Reader A was minding his own business, raiding orcs and hording alliances or whatever it is World of Warcraft players do, when he says a hacker started selling in-game items for real cash, spurring Blizzard to cancel his account. A says Blizzard is aware that the nefarious activity wasn’t his fault, but stopped him cold anyway, bringing out his wrath of the Lich King.
Here is the email he wrote to Blizzard:
Even though this helps me close an account that I wasn’t using much anymore but the circumstances in which this was arbitrarily handled without ANY input from me, the user, shows astronomically bad customer service. What makes it worse is that this is not a new account. I have had this for over six years now working on all of my different characters. And all of this shut down within hours of being hacked? What’s hilarious here is that you detected the strange activity and emailed me!! Punishing your paid users for faults in your authentication mechanism makes so much sense, doesn’t it?I’m intentionally using my work signature here to lend credibility to my assertion that a lackadaisical approach to customer service will not serve you well by isolating payers that have played for a long time. I was hoping to come back to the game with Catacylsm but you adeptly took care of that because there is no way I can develop a character the way I had done on my Trifectum account.
I am seriously hoping for a human response this time explaining your actions and hopefully a resolution that returns my account to me for whenever I want to get back in the game. I know your business model for handling customer requests is horrible so I’ll give you a few days to get this squared away. After that these emails will be forwarded to all of my friends’ blogs, consumer protection web sites, and FTC so they can be warned about this kind of treatment. Hiding behind a EULA does not protect you against bad publicity highlighting your refusal to communicate with your users.
World of Warcraft vets, what would you do in A’s situation?
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I actually had this happen to an account that was dormant for about three years. Some gold farmer or something got into my account (weak password), and they shut down the account. I simply replied to their email and explained the situation, and within a couple days they had re-activated my account and gave me a 7-day free period to clean up the account and play a bit of the game again.
Blizzard, at least in my experience, is rarely unreasonable, although they may be quick to throw down a banhammer to keep people from exploiting the system.
The thing is that there are authenticators to prevent your account from being “hacked.” If you own a smartphone they’re free, if you don’t they’re like 4 bucks and free shipping.
Although, I never had my account hacked even prior to that because I picked a suitably long password for my account and never told anyone my login info. I also have an internet anti-virus/anti-phish active.
You see, I don’t really feel bad for the people that get hacked that don’t take any precautions.
Authenticator
How have you had an account for over 6 years for a game that’s only been out for 5 years and 8 months?
This is the OP fault. I don’t feel sorry for him/her at all. I to had my account hacked, now twice. Last time, I wasn’t even paying for wow and the hacker paid for a month subscription to hack it. Took everything, even from my guild. I finally got my account back, now I just need items or gold. It took them 2 weeks to catch it though. It is your responsibility to protect your account. I highly doubt they also shut down your account within hours of your account being hacked, either it was hacked for days and you didn’t notice it yet, or you are just plain lieing. (It could be a miracle though if they did catch it in an hour) If you don’t want it to get hacked, use an authenticator.
Horrid letter if he truly hoped for resolution. Starts off saying how little the account means to him, uses an inaccurate, hyperbolic time scale to show how loyal of a customer he is (WoW was released November 2004 and new account creation was required even for those in alpha/beta, so a six year old account is impossible), and goes into threats against a company who simply took the initial sane steps based on an account performing improper activities.
Not to defend Blizzard in general or say that going through the proper channels would have resolved his specific concern, but immature internet rants are just as pointless as in person internet rants.
My daughter throws tantrums like this sometimes too. I usually just give her a time out to think things over. Hopefully in three years, when she turns six, things will be a bit easier.