So after getting back from my trip, i logged back in to see that my characters had been restored. However, my stash and gear was pretty degraded.
They had dropped mining from patrogue to take enchanting; given that I had skill 26 in that, presumably they DEd my stuff to sell the mats. This should be an easy restore, since the only "special" mining skill I had gained was Smelt Dark Iron. (At least they didn't drop engineering, I would need to relearn dozens and dozens of schematics.)
None of my alts had any restoration done. Zapata and Cowndoleeza pretty much just lost their travelers backpacks and gold. Lockheed lost something like 900 gold and a ton of BOE blues, darkmoon cards, engineering mats, gems, and any good enchanting mats (they left the crap, of course).
They did restore any soulbound stuff and quest items I had on Patrogue, so I can at least go questing again. However, all enchantments were lost. This is not THAT big a deal (I was about to buy new weapon enchantments, so all I lost were the enchants on armor) but it is annoying.
Worse, any "of the foo" gear was rerolled. This turned my Cinderhide Armsplints of the Monkey into Cinderhide Armsplints of Spirit, and my Multicolored Ring of Fire Resistance (+10 sta, +10 FR) into a Multicolored Ring of Frost Resistance. I don't have time to MC much, so my FR set is not so important, but still it's depressing.
And anything that wasn't soulbound, like all my consumables and the ~10 arcanite bars I had stashed, was stripped from the character and didn't get restored. I did get 170g back on Patrogue, so I returned the "patro fund" things you sent me. Thanks, though! It's a very nice gesture.
I've submitted new restore tickets for these chars (still hoping they can just roll Patrogue and Lockheed back to June 11, but I'm less hopeful now. I suspect the Lightbringer characters were able to be fully restored because the hacker just deleted them without logging in and stripping them first.) but I'm pretty blue about this.
I feel like I had a very shiny toy that some bully came along and busted. Even though I waited a month to get it glued back together, it's just not the same. I don't feel like playing with it anymore because I can't look at it without thinking about the bully.
I also still have NO idea how this happened, which contributes to my unhappiness. I've never entered my acct name and pw into web sites, I've never downloaded executables, I've run virus scans and found no keyloggers/trojans, so how can I stop whatever happened from reoccurring? Am I going to have to go through all this crap to get restored AGAIN?
I can understand there might be technical limitations on things like enchantments and "of the foo" items, but not getting anything that wasn't soulbound really stinks. My plan is to wait for this round of restore tickets to go through, and see how I'm feeling then. If I'm not happier, I expect I will call Blizzard and cancel my account. Either that will light a fire under them or restoration is truly impossible.
Yeah, what FC said. That sucks bad, and I know I would feel all stinky and violated about my character if someone had done that to me.
BUT, if you can try to get over it, remember that WE think it as good ol' Patro is back! whoohoo! We do miss you online, and speaking for myself, I will gladly pitch in $g and/or quest help to assist you in getting back to a good place. I'm sure the rest of feel the same.
Sure, I can unlock boxes, but I can't do the Hammer dance while I'm doing it.
I know exactly how you feel, Patro, about the whole "bully" thing. I had a similar thing happen to me with a bicycle a few years ago. Loved to ride. After the "incident", well, just lost interest. Even in WoW, I have a couple characters that I can't go back to because of bad experiences with them.
But I bet you can guess what my suggested solution would be
Man, this doesn't look good. I submitted the new round of restore tickets on Thursday early morning; I had gotten responses within a few hours but haven't had time to deal with them yet. I also haven't logged into these characters, to see what happened.
Since only Patrogue had gotten any item restoration, and none of my alts, I submitted a restore ticket from each character (Patrogue, Lockheed, Zapata, Cowndoleeza). I don't know which email went with which character.
There were three emails with the return address of "donotreply@blizzard.com":
The first one gives me a little hope:
Your petition has been forwarded to our character specialists for further investigation and troubleshooting. Please keep in mind that, due to the nature and complexity of these types of petitions, it may take several days for us to contact you with the conclusion of our investigation. Please do not delete, edit, or re-submit your original ticket, as it contains essential information needed by our character specialists.
Then I got two emails that were pretty bad. This one looked like a generic form letter:
Unfortunately, we were unable to provide the restoration you requested. While we make every effort to verify your loss there are times where restoration is not possible. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you may have been caused.
Another rejection; I assume this was from Patrogue since it mentions professions.
Unfortunately, the Account Investigator has recovered all the items and money that they were able to in the course of the investigation.
Regarding the restored items with random modifiers (of the Bear, of the Eagle, etc.), we cannot guarantee that you will receive the same modifier you had on your original item. We are also unable to restore enchantments or add-ons that these items may have possessed.
Additionally, we are unable to restore professions and recipes that have been unlearned.
The third, longer one had an actual GM's return address attached; I wonder if this is the followup from the first "we bumped your request up" letter.
Greetings Bill,
Thank you for contacting the World of Warcraft Game Master Department.
