Wednesday, January 30, 2008

The Trouble with Blizzard Support - Part I

This is the first part of a two part post on some stuff that happened with our Guild Master and our Guild back in December. I have broken the discussion into 2 parts. In this part, I will discuss the facts of what happened. In the next, post I'll try to make suggestions about what Blizzard should do and what they should have done.

Our guild master and her family are avid World of Warcraft players. They have two accounts and play regularly. They also have a nephew who lives nearby and plays as well. Our story begins when our GMs son visited his cousins house and played a little WOW. Apparently, hackers got a key logger installed on his machine. Therefore, while playing there, the hackers were able to obtain the passwords to both of my GMs accounts and her nephew's account.

Fast forward a few weeks to just before Christmas. Our GM logs off for the night around 12am server time. Pretty typical for her. And since it was near the holidays, we had several guildees (like about 5 or 6, including a couple of officers) playing most of the night. At like 3am, our GM and then her husband log in. Now being married with kids, this is very unusual. So our guildees said hi to her. No reply. So several of them begin to ask what's up. One of the hackers pleasantly tells them to "F*!# off, you idiots". Since our guild has a strict policy against using profanity, guild members realized almost immediately that our GM's account has been hacked. They all open tickets with Blizz game masters to shut down the account. Now this is 4 or 5 people opening at least 1 ticket. By now the Guild Bank has been emptied. Then the hackers begin to gkick all the guild members above level 30. So the fact that we have been hacked has been confirmed.

So our members finally get a hold of game masters and report that the GMs account has been hacked, they are robbing our guild bank, and gkicking members. Blizzards response "we can't do anything, only the account holder can shut down the account." So Blizzard does nothing. Absolutely nothing until, we are able to reach our GM via e-mail at about 3pm the next day. Then our GM changes her account password and calls Blizzard tech support alerting them to the fact that the account has been hacked.

The end result of Blizzard's lack of response? Our guild bank is emptied completely, probably losing the guild items worth 1000 to 2000 gold. All of our GMs toons are stripped of their gear or deleted. Her husbands account is also stripped and transferred to another server. (I find this particularly interesting as most character transfers take at least a day. They were able to move his primary toon from one server to another in 12 hours. Makes one wonder if the hackers don't have a back door into Blizzard's transfer system.) So their toons are stripped of gear and everything is sold and all their gold is taken.

So how does Blizzard respond? With an immediate call back? With a quick restore from the day before? No they gave each account a 3 day ban. Yep. If you report being hacked, Blizzard will shut you off the game for 72 hrs. Nice huh. And don't expect them to tell you anything. Cause they won't. They will say they are "investigating" and nothing else.

So what happens after the 72 hrs? A quick restore of your account? A detailed e-mail on what they have found out? Nope nothing. You get nothing. They say pretty much nothing other than they will be in touch after they have completed their investigation.

So fast forward 2 weeks, a Blizzard Gamemaster finally contacts our GM and begins to restore some of her stuff. But anything really important like her primary weapon (a bow, she's a hunter) or other gear, you don't get back. We got nothing back for our Guild bank. She get's practically none of her gear back for alts. It takes another couple of weeks before they restore stuff on her husbands toon.

Pretty lousy support if you ask me. What can we deduce from this state of affairs? A few things.
  • Blizzard does not back up your toons. The GM had to give our guild master her stuff one at a time. This means they have no backups of accounts and no way to restore them. They must take snap shots of your inventory list, but that must be the extent of their data protection.
  • Blizzard gamemasters and tech support have no authority to help you. Bascially, you are screwed if you get hacked. If someone contacts you in time, you can reset your password, but that only kicks the hacker if they log out before stealing all your stuff. You are on your own. Blizard support can't do anything to help you.
  • Blizzard does not take hacking or customer support seriously. They are taking in around $150M a month in revenue. There is NO excuse for not backing up players data. NONE!!! Disk arrays and storage are cheap. It would not be that difficult to backup accounts weekly or bi-weekly. Obviously they don't think this is important.
So I have described what happened and what the state of affairs are relating to customer support. In part II, I will discuss what Blizzard should do. Apparently they need some advice. :)

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