLK upgrade it got, and he didn't get to sell the character before getting banned amuses her.

While I dont play any more, I used to play a lot, and knew slews of people who got their accounts hacked or stolen. I think every single case that was lagit, the person got their account back.

The only time someone didnt get 100% satisfaction was when the hacker sharded all their gear, and then sold the shards on the AH, and something to do with the items technically still being in the game (in shard form) Blizzard wouldnt give them back the equipment.

I have a feeling you will get your account back, with a free WotLK and a level 79 character.

Just ignore Gryeyes.

You could make a new character as well and Recruit-A-Friend alongside her with your mutual friend feeding you both gear.

You missed the part where he already has the account back (really he never lost it) but it's been banned in the meantime. I don't think anyone is under the impression that Blizzard won't restore a stolen account to the legitimate owner, the question is whether or not they'll overturn the ban.

After the 10th time of explaining the distinction I realized its pointless.

fyi went looking for the mobile authenticator app tonight and it got pulled from the app store due to login issues with the latest update  :ye_gods:

Or: we knew what you were talking about and know that Blizzard un-permaban people all the time, go away, you're a real downer.

Or you dont because the examples given as substantiation have nothing to fucking do with the issue at hand. Congrats you got your character unbanned (bullshit), completely fucking irrelevant.

OHAI THAR (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19820636403&sid=1)

We tend to focus in on why WoW is successful based on gameplay and stuff. But whether it's things like the authenticator, their aggressive anti-RMT stance, or the way they are willing to restore accounts and items (a long way from "I cannot help thee with that") Bliz has a way of making you feel like they're not the enemy.

Surely you don't think your 'facts' can defeat his conjecture!

Man why didn't Morat just call in and get it unbanned!  :uhrr:

protip: You cant directly speak to someone in Account Administration and have them overturn a ban. Accounts suspected to be violating the ToS by account sharing/selling/other forms of perma ban offenses. Or an account that is blatantly a case of unauthorized access (account sharded,spewing advertisements,fresh IP never used before,reports from friends) will be summarily locked down as a precursor to any investigation that later takes place, as a simple means verify the original owner is still in possession of the account. Its an easy filter for people they are fairly sure are violating the ToS before having to commit the resources to an investigation. They know accounts used for RMT 99.9% of the time are not being used by the original owners,wont have access to the the original email, so will be unable to even start the process. And will be unable to provide the proof so wont even bother to try if they can. End result being a RMTing account being permanently unaccessible but its not perm banned. If the legit owner is still connected to the account he will be asked to confirm who he is by faxing and mailing in a bunch of shit (what they request varies),takes from a week to a month,and you regain access. And then the process of investigating the reasons for the ban will take place and restoration takes place.

Then there is the other type of bans, that result after they have determined by whatever criteria they have wrong doing took place. Botting/hacking and account sharing/selling are the only ones I know of that will assure a perm ban. There is no process to dispute the ban,you will receive an email that says "after confirming our previous conclusions you are fucked". And even if you receive one of the later types you can still go through the process of retrieving the account and then be told that the ban will not be lifted. They are two distinct processes,more importantly Morats situation is identical to someone selling an account and then reclaiming it a few months later (This type of fraud was so widespread Ebay/Paypal revised their policies specifically in response to it). Which is ridiculously common.

The issue here is not retrieving an account,getting the gear restored,overturning a ban in a completely incomparable situation. Its will Blizzard believe that Morat was sharing/selling his account OR someone without permission accessed it,paid the subscription,upgraded it with expansions,played it for months,received and ban all the while Morat was unaware.

So once again, you got your account unbanned? Awesome, completely fucking irrelevant to the thread in general and specifically Morats situation,thanks for sharing. I could retort with the 10,000 postings complaining about their account being hacked and perma banned and they are an innocent victim but thats rather needless at this point.

I think you may be making a few broad assumptions on internal policy.  I think the short answer is that they don't really give a shit if you were paying farmers for gold, lending your account to friends, or some other dubious activiity, and got screwed.  As long as you're intending to pay them more money in monthly sub, and you demonstrate that you've learned your lesson, it's been my experience that they'll overturn whatever the fuck - even in cases where when it was described to me, I was sure the guy was perma banned. 

If an IP from a Viet Namese Net Cafe logs in your account, it's not a mystery.  It's just a matter of enough time for the trained monkey to read the logs.  Now if it's your IP that was involved in the evil doings, then okay, you may be fucked.  At least that's my broad assumption of internal policy.

Yeah its not an assumption, its working knowledge generated by being forced to game their system. The only things that will certainly get your account banned is if they believe you were botting/hacking or that the account has been sold or traded.