Each account is permitted a limited number of instances in which the GM
staff will assist with property recovery. We do not wish to encourage
career victims, nor will we penalize players who legitimately make the
occasional slip-up. Restoration of any kind is not guaranteed. While we
will make every effort to verify and restore your loss, the decision to
go forward with a restoration is entirely at Blizzard's discretion. If
you repeatedly make decisions that result in lost property, we reserve
the right to refuse restorations.
While we can restore items with random modifiers (of the Bear, of the
Eagle, etc.), we cannot guarantee that you will receive the same
modifier you had on your original item. We are also unable to restore
enchantments or add-ons that these items may have possessed.
Please consider carefully whether the item(s) lost is important enough
to you to warrant using one of your very limited requests. If you still
wish for us to investigate the loss of your item(s), please reply to
this e-mail with the following information:
- Account Name
- Character Name
- Realm your character is on
- Exact name of the item(s) that was lost
- The time (include the time zone) and date of the loss
- If possible, how the loss occurred
- Acknowledgement that you would like to use one of the limited
restorations available.
Thank you again for contacting us. We hope you continue to enjoy your
experience in World of Warcraft!
I guess when I get a chance tonight I will log on and see what in-game changes have occurred, then I will respond to the last email with a full explanation of what happened. I will continue to ask for a rollback (at least of Lockheed and Patrogue) since the characters on Lightbringer were given that treatment. While I suspect that those were able to be rolled back because they were deleted without being stripped, it's about the last straw I have left to cling to in hope of getting my stuff back.
I'm not as dejected about this as I was last week, but I am still considering cancelling my account. This time out of principle -- I am really disappointed how this has gone. If enough accounts are being compromised that they have a 2-3 week backlog of character restorations, then they really ought to be taking steps to make things easier on their customers.
I can't help comparing this to what would have happened if a credit card number had gotten stolen. My password got compromised; I can only assume that this was my fault. Just like if my CC# got stolen because I was dumb and entered it in a phishing site, or I didn't retain all the pieces of paper that had the number, name and expiry date. It would be my responsibility to take steps to identify the fraud and limit the damages; however, my loss would be limited in that case.
In this case, getting EVERYTHING back should be possible simply by copying information from a backup file to the current character file. But I have only recovered soulbound items from one character, none of my non-soulbound items (like 8 arcanite bars, about 15 darkmoon cards, hearts of the mountain, black diamonds, a righteous orb, some BOE blues, and stacks of mithril, thorium, and other metals and engineering stuffs), less than 1/3 of the Traveler's Backpacks I lost, and about 15% of the cash I had. I also would have to rebuild mining up from 1-300, which I expect would take 10+ hours of just farming metal.
I don't have time to do raiding, so I've found fun in earning money. As they said above, "We do not wish to encourage career victims", but this is the first time in over a year's playing that I've had a restoration issue, and losing so much stuff in one blow is really discouraging. This is now almost 6 weeks after the account compromise issue was first reported (on 6/19), and I reported it about 4 days after it happened. If the trail is cold, they should have saved copies of every relevant file when the account was locked.
Still, since I'm still hoping for a rollback, there's no point in playing my main. I will probably copy my character to the PTR and try out the new talent trees; I had been planning on doing a talent respec once I got The Lobotomizer anyway, so I might as well try and get used to using daggers. Or I'll work on Boeuftorte, I was having fun being a shammie.
To quote the one email I called "hopeful" (emphasis added):
[quote]Please consider carefully whether the item(s) lost is important enough to you to warrant using one of your very limited requests. If you still wish for us to investigate the loss of your item(s), [b]please reply to this e-mail[/b] with the following information:[/quote] I send the reply email to that address and get:
[quote]----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
(reason: 550 : Recipient address rejected: No such user (xakerivek.wowgm@blizzard.com))[/quote] Well, hell.
Comments
They had dropped mining from patrogue to take enchanting; given that I had skill 26 in that, presumably they DEd my stuff to sell the mats. This should be an easy restore, since the only "special" mining skill I had gained was Smelt Dark Iron. (At least they didn't drop engineering, I would need to relearn dozens and dozens of schematics.)
None of my alts had any restoration done. Zapata and Cowndoleeza pretty much just lost their travelers backpacks and gold. Lockheed lost something like 900 gold and a ton of BOE blues, darkmoon cards, engineering mats, gems, and any good enchanting mats (they left the crap, of course).
They did restore any soulbound stuff and quest items I had on Patrogue, so I can at least go questing again. However, all enchantments were lost. This is not THAT big a deal (I was about to buy new weapon enchantments, so all I lost were the enchants on armor) but it is annoying.
Worse, any "of the foo" gear was rerolled. This turned my Cinderhide Armsplints of the Monkey into Cinderhide Armsplints of Spirit, and my Multicolored Ring of Fire Resistance (+10 sta, +10 FR) into a Multicolored Ring of Frost Resistance. I don't have time to MC much, so my FR set is not so important, but still it's depressing.
