I’ve made it clear that I’m a WoW head. I enjoy the game but more so because of the group of fellas that I game with. We’re a pretty laid back group, the majority are married with kids and so we all realize family comes first. I suppose it’s not too different from “bowling night” or “meeting the guys at the bar” with the exception that we’re home where our spouses can typically roust us for that last minute “honey do.”
Recently once of the guys (we shall use his handle Beet) logged on to find the majority of his equipment and inventory missing from several of his toons. Of course the first thought was that his account was hacked so immediately Beet submits an in-game GM request. Beet gives the GM the particulars after close to an hour of waiting. During this time we discovered some peculiarities.
Generally if someone were to hack your account they are going to vendor everything possible in order to scrape together as much gold as possible to mail off to their toon. If the account had been hacked why would they sell some relatively worthless items and leave Beet an epic staff that sells for 10g when vendored? This didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Tied to the odd lags and bugged items and mobs in the game I drew the conclusion that this could quite possibly be a server malfunction. Beet wasn’t using any mods that are typically associated with keyloggers or other spyware. He was also using only the bare essentials.
Regardless the GM gave him the spiel that it would take some time to investigate the issue and that it could take several months. Needless to say Beet was livid. A lot of time and effort went into his toons and he had some irreplaceable items. Upgraded Dungeon set pieces that he could not repeat the quests to replace. I thought it very odd that Blizzard could not simply look at the server logs for his account and find out the login times for the last 24 – 48 hours. Granted I don’t know how their servers are set up and what capabilities exist on the back end, however if Blizzard can track unauthorized 3rd party modules it would seem highly illogical that they couldn’t check a simple login timeframe.
If they wanted too…
Well the Crusade expansion was released and we all jumped on board eagerly. In the first 24 hours most of had replaced one or more epic items with a green drop or quest reward from Outland. Beet still hadn’t heard anything back so he submitted another ticket with his request for his account logs. He even managed to speak to message with a supervisor but got the same runaround of “we’re looking into it.” He made clear our suspicions and concerns of the cause of issue. A simple log check could determine whether someone else hacked his account. No word. After a week of calls, emails and ambiguous responses from Blizzard support, Beet finally got an answer. Basically? Sorry Beet you’re S.O.L. but here are a few measly green items we hope might make you feel better.
Now before we go any farther we’ve read through the EULA from beginning to end and know full well that Blizzard claims absolutely no liability for anything that occurs in game. They don’t even have to try to replace the inventory and equipment Beet lost. The more this story progresses, the more we feel this is the case. Blizzard didn’t even try. I imagine that the thought process went something like “He’ll get better green drops in the expansion so there’s not point in trying to recover the item.”
Blizzard certainly has the capability to replace the items that went missing as well as the gold. My question now is why didn’t they? I realize that there is a 0 tolerance policy towards 3rd party modules, however they can’t (or won’t) even furnish records to indicate that the account was in actuality “hacked.” If it’s something that can easily be proved then why leave any room for doubt? This reluctance does more in establishing guilt on the part of Blizzard than an outright admission. I think that Blizzard is used to dealing with teenagers with more time and money on their hands than they know what to do with. They appear to have adopted a customer service model of superficial platitudes.
The prevalence of virtual worlds and virtual property has gone so far as to pique the interest of our government in-so-far as actually establishing legislation to tax the virtual property of gamers. To me this lends strong support to a case that gaming developers need to modify their EULA’s to protect the virtual property of their players. An annual subscription to Blizzard’s game is in excess of $150. With a subscriber-ship bringing in almost a billion dollar revenue for the company, one would think that our virtual property would be protected a little better.
Beet is managing to build back up his assets as you might expect, but this really isn’t the moral of the tale. The number one priority of any company should be it’s customer service. This is the face to your market, this is how your customers will identify with your company. For now it seems that Blizzard doesn’t really see this as a necessity. Granted there’s no reason for them to change since they have the market in a choke hold. The point is that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