Saying your account was hacked while the same IP plays and upgrades it for months is highly dubious. Maybe they will unlock it,but it sure as fuck is not comparable to some goldfarmer spamming adverts for 3 hours and getting locked down.

Good lord, calm down. It's only a game. I'll either get it restored or I won't.

What I've taken from this thread is that Blizzard's customer service, on all levels, seems to be a lot more friendly than "Sorry, Dude, not our problem". That's heartening. If I end up having to open up a new account for her, well, I'll do so happily -- not feeling that I got screwed by lazy customer service.

If nothing else, if they're as polite and helpful -- even if they ultimately can't unban her account -- as people have said, I'm not going to be pissy and not play their game. After all -- she DID use a crappy password, practice poor security, and fail to notice what had to have been a number of emails late last year.

Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons Blizzard has so many subs. By all accounts -- and I admit I've only dealt with in-game GM's -- they're professional, courteous, and help out when it's possible. Which, sadly, is not the standard experience in MMORPG customer service.

I'll let you guys know when something is sorted out between account admin and us -- and I appreciate the helpful responses. I imagine in a week or two, if nothing else, I'll be back here asking what the hell a "glyph" is, and what the hell is up with all the achievements.

I did hear they have a pet/mount bag thingy now. That makes me happy.

It's actually a tab on your character panel.  But yeah, saves on bank/ bag space and is pure awesome because you now carry all your pets/mounts with you at all times.

The account is unbanned. No actual information yet -- we don't have a sub yet and she's not home -- but I had a password reset email from Blizzard today, and we can access her account.

BTW -- it was hacked 11/29/08 and renewed 12/30/08. It was banned sometime in the month from 12/30/08 to 1/30/09, according to the payment history.

Her characters are still fucked --- looks like they melted down and deleted all her Alliance side characters, although her Horde character seems to have been left alone. Oh, and created a fucking spamming toon named "Lkjhi".

I got that by going through the character transfer bit to see who was left. Her main at 79, one Horde-side at 18. They even waived 60 bucks in fees for...something. Dunno what. I will let you know if any character changes changes can be made.

The emails seem to indicate to contact an in-game GM to handle fixing her toons.

Deploy smug mode!

Shit, deploy "happy husband whose wife will be thrilled fucking spitless" mode. I'm still getting emails from them, and I'm *hoping* they saved an account state when she quit in April 08, or can roll her character back to the 10/08 state. If they can't, I suspect my wife will be deleting down the hacked 79, after sending all it's stuff to a bank alt, then recreating her 'lock from scratch.

I eagerly await Gryeyes coming back to tell us that Morat getting his wife's account unbanned is irrelevant to the thread.

Final Tally:

Account unbanned.
Main toon left at 79, WoTLK upgrade left in place.
18 gold given to a level 18 Horde character (the only character left other than the main) to help in "regearing".
Total time elapsed: 4 days.

They stated that simply too much time had passed to roll the character back, and they were unable to find any deleted characters. They're leaving it WoTLK enabled and said not to worry about it -- effectively, they're viewing it as the hacker's way of saying "Sorry for fucking your account", although they phrased it much more nicely. As far as they're concerned, since they cannot restore it to it's original state, SOMEONE bought WoTLK and associated it with her account, so it's HER key.

We're waiting for one more reply (Basically we asked "Okay, is that everything? Can we play now, 'cause you've been nice and we want to make sure your're all done before we go futzing with it) and my wife's general view is: "i've got a level 79, who can farm materials and gold, and frankly I can make a Death Knight or something if I don't feel like going through the whole thing again, and I probably will start a new character to get a feel for the changes".  Of course, for all we know, her main is stark naked -- or poorly geared with 4000 gold in the bank. Somehow I doubt Ye Old Farmer did a lot of quests. Or instances. Or did anything but move from farming spot to farming spot. So I suspect she has plenty of content to wander through, or she can do it with my 67.

Overall -- damn good customer service. I'll start spazzing about the changes soon, especially since I now have a WoTLK key...the one I bought for the wife that she doesn't need.

I kinda figured something like that would be the case. Blizzard really does have the best CS in the industry by far.

Oh, oh, oh.  My turn!

Gryeyes:  I. Told. You. So.

Whee!  Glad to hear, Morat.  One other little bonus is that if she gets her to 80, she can buy some tome for future characters to get cold weather flying in Northrend.

At this point, she's just hoping the guy didn't fuck with her tradeskills. She had herbalist/alchemy and hopes he didn't drop the alchemy. The WoW GM suggested she wander through the other realms and delete all the level 1 spammers the guy made. :)

And just for gryeyes, by back I mean accessible and unbanned. Not back from the person who hacked it.

Grats, this time for real.  I'm noticing a distinct lack of gryeyes around here.