And anything that wasn't soulbound, like all my consumables and the ~10 arcanite bars I had stashed, was stripped from the character and didn't get restored. I did get 170g back on Patrogue, so I returned the "patro fund" things you sent me. Thanks, though! It's a very nice gesture.
I've submitted new restore tickets for these chars (still hoping they can just roll Patrogue and Lockheed back to June 11, but I'm less hopeful now. I suspect the Lightbringer characters were able to be fully restored because the hacker just deleted them without logging in and stripping them first.) but I'm pretty blue about this.
I feel like I had a very shiny toy that some bully came along and busted. Even though I waited a month to get it glued back together, it's just not the same. I don't feel like playing with it anymore because I can't look at it without thinking about the bully.
I also still have NO idea how this happened, which contributes to my unhappiness. I've never entered my acct name and pw into web sites, I've never downloaded executables, I've run virus scans and found no keyloggers/trojans, so how can I stop whatever happened from reoccurring? Am I going to have to go through all this crap to get restored AGAIN?
I can understand there might be technical limitations on things like enchantments and "of the foo" items, but not getting anything that wasn't soulbound really stinks. My plan is to wait for this round of restore tickets to go through, and see how I'm feeling then. If I'm not happier, I expect I will call Blizzard and cancel my account. Either that will light a fire under them or restoration is truly impossible.
BUT, if you can try to get over it, remember that WE think it as good ol' Patro is back! whoohoo! We do miss you online, and speaking for myself, I will gladly pitch in $g and/or quest help to assist you in getting back to a good place. I'm sure the rest of feel the same.
WE NEED PATRO CAUSE WE LOVE PATRO!
VIVA PATRO!
I know exactly how you feel, Patro, about the whole "bully" thing. I had a similar thing happen to me with a bicycle a few years ago. Loved to ride. After the "incident", well, just lost interest. Even in WoW, I have a couple characters that I can't go back to because of bad experiences with them.
But I bet you can guess what my suggested solution would be
Since only Patrogue had gotten any item restoration, and none of my alts, I submitted a restore ticket from each character (Patrogue, Lockheed, Zapata, Cowndoleeza). I don't know which email went with which character.
There were three emails with the return address of "donotreply@blizzard.com":
The first one gives me a little hope:
Then I got two emails that were pretty bad. This one looked like a generic form letter:
Another rejection; I assume this was from Patrogue since it mentions professions.
The third, longer one had an actual GM's return address attached; I wonder if this is the followup from the first "we bumped your request up" letter.
I guess when I get a chance tonight I will log on and see what in-game changes have occurred, then I will respond to the last email with a full explanation of what happened. I will continue to ask for a rollback (at least of Lockheed and Patrogue) since the characters on Lightbringer were given that treatment. While I suspect that those were able to be rolled back because they were deleted without being stripped, it's about the last straw I have left to cling to in hope of getting my stuff back.
I'm not as dejected about this as I was last week, but I am still considering cancelling my account. This time out of principle -- I am really disappointed how this has gone. If enough accounts are being compromised that they have a 2-3 week backlog of character restorations, then they really ought to be taking steps to make things easier on their customers.
I can't help comparing this to what would have happened if a credit card number had gotten stolen. My password got compromised; I can only assume that this was my fault. Just like if my CC# got stolen because I was dumb and entered it in a phishing site, or I didn't retain all the pieces of paper that had the number, name and expiry date. It would be my responsibility to take steps to identify the fraud and limit the damages; however, my loss would be limited in that case.
In this case, getting EVERYTHING back should be possible simply by copying information from a backup file to the current character file. But I have only recovered soulbound items from one character, none of my non-soulbound items (like 8 arcanite bars, about 15 darkmoon cards, hearts of the mountain, black diamonds, a righteous orb, some BOE blues, and stacks of mithril, thorium, and other metals and engineering stuffs), less than 1/3 of the Traveler's Backpacks I lost, and about 15% of the cash I had. I also would have to rebuild mining up from 1-300, which I expect would take 10+ hours of just farming metal.
I don't have time to do raiding, so I've found fun in earning money. As they said above, "We do not wish to encourage career victims", but this is the first time in over a year's playing that I've had a restoration issue, and losing so much stuff in one blow is really discouraging. This is now almost 6 weeks after the account compromise issue was first reported (on 6/19), and I reported it about 4 days after it happened. If the trail is cold, they should have saved copies of every relevant file when the account was locked.
Still, since I'm still hoping for a rollback, there's no point in playing my main. I will probably copy my character to the PTR and try out the new talent trees; I had been planning on doing a talent respec once I got The Lobotomizer anyway, so I might as well try and get used to using daggers. Or I'll work on Boeuftorte, I was having fun being a shammie.
[quote]Please consider carefully whether the item(s) lost is important enough to you to warrant using one of your very limited requests. If you still wish for us to investigate the loss of your item(s), [b]please reply to this e-mail[/b] with the following information:[/quote]
I send the reply email to that address and get:
[quote]----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
(reason: 550 : Recipient address rejected: No such user (xakerivek.wowgm@blizzard.com))[/quote]
Well, hell.