February 22nd, 2008

WoW cheating is bad for you (go figure)

I started playing World of Warcraft again a couple of months ago and just hit level 70 last week. The day after I made 70, my account was hacked and stolen. My level 70 character was transferred to another server and was then apparently used for gold farming. This happened on Friday night and since it was a holiday weekend (does anyone really even celebrate President’s Day), Blizzard was closed until Tuesday. When I finally got a hold of someone to fix my account, they were able to reset my password and move my character back. When I tried to log into the account with my new password, it was immediately reset again without me wanting to. When I tried using the new password, my account was locked. Three times I had Blizzard fix the account only to have it locked on me again. The only solution I was able to come up with was to start a new account (which meant I had to buy the game and expansion again) and pay to transfer my character. I wasn’t willing to pay to transfer all my characters, so I lost three guys in the process. Sixty five dollars later and one week without being able to play, I was able to get into the game again.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how anyone was able to get into my account, when I remembered something that happened over a year ago. I was starting to get burned out on the game and was falling behind my roommate in levels. He offered to pay to have me power-leveled to catch up with him. I am totally against any kind of cheating like this, but since I was going to quit if I wasn’t able to play with him, I gave in. A couple of days and and fifteen levels later, I was ready to play again. I changed my password and went on like nothing happened.

I figured the password change would be good enough, but then I realized that when they had my account name and password, they had access to my entire account, which included any security questions or precautions on it. Apparently they had been keeping tabs on me and were waiting until I made level 70. The benefit of being leveled up a while back was completely wasted by the week I was without an access to the game. Ironically, the day after I got everything straightened out, Blizzard posted this statement. Before, I would have laughed it off, but now I completely agree with them.

The companies that supply these services have no moral problem with taking your money and then screwing you over in the future. Not only this, but just having these options available is completely unfair to the players that earned their gold or levels the right way. Whether or not you agree with this is totally irrelevant. Everyone that plays has accepted the license agreement (Just because you skipped over it doesn’t mean you didn’t accept it) and has no choice but to abide by it. If Blizzard says that we are all required to play the game naked using only our feet, we have to deal with it as long as we accept that agreement. Power leveling and gold purchasing can only be bad for players in the long run.

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