I guess we should listen to people who use the system, rather than game it. (/dogpile)

Good to hear!  If you get a chance, I'm really interested to see how the gold sellers left your main characters.  Armor, money all that.  No real reason, just wondering what they do when they hack stuff.  

No problem. All I know so far -- via the GM -- is that they deleted everything but the main toon, a level 18 horde-side toon (don't know about gear) and created a shit-ton of level 1 warriors on multiple servers named things like "Lhtjz".

I'll let you know what he did gear and skills wise. Might not be until the weekend. Between her Master's degree, work, and coaching Special Olympics, she's a bit busy during the week. So far this has been more "stress" than "stress relief". :)

 :drill: :awesome_for_real: :drillf:

Gotta say that's great to hear. A co-workers account was hacked via usb trojan, and they effectively rolled her character back to the time before the hack took place. Unluckly for her this all happen while traveling ie: hacked/spammed/traded gold/sharded everything and xfered level 80 raiding character.

I'm really amazed by your experience of how much of an effort they attempted, and I'm really shocked from an IT perspective of how much data they must preserve.

Nice one Morat, good to hear.

ALL OF F13 CRIES OUT FOR THE TEARS OF GRYEYES! COME FORTH AND RECEIVE THY COMEUPPANCE!

Hey! congratulations on this!

 :awesome_for_real:

Good to hear you got your account back.

The GM said that they probably could have gotten the deleted characters back if they'd been higher level, but low-level toons (she didn't define "low-level" but knowing my wife they were probably a bunch between 10 and 20) weren't archived long after deletion, but high-levels were.

As for the gear, it was simply too long ago. I got the impression that had it been 3 months, everything could have been restored, but almost a year? Not a chance.

I wanted to log into my hunter and cry my sweet tears of joy at having a pet/mount tab and fun new talents and shiny pet changes to play with (not to mention running down the Hunter trainer and Engineering trainers to pick up any new schematics and talents), but instead I played a fun game of "Why is the patcher not patching?" followed by "Fucking Kapersky" followed by "I'm letting this patch and going to sleep".

Question for any hunters: What the hell is an "exotic pet"? I was beastmaster back when beastmaster sucked, so I'm pretty sure I'll continue that -- but is that top-level talent (I think it's "Can tame exotic pets and get more pet talent points") worth it?

Congrats Morat! FUCK YOU THE REST OF YOU!  :facepalm:

Exotic pet: If you go at least to the bottom of the BM tree (51 pooints) you can control pets with a special ability.  Check out PETTOPIA (http://www.wow-petopia.com/).  Under Tenacity, Cunning, and Ferocity links you'll find at least one or two exotics of each type.  They will have a ! after the name of the creature type. 

Hope that helps.

Yeah, pets are 100% different from when you last played if you don't know what the exotics are.   You're going to need to relearn your class.  :grin:

They're mainly things like Bugs, Dinosaurs, Corehounds and the other "ooh, wouldn't it be cool if..." pets.   Except Zhevra and Giraffes.  I still want a Combat Giraffe.

DPS pet:  Cat or Wolf.  I think wolf is more of a group/raid dps pet, as it has a buff that applies to group/raid.
Tank pet:  Gorilla or Bear.  Gorilla can occasionally lock out a caster.  Bear has Swipe, which in addition to Thunderstomp, makes them quite effective at holding aggro on more than one mob.
PvP pet:  I'm not as clear on this... crab or something with a HEY YOU STOP MOVING ability.
Exotic pets:  Suck nearly uniformly.

My current stable is a cat and a wolf. Cat is the snow leopard from the Dwarf starting area -- which led me to grind Night Elf faction so I can ride an almost matching white cat -- it makes my stoic Dwarf happy, damn you -- and the wolf is the one from UBRS? LBRS? You know, that one. The one you tame while everyone else is killing Mama.

I should probably go find something suitably tanky, and I suppose something suitably PvP-y, but I've always found the cat was good enough for PvP (of course, that was back when it was specced to be a big Fuck You to mages, thanks to resists) and the wolf held aggro just find for soloing.

For tenacity, I recommed the following:

Bear for multiple pull aggro management.  Swipe makes holding pet aggro trivial.  This is a great leveling pet.  It's slower than a cat, but much safer in high aggro areas.

Turtle for bosses.  My turtle allows taking of heroics in 3-5 man quest content trivial. 

A cat will do you just fine if you're the slightest bit careful of how you pull.  It'll handle more than one add quite easily, particularly if you know how to drop traps.  I like the gorilla for the spell interrupt/lockout, and the bear is fairly decent for lazily sending into a pack of mobs and hitting pet mend.  I've had a bear tank 5-6 mobs at once while I pew pew'd away.  Note:  I was using some pvp gear, which means the pet had some resil, and some extra stamina.

