I know that it is not possible to travel backwards or even forwards in time. We are not going to have a metaphysical conversation here. What I feel would be good customer service and would heal relationships between NCSoft and its customers is by taking care of the victims of the latest hacking spree going on in Aion Online.
Backstory.
In recent posts I gave a good friends story of how her account was hacked and how badly she was treated by customer service. The first thing I asked her was, “Did you get your gear back?” and the second after she told me no I asked, “How long will it take you to earn it back?” Her answer was “Weeks.”
As an MMORPG gamer and veteran I know how long it takes to get endgame gear in the first place. Now to have to regrind all that back is annoying to say the least and time consuming. She told me that a few of the dungeons are at least 3, 6 to 9 hours to complete! There are no insurance policies for virtual goods.
You are not alone.
Is what I said to comfort her. I simply googled ‘aion accounts hacked’ and got a slew of forum complaints from other victims of their Aion accounts hacked. Here are the links if you want to read some of the other horror stories I found.
Account hacked! What will NCSOFT do?
My wifes account was hacked today.
Account hacked second day in a row.
NCSecurity: Phantom Hacker Steals Aion Account
Can you see a trend here? It seems that the same cause and effect is happening while the company does nothing to help the customer other than restore their accounts. And in some cases even slow to do that.
A worst case scenario.
Imagine you come home to your house/apartment to find your front lock is changed and your key does not work. After finally breaking the door down you walk it to a ransacked apartment. Your electronics are gone, so are your jewelry and even your old microwave.
It has to be one of the worst feelings in the world to find out you are robbed. You may be lucky to have insurance on your stuff; you call the police, fill out a report and hope for the best. It still doesn’t remove that gross feeling of being invaded and you cannot even begin to calculate how much you lost monetarily.
The bottom line is you could have protected yourself as best as possible, if someone is determined to rob you, they will. And it’s not your fault you were robbed. The best you could do cut your losses and move forward. But what did you really lose?
You lost your time. When it comes down to money, you have to look at the time it took to make the money to buy that DVD player and Xbox you lost. The jewelry might even be heirlooms that are irreplaceable. It will still take a long time to build it all back. I think your first investment would be of course new ways to secure your home so it never happens again. At that point any help is a relief.
My proposal.
I’m willing to fight for you. My dedication to the honest paying game player like myself, is why I write mMO MONEY.
In my opinion I feel NCSoft should give at least 2-3 free months of gametime subscription to anyone who had their account compromised. As well as Aion customers they can also be held accountable for customers of Lineage and Lineage II,City of Heroes/Villians and Guild Wars as well. If their security is bad for Aion, it has to be for their other games too.
I think it’s also very important to improve their security too. They removed their gameguard before going live and maybe it wasn’t a good idea to do so. I also know that it created many technical issues, but I would rather have that than lose weeks or months worth of my efforts because of faulty security.
Here’s my strategy.
There is a website that offers a free online petition service: http://www.petitiononline.com if you, the MMO community would be kind to collaborate with me for this cause, or are a victim of NCSofts’ faulty security and would like some retribution. Then give me some feedback and your support, please. In the meantime I am going to write a thesis on WHY they should be giving their customers the time to replace some of the equipment they were robbed of from these terrible hackers. I think they least they could do are to give 2-3 free months of subscriptions to their customers. Don’t you agree?
I’ll post it and I will start a largescale petition to rally the community to stand up for themselves against NCSofts weak response to this problem. What do you think? Any and all feedback is welcome. This is not the first time an online game account was hacked so this is going to send a message to NCSoft but hopefully change the way that all MMO distributors will approach their games security and most important how they treat you, loyal customer.
It’s you loyal customer, who pays his $14.99 a month not matter what, and who is the most important person at the end of the day. Don’t you think it’s time these game companies started treating you like one?
I am starting a forum post here for your feedback. Thanks in advance =)
Play safe,
Frank Inktomi
I largely agree with you, but I do wonder about a few things (Not having played the game myself):
1) Does NCSoft have a minimum complexity requirement for their passwords?
If not, shame on them, but if a player has a simple password like Password123 then I have very little sympathy for them.
On the other hand, EA can’t handle special characters (i.e. !”£$%^&*) in their passwords, so my Warhammer on-line password has to be uncomfortably simple.
This is a big part of my reason for only playing the free never ending trial.
2) how quickly can hackers try a new password?
With WoW a hacker can only try every few seconds, making brute force pretty much unusable. Both good and annoying at the same time. Plus they have authenticators (Yay, go Blizz).
3) Are people protecting themselves?
If the players don’t use Anti-Virus/Anti-Spy ware software, then it’s pretty much their own fault and they shouldn’t go crying to NCSoft…
I see AV software like condoms. If you don’t worry about Viruses, don’t use one. But don’t start whining when you do get something.
