Feldon From EverQuest2.com:
By Scott Dale (Customer Service Manager)
and Linda “Brasse” Carlson (Director, Global Community Relations)Every day, thousands of game accounts are stolen. Tens of thousands of credit cards are compromised. Most of you know someone who has gone through this traumatic experience. Maybe it has even happened to you.
Sony Online Entertainment has joined together with a number of high-profile game companies under the umbrella of the Gamer Safety Alliance to bring you Gamer Safety Week, running from February 6th to 12th, 2012.
Our goal is to raise awareness of online security concerns, and to provide some suggestions for our players to keep their accounts safe. These principles apply regardless of whether you sign up for a game, buy some shoes, or donate to a charity online. In this article, we’ll share some actual experiences from our customer service files and how to avoid these nightmares.
Over the past year, SOE has redoubled its efforts to continually improve our company’s online security on all levels. Keeping your information safe and secure is one of our top priorities. Even with our evolving security measures, it is still too easy for scammers and hackers to work around all security by counting on the trusting nature of players and the sheer volume of places where information may be shared.
Read more at EverQuest2.com, or read the Press Release posted at the Merchant Risk Council.
Note: The article makes no mention of the free Mobile Authenticator app announced at Fan Faire.
If they are going to talk gamer safety, I would really like to see all these studios start addressing the violence in general chat channels. The talk / trolling/ abuse is getting rather violent over the past year or so. Trolling is the new “Chuck Norris” joke. And some of the conversations would litterally be illegal and deemed hate crimes or sexual abuse in real life.
Its almost to the point that I feel ALL games should remove serverwide or cross server chat channels. Go back to proximity says and /tells / guild chat only. Or private channels
This abuse / violence is only getting worse, not better. One day one of these Studios wil find itself on the criminal end of an investigation when something goes horribly wrong and someone in rela life is seriously hurt dies as a result of the blind eye these studios take to these chat channels.
To some extent, it is by degree. And some servers are worse than others.
The problem too is community standards. The standards in the US, UK, and Australia are different from those of Europe which are different from North Europe, which are different from Asia, etc.
I have had to leave 1-9 chat from time-to-time over the last few months. Thank God for /ignore
Well 1-9 has always been harsh, and then there are the private channels that don’t get censored, but if you want a group on my server you use them as 1-9 is where the trolls live, nobody looks for a group their.
So either way you got to have a thick skin while reading chat.
And yes it does get really bad some days.
Funny thing is all these companies are now comparing notes, I guess that is because all of them have been hit hard by the hacking account stealing folks that are out there. Lotro has been hit hard by that, I know that my account and 4 other folks in our guild, all of us not playing had their account hacked, thus looking at the possibility of the folks who were providing us with a guild forum might have given away our info or had been hacked themselves. It quite a popular site most folks have them do a free guild website.
So whatever hapened to the free authenticators,and the free whatever else after the great hack last year?
The funny thing is, on Tuesday evening, I was unable to log into the game. I kept getting an “Invalid user name or password” message. Sometimes right away, when entering the password, sometimes I’d get past the initial login screen and hit the play button only to receive the message there.
Upon calling Customer Service I was told, “There are a number of players experiencing this issue right now. We have been told that some people have had success by trying to log in repeatedly. I know it’s not the best solution, but it is all we have at present.”
“But I’ve been trying for over an hour . . . 30 minutes of which has been while waiting on hold with you. So you’re telling me my account has NOT been hacked and the problem is at your end, and not mine?”
“Well, I’m not saying we were hacked.”
“I know, I’m not saying YOU were hacked, but I’m asking if “I” was hacked and my account was compromised. How do we determine that?”
“I can’t do that at this time but we don’t think it’s a hacking issue.”
“Is there any way to check?”
“Not at this time, no . . . ‘
Really? So much for account security. The only thing that DOES make me believe it’s a login issue is I have the authenticator (having gone to Fan Faire and received it for free). But REALLY, really? I can’t login and they can’t tell me if my account has been compromised? WTF is that about?