I've not used a turtle, but I understand they're outstanding for tanking old world raid bosses and the like.

I'll have to look into turtle and bears --- although I suppose I should consider at least one flyer.

I think it'll be awhile before I'm doing anything cutting edge. I'm mired mid-way through TBC and having to relearn my class, my wife is starting over -- either at 1 or 55 -- and the guy we're playing with is a DK around level 60. I sincerly doubt the guild I was in is still active, so it's PUGs, solos, and whatever two or three people can do for me for quite some time.

And PvP, later. I always enjoyed battlegrounds.

Without one of you as a healer you'll be locked out of dungeons but other than that even 2 people is often more than adequate for everything including most "5-Man" quests with a pet class or DK in the group.

For pvp I have a couple of personal favs:

I like the gorrilla for the stun.  It can be great against paladins when timed well against their big self heal (between that and interrupt).  

I like my spider for kiting.  It has a decent length root that seems to be up often enough to maintain distance.  

I  tend to choose my pets for utility rather than dps.  

If you stay BM spec the wyyvern has a nice special for a flier.  

The devilsaur is the best pve dps pet in the game, ahead of wolves. The 4 extra pet talent points are really quite nice.

That said I think both survival and marksmanship are ahead in theoretical top raid DPS terms but I doubt you care about that for now (if ever), and BM blows them away for soloability. Survival has better burst for PVP, if that is important to you.

Question: Doesn't this burst depend on proximity to target?  I've found that my burst dps as a MM spec is pretty damn good from max range, but was better as Survival only when I was in close and could get added utility from traps.  In BG's being on the fringe of a battle helped me drop a lot more targets as MM spec.  Mayeb it's just a playstyle thing, but I found that survival dps was really lower when I played my hunter more like I did my mage (i.e. picking off targets from max range or kiting).

Not really distance related, although being close to get traps too doesn't hurt. Survival burst primarily comes from piling explosive shots into people from lock and load procs. With black arrow ticking away on top of that and aimed shot giving the mortal strike -heal effect (its low enough in marks that any survival hunter can pick it up), they can create a solid amount of pressure. That said I don't really know marks or have a max level hunter myself, I'm just giving the conventional wisdom.

That helps a lot.  I think I may respec survival and play a few rounds of WG to see what I think of it with my current playstyle.  I was survival spec for a few days in the past, but found myself getting in too close to try to maximize my output.  Maybe that was an unnecessary decision on my part. 

What you might not really like about it is you can't really do it on demand. You kind of have to just get your DoTs/aimed shot debuff up on someone and kite around and wait for the lock and load proc, I think. Frost trap is good for that, I suppose since it can trigger the procs, and it helps you kite.

In BG's and WG I don't have to kite.  There are so many people around that I either get zerged or the zerg kills my target.  Perhaps Survival is a preferred arena spec and I can completely see why.  In the BG's, I'm not sure the benefits are as great.  I think MM provides a higher sustained dps at the expense of survival's greater utility and spike damage.  Then again, I don't claim to be a mechanics expert. 

Thinking about it, its probably fairly easy to come by lock and load procs in a target rich environment like WG, since you can get bunches of people with frost trap or whatever.

I like standing back, using my pet to keep mobs off me, and shooting them. Frequent use of intimidate helps. For PvP, I like....standing back, sending in my pet when necessary. I normally keep it close to me, and stealthed if it's a cat, to deal with rogues or other people that would like to examine my kidneys from melee range.

Mostly I just plunk away at targets of oppurtunity, although it's been so long since I PvP'ed that I sincerly doubt anything I used to know works anymore. I'm still weepy from when they stopped letting me drop Viper stings on every mana-user I could see.

I'm an engineer, and my entire PvP philosophy boils down to one thing: If I can't get them to kill me because I'm good, I'll get them to kill me because I'm annoying. Hunter's Mark rogues, lay traps, play "interrupt the spell caster", and make good use of any engineering trinkets or toys that can annoy, harass, irritate, or otherwise cause another player to stop playing smart PvP and kill the crappy-ass hunter with low skills.

I honestly think that's why my mage was frost specced. It's not about killing. It's about annoying the shit out of you, so that you focus on me instead of the people who are actually killing you.

I like Beastmastery. To me, the whole point of a hunter is to have a pet, and to kill you from far away. And to fake death if you catch on. Engineering I just kept because, dammit, it sucks but I like the toys. My world enlarger, for instance. Net guns. The death ray. God, I had so much fun with that death ray back in my 40s.....

Your philosophy is so much better than mine.  I chose a hunter because it was a class that would allow me to experience the most content as a solo player.  I'd much rather play a healer, but they shine best in a group and I'm generally antisocial unless among friends.  DAoC ruined me as I always knew the people I was grouped with.  The predictability was very satisfying. 