But anyway, if people are being hacked even though they have a complex password, AV software and don’t use dodgy internet cafes, then yeah, bummer, but if they don’t have those? Tough. Your own fault…
I believe there’s a good reason why I’ve never had any of my on-line gaming accounts hacked. Namely I make it too hard for the baddies to do their thing…
I have been hacked in WoW, a long time back (long story short, it was my fault – did not stop me from canceling my account though). So I agree with Lars on this to a point.
.
I have no clues about Aion or its security, so this is just “in general.” The Dev/Publish should be taking HUGE steps to inform people exactly how most people get hacked. Then provide extremely specific and easy to follow instructions to fix all of those problems (like Lars said above). I’m pretty sure that AVG and/or other free anti-virus would not mind if a large corporation with thousands or millions of customers started pushing their software on the customers. It would not be hard to download a specific settings file to make things easy for people.
.
Video Games, and especially games like WoW are becoming very popular among the non-tech savvy crowd. There is no way to reasonably expect that the all your customers have the know how to be able to do this on their own. This exact reason is why I think that publishers need to be more proactive to the problem, not reactive. MMO’s should come with a single, free authenticator after 3 months subscription. This should be the norm, not out of the ordinary.
.
When things like this are not done to try to protect and keep their own customers, then the publisher is doing something wrong and needs to be called out on it.
Does anyone think people that are dumb enough to have their account hacked aren’t really deserving of sympathy, let alone a ‘let’s attack the publisher’ campaign?
Here’s the thing. Don’t click on suspicious links, don’t give out your password, don’t use Internet Explorer and other Winblows software that is full of security holes, and basically take the time to learn how to secure your computer system.
I’ve played Aion heavily since launch, as well as many other mmo’s over the years. I have never been hacked and never will be hacked because I’ve educated myself on how not to be retarded when it comes to doing business online.
Grow up.
It’s not NCSoft’s fault that you’re ignorant and gullible.
I have played MMO;s for 10 years on a dedicated PC not used for browsing, surfing net or anything. I run seperate passwords for accoutn management and ingame that meet minimum 10 characters 2 number combinations.
I run virus scanners ad scanners daily (updated daily)… and yet for the first time in 10 years my account was hacked yesterday. I actually logged in on my other account, found my toon botting away earning money.
It is rumoured that the account site has been hacked as a spate in the last 24 hours of hacked accounts has proliferated. I can barely swally the violation i feel of the account being hacked, but the least they can do for a paying customer is to
1. Respond in a timely fashion – Ingame petitions, emails and account management (And phone calls) have gone unaswered for 32 hours now.
2. Reset passwords (which they will do when they finally get back to me)
3. Rollback the character to my last legitimate access (Which they are not currently doing). The security for the game was removed at launch, their is no CD or KEY authentiaction at login for the DLC users. And hence not all precationary measures have been taken by NCSOFT.
Anyway, I am hoping for a better outcome than some of the people have expereinced, but I doubt it very much.
@ wtf
Dont assume everyone thats has their accounts hacked is stupid?
I do play Aion, and I am in a legion with people that have had thier accounts hacked and they have absolutely NO idea how this has occurred. They have not clicked on suspicious links, and they are not stupid people, infact a few of them even work iin the IT field.
I have heard reports that there was a problemj with the aion log in screen security and this may have something to do with it, but I think its ignorant to “assume” that just because you have had your account compromised, that you are to blame as its not always the case.
On the topic though, of all the people I know that have had thier accounts hacked, every single one of them has had thier gear and thier AP, kinah restored fully to what it was before the incident. They did have to apply to ncsoft to have this done, by either an email or a petition, then there was a wait of 1-2 weeks before evrything was restored but that is maninly due to the fact that ncsoft have so many accounts hacked each day that they have a huge backlog to restore.
So, I dont know why these other reports have ot had the same treatement.
Hacking is a problem in Aion, but ncsoft have been working at it and as I have stated there is no reason that ppl should not have thier accounts restored.
I just had my account hacked also. I wasn’t playing for a month or two…didn’t care about it at all actually….That is , until I got an email saying my password was successfully changed!!! I did not go to any suspicious links or share account info, my computer is locked up tight, it was NOT MY FAULT!!! For those of you who say we must have done something stupid…..F.U. Look at AION and their security system. I for one am never playing any NCSoft title again because of this.
I’ve had it with NC Soft. They are criminals. Rather than spending countless hours playing their games, I now dedicate time (a few minutes every single day) to using up their resources. I create about 20 complaint tickets a day and will not stop until they refund me my money. I realize that this is hurting you all as well, since they don’t have adequate support, but they’ll have to spend some more money to fix that as well. The truth is, I hate those crooks at NC Soft, more than I care about the users. It’s a quick way to say FU to them and spend their money at the same time. It’s amazing how long they will continue to respond to these support tickets, before realizing that they’ve been had. After they ban your email address, you can just create a new one (the joys of free email providers). I guess I’ll stop once I feel that I’ve cost them enough money, but I’m getting more satisfaction out of this than playing their games anyway. This all could have been avoided, had they taken responsabilty in the first place and stopped ripping off innocent people