Well good news! Engineering is really pretty good these days.

So I heard. I'm excited by the notion of "Tinkering" (that's the engineering sorta-like enchanting yourself, takes the enchant slot? I'm dying to work out what you can do with that). What's going to take the most time, I think, is sorting through my old schematics, grabbing the new ones I can learn, and trying to sort through what I can do now, and what I can't, and where things should go.

I've got bags full of stuff I don't use, but kept -- that dragonling, the death rays and net guns, the parachute cloak -- lots of fun toys. I keep hearing that the bag problems for hunters aren't as bad, so that'll help, and that a lot of the trinkets no longer have to be held to be used (like teleporters).

I love engineering.  Between Jeeves, wormhole, and the enchant to make my cloak have featherfall I'm very satisfied with the changes.  Having an AH in Dalaran is also a huge plus. 

Oh.. there's one we haven't mentioned!  Your quiver no longer gives you a haste bonus, it's been built into the hunter class itself.  Eventually they plan on doing away with ammo altogether, but some sort of back end problem prevented it.  As a partial solution they've made ammo stack to some ridiculous amount like 1,000 per stack so you can use a real bag instead of a quiver.

Or do what I did.  I have an 18 slot ammo bag and fill it with mammoth cutters.  It allows me to essentially forget about ammo for weeks at a time. 

Oh thank heavens. Fucking ammo bags. Fucking slots and slots worth of fucking food for my pet. Fucking LOYALTY GRINDS. Fucking "I want this pet skin, but it's 25 levels below me". Thank god they finally fixed that stuff.

They're still, hopefully, working on the ammo problem, right?

Since they said it's a back-end problem I wouldn't count on anything being 'fixed' until Cataclysm or we get our customized dancing emotes that everyone forgot about after WOTLK actually released.  :grin:

You shouldn't need the stacks of pet food either beyond the stat enhancing food.  For pve I just spec into the tree that gives bonus happiness (along with bonus hate) to pets with damage/kills.  Even with frequent dismisses, my bear is always happy and I never feed it beyond str food.  

I recently tamed a bear to experiment with, after some people had mentioned bears as an alternative to gorillas.  Forgot to feed it.  I did set the "loyalty when growling" or whatever talent, and went off on my merry way.

About half an hour later, I went "oh shit, my pet's loyalty!"  I glanced up to see where it was, and it went from happy to SUPARHAPPY.

So yeah.  Loyalty isn't a problem, unless you've min/maxed your pet's talents, and avoided the loyalty ones.

There's food that buffs my pets? There's talent points (is that pet or BM?) that makes it get more loyal when you use it? It's like I've died and gone to hunter heaven.

Although I think I actually remember something about the pet food buffs.

I think the food is called mammoth bites and you need to do a few cooking dailies in dalaran before you get the spices & points to buy and make the recipe.  The weird thing is that you have to eat it for it to give buffs to the pet.  I must have gone through a stack of it feeding it to my pet before figuring this out.  Yes... I'm an idiot.

You also should have a tab for pet abilities next to your talent trees.  just look at it next time you have a pet up.  Pets get points a lot slower than you do for talents, so use them wisely.  Also, being 51 in BM will grant you more ability points for your pet which is a HUGE plus.  

Food buffs for hunter/warlock pets was introduced in TBC.  There was the stamina food from Sporelock rep and a Strength food you could randomly get from the daily cooking quest reward pouch (Kibbler's Bits?).

WoTLK has continued this and there are upgraded versions of both recipes, I'm fairly certain they are bought from the cooking recipe vendor in Dalaran via daily cooking quest tokens.

Also, all pets have their own talent tree now (with talents that vary by pet type; Cunning, Tenacity, Ferocity).  This is the system that was introduced to replace the old system of training basic pet skills from a pet trainer every few levels and then constantly getting new pets just to *learn* their special abilities and discard them.

It was a real adventure as horde getting that level 24 boar.   :awesome_for_real:  You know.  The only one that had Gore 4.  Then there was a huge gap, because there wasn't a single tamable mob in the game with Gore 5 or 6.  Good times.

Oh, some of us remember well.  :mob:

I logged on and my confusion was total. There's glyphs. I put some in. They probably suck, people will probably laugh if they could see, but they seemed "Beastmastery". I went looking for those enchants on vellum, but can't find them on the AH. My gear and new stats are ludicrous -- I can't tell if they're good or bad. :)

I trained up my cat -- wolf is next -- moved my pets and mounts to their new slots. Bought a bag to replace my ammo bag. Stacked my ammo. Tried to figure out if I had any new skills I could learn, or somehow missed. Got my UI...sorta useable. Looked at my quests and was confused. :) Earned some sort of achievement for putting together my Crumpled-Horned Snorcack pet. (They called it something else. It was a rabbit with horns that I got at brewfest).

Tried to decide if I could ditch any of my engineering tools. Laughed at that a bit. :) Sorted out my bank some.

Now, to go 'round the engineer trainers to make sure they haven't moved some schematics there. Then off to, um, Burning-Crusade-Land to do quests.

Need more ammo, can't remember where I was buying Ironbite Bullets. (I'm level 67 at the moment). Figure I'll go hang out in BC-land and grind some faction or something as I figure out if this spec and pet thing works out.

Also, my guild is gone so I need to form a guild. Do you still need 10 signatures? Do you alts count? :)

You can head to Northrend at 68. I would try and grab a few quests in Outlands to get you to 68, then just dump all your quests and head to Northrend. Even starting Northrend at 68 you will still have plenty of quests left there after you hit 80. That and Northrend is a MUCH more fun leveling time.

Quest greens in early Northrend are also approximately on par with Karazhan purples, so... yeah.

If you actually want some advice you could link your armory page.  Other people probably know which glyph is guaranteed to to increase your 10% of the DPS 10% of the time by 20%. :why_so_serious:  Or you might actually get pointed to something helpful, like the Glyph of Life Tap is for warlocks.

EDIT: MMO Champion and Wowhead both have nice combined glyph/talent calculators.

You will eventually  be able to build a gnomish army knife that replaces EVERYTHING. Pick, Flint & Steel, Engineering tools, Blacksmith Hammer... everything.  It is sheer awesome and if I didn't know the joy of engineering my own damn tools I'd tell you to go buy one off the AH right now.

Sadly it doesn't count as jewelcrafting tools.  :cry:

That seems like an odd oversight.  Probably so enchanters didn't bitch they were the only prof not serviced by it.

I'd kind of like to experience the content of TBC a bit. :) Learned a few patterns, found out that "Show only things I have materials for" is AWESOME. Picked up a flying machine schematic.

I'll like my armory profile later, and you can all laught at my "I was sorta grinding solo through TBC with bits and pieces of MC gear, crap what I found on the ground, and one thing from that dungeon I did once".

That doesn't make sense, they had an ammoless bow in the previous expansion.

They're not going ammoless like that - the indication at BlizzCon was that ammo would still be an item, much like druid idols or whatever, that added a certain effect to hunter shots on top of the normal dps bonus of ammo or whatever. There wasn't much in the way of detail though.

My armory profile is here (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Argent+Dawn&cn=Kalan), I am currently using the cat to level. The talents aren't exactly what I wanted, unfortunately I didn't notice the button marked "Explore talents" (or whatever it is that lets you assign them, play with them, and muck with them before committing them) so I didn't end up with the points exactly how I wanted.

I'm a bit confused by the pet talents. My pets can have multiple talents (my Wolf still has Furious Howl, for instance) but it appears only four can be on the pet bar? I take it whatever isn't on the pet bar doesn't auto-trigger? (So like I could put claw, dash, Heart of the Phoenix and Lick My Wounds on the bar, and only those four would ever trigger?).

You're going to climax once I tell you that the search box goes through materials as well, right?

No, you can turn autocast on and off in the spellbook. What I do is put the stuff I NEVER turn off in there, like claw or bite or whatever, and just have the ones I might want to turn off or trigger manually on the bar.

Oh good. Time to change the pet bar. I take it things like Heart of a Phoenix auto-cast too?

I had fun. Ran around and mined fel iron and adamantine in Zangermarsh. It was...me and a Death Knight, as best I could tell. Collected some motes. Probably not worth crap, but I was there. I need to rebind the controls. I keep strafing when I want to turn.

My wife logged into her main, said "Oh my god, what's she wearing? That's fucking ugly. Wait, what? That fucker changed her face! How the hell did he change her face!" and then created a Dranaei mage because, quote, "I hearthstoned my Warlock and ended up someplace I'd never been and said fuck this. I'll go back to it when I'm willing to figure out how to get her to Ironforge".

There is now a barber in every city. Also, he moonlights as a plastic surgeon.

Glad you had fun. Motes aren't overly valuable but you can get some cash for them on the AH since engineers need them to plevel.

Get her to Ironforge and fix her hair/face. She should be enjoying the free levels the hacker gave her, not rerolling.  :grin:

They aren't worth what they used to be, but they still sell well to people skilling up alts.  You may be pleasantly surprised.

Oh, she will -- it's just it took her most of the time after work to patch WoW up, and she didn't feel like messing with it. Plus, we have a friend that's new to the server (he built a DK there, but he's wanting to run up through the levels). So she has a space goat mage, he has a space goat warrior, and I've got a level 23 space goat Shaman sitting around that I'll use when they catch up.

Of course, I have to remember what the hell his talents were and respec him. That's the biggest damn hassle, really, is that I haven't played in so long and have all these talent points and I have to try to remember if there were specific talents I chose for a specific reason. With my mage, it's easy. She was almost pure ice-spec. But I can't remember if I had the Shaman enhancement or what.....

I'll let her know the barbershop can fix that stuff, though.

As for motes -- I'm keeping them and elements in the bank, since I AM an engineer in need of leveling. :) I figure once I get to the top I can sell off things. I probably do need to go through and sell off a bunch of old elements of air and whatnot.

I think I found fire to be the most useful, but you may need them all until you get over 400. 

Keep in mind that you will get a lot of new recipes when you get to Northrend.  Don't bother with a lot of the high end, exotic stuff until you see what recipes you have available to you in the new expansion. 

I'm still at the point where adamintiam frames give me skill ups -- I think I'm like 305 or 310. I want to build the flying machine, and isn't there a motorcycle recipe somewhere?

I JUST leveled engineering past where you are. Don't build too many adamantium frames. This should help...

http://www.wowhead.com/?spells=11.202#200+7+1

Once you get to 335 you can buy the smoke flare in shattrath city and build those until 350. I built frames until 330, then grenades until 335.  flying machine is 300 skill, I had built it way before I was on adamantite frames.

Motorcycle is thousands and thousands of gold and is an end-game vanity item.

The barber can change your hair style and color but I thought to change your actual face you had to play cash money for a 're-customization'.

Motorcycle requires 450 engineering and exhalted faction with a particular vendor to buy the recipe. 

The parts are crazy expensive (~12,500g from a vendor, 12 titansteel bars which can be made once every 20 h from titanium and eternals, etc.). 

The price for one on the AH is about 16k gold and that's not a bad deal.   

Everyone needs a goal in life. And if mine is to have an imaginary motorcycle for my imaginary hunter, who's to say otherwise? :)

I am considering a DK -- what are the restrictions on those? (One per server? Just need a level 60+ somewhere? What?). What's a good race for it? I was thinking Gnomish, actually, since I've never really had much to do with the Horde side and I don't have a Gnome. :) I was also considering ditching my undead warlock for a blood-elf warlock, since it's only level 12 or so and I hear the blood-elf starting zone is nice.

The BElf starting zone is pretty cool. You could also make an undead warlock, run it to Undercity and take the portal thingy, and just play a undead warlock through the blood elf zones, too.

I'm not sure if there even are any restrictions on making DKs anymore. Even if you never play it again their starting zone thing is definitely worth playing through once.

1 DK per server per account is the only one I know of that's still in place.

Well then, it appears my Gnomish Death Knight will ride! Sadly, the name Twinkerbelle is taken on my server.

Speaking of skilling-up, you don't have to max out your prof to get to Grand Master (the Northrend level) and up your cap to 450.  I believe it's only 350, so you don't spend the hell of grinding up Hardened Adamantite and Felsteel Bits that was BC-era tradeskills.   You'll flip right over to Cobalt and Saronite with the new recipes at 350.

I'm bringing this thread back from the dead a bit. I just had this exact thing happen a few days ago. I hadn't bothered checking my email that day and at around 4 PM, I checked it and I had a password reset and 10 day free trial of WotLK email sitting in my inbox. Uh oh.

I immediately go reset the password, change my login email on my Battle.net account, and go check and see if any damage had been done in the 7 hours they had access to the account. In that 7 hours, they maxed my mining on my hunter and had a good two pages full of thorium for sale on the AH. I also had a few hundred gold I didn't have before. At this point, I'm thinking I came out ahead in this.

That's before I got an email later that night saying my account was banned for abusing the economy. Fuck me. I'm currently waiting for Blizzard to respond to my appeal.

I'm interested to know what the hell banned for "abusing the economy" means, so if they give you details on that at some point, do let us know.  And good luck getting your account reactivated, preferably with the extra money the account thief so kindly gifted you with.

Have you seen the number of underground miners these days?  I imagine the thorium has something to do with the economy manipulation. 

Long before I quit playing WoW I gave up mining.  Every time I'd come upon a titanium node in Shalozar, a level 50something would pop out from under the ground while I was attempting to mine the node.  It happened less in icecrown, but I think that's an issue of mobs and aggro. 

There are still many easily exploitable elements in WoW. 

Ok, I plead idiocy in the case of underground miners, what is it?  My defense is that the only character I mine with is my death knight, and he is at 60 until I feel motivated to level him.

There's ways to get underneath the terrain and mine nodes from there so you don't have to deal with mobs. 

'abusing the economy' to me meant there was likely trade chat spam involved. 

They explain it pretty well in their email.

Hopefully you use a different password for the attached e-mail, but you may want to change it, too, as well as doing a system scan for viruses and trojans.

To those in the switch-over thread, I present Exhibit A, within a week of the forced switch announcement.  Have a nice day.

I've been playing MMO games, like a lot of people here, for as long as the genre has existed. I have never been hacked. I have to ask, what the hell are you people doing? Especially the ones who get hacked repeatedly. Even if no one in this thread has, we've seen it happen.

I got hacked in EQ once.  But really, I was young, had poor security on the account, downloaded a lot of crap in college,  and had been involved in a lot of ebaying.   It was bound to happen. 

Still, account was restored fully. Just took a little while.

I'm morbidly curious how this even happens.  Was your WoW password unique to WoW and reasonably non-guessable/brute-forceable?  People always mumble about keyloggers and stuff, but based on real-world password behavior, I have to wonder if it's reused terrible passwords that are the culprit. At least I _hope_ that's the culprit.  :ye_gods:

That's not the culprit in my case. I literally use a combination of random letters and numbers. The only thing I can figure is that they figured out my login email, knew my name, and then answered my secret question. My secret question was what high school I attended. At the time I chose it, I didn't think anything of it. Now, I realize that's easily accessible information and if they just happened to know my name and my email, they could easily reset my WoW password.

Or maybe they did brute force it. I don't install anything from anyone I don't know/trust. I use Chrome/Firefox so I'm pretty safe just browsing the web. I did a scan for any malware/viruses/trojans the moment this happened even though I knew I didn't have anything. I didn't.

The secret question is the only thing I can figure out.

Could be a compromised addon.  What do you normally have installed?

I hadn't played in months and didn't even have it installed on this computer anymore. I installed it again just to see if he stripped all my characters. So, needless to say, no addons.

Just got an email from Blizzard about my account. The good part:


The rest of the email is them outlining the fact that restoring characters that this person may have deleted or items that they might have gotten rid of will take more time. None of that really applies to me that I can tell. So, I now have my account back. Nice.

Stupid secret questions.  I hate them so.  What's the point of a password with those damn things?

It was likely compromised while you were still playing and they simply filed it under "rape at a later date".

While that's possible, the only addons I used were a couple of CTMod ones, Gatherer, and Auctioneer. If one of those is the culprit, a lot of people are in trouble.

I was researching specs late at night and was pretty tired and clicked on the wrong link on a message board and got hit with a keylogger. Fortunately AVG nabbed it, but it went to what otherwise looked like a legitimate page and I never would have known.

That's when I decided to get an authenticator.

Ozzu, have you switched your account over to Battle.Net yet?  Did you use a new email address or an old one if so?  Was your account active (your money) when it got hacked?

Yes. I switched my account over right when they first started suggesting you do it. It was a while ago. I used an old email address that I've had for a long time and the account was not active when it was hacked.

I changed the email address after this incident to an email I haven't ever really used for anything.

Did you do this on the same computer?

Because if it was a keylogger, they could know your new email address just as easily as the old.  I wouldn't put too much faith in individual virus scanners either, pattern-based searches can be evaded by anyone willing to put in the time to obfuscate the code in their malware.  Assuming you haven't already, I'd get a bootable scanner from a different company than the one you just used.

I'll give it another scan once I get home from work later tonight. It would just seem really strange considering I didn't even have WoW installed and this was a fresh install of Windows 7. What are the chances I would have picked up a keylogger when I basically never download anything from untrusted sources? I don't even use Internet Explorer anymore because of its security issues.

If you reformatted your computer and installed Win7, and if nothing related to WoW was ever installed or used (websites included) after you installed Win7 it's almost certainly clean, barring anything really exotic.  If it was an install in place over your previous OS something might have survived, though it's entirely dependent on the malware and what the install process overwrites or deletes.

Mods that actually run in-game should be safe, because they will be Lua or XML and won't be stand-alone executables and thus should not be able to escape the game's scripting environment, barring a buffer overflow (they probably exist, I doubt they are mapped out well enough to be exploitable).  External utilities like download managers are not safe, but they are relatively trustworthy depending on the source.

Don't trust any website, ever.  Flash/Java etc. should be safe, but in practise are not because large numbers of people have an annoying tendency to scout out ways to run arbitrary code.  Buffer overflows, again, are a likely culprit.  However, unlike a scripting language purpose-modified for a game, these plugins are very common and frequently used as attack vectors.  Thus a specially crafted .swf ad placed on Curse.com could be used to run the attackers code on your computer - until it's taken down.  Which is why NoScript is the shit.