Cases where game masters will not intervene

Then dont delete your character?

Problem is the hacker attacks...
it's not exactly motivating that you could lose your "i love this toon and worked my a$$ off for it" because someone transfers, robs, deletes it...and all you get is the middle finger afterwards.

Its not hacker attacks its idiots falling for phishng scams... In 2015 theres no excuse to be phished.

What happened to personal respectability? You have people talking about kids deleting characters like thats someone elses fault or problem...

Dude...Eq is played by a lot of old people, and not everyone is up to date with everything that can happen these days on computers.
Besides, it's totally possible to become a victim without falling for something obvious.
I know a bit about that, and trust me you are not 100% safe.
Stop defending this, Daybreak...SOE...had LOW safety measures for years and years.
Yet you talk as if they had gold standard...blah.

I do feel bad for the people that are victims of hack attacks, but I'm still unclear how it happens so often. Do the hackers have the ability to bypass the secret question/answer, or are they hacking into a person's email account in order to reset the question/answer?

the only way I can see it happening is as follows:
1) keystroke logger infection on personal computer
2) logged creds to both email and eq account received by hacker
3) hacker uses the email access in order to reset eq accounts, and then resets the email itself (or vice versa)
4) continues to transfer, sell, delete etc.

Is this how it's occuring?

That sucks, but there are SO many precautions available to all of us that prevent these types of infections. Malware scanners... virus scanners... safe surfing/emailing practices in general (don't ever click on links you are not expecting (if Fedex/UPS/IRS/FBI sends you an invoice to your email that you weren't already expecting... chances are it's a virus so don't open it))... maybe don't surf so much .

This story is repeated time and time again. There are many precautions available to us. Are we, as a collective, using all of these available protections? If not, then we are inviting these types of disasters. Bad things will happen to people that set themselves up for bad things to happen. Yes, sometimes bad stuff happens to people that do take precautions, but the more we mitigate and lower those chances... the safer we are.

I have the option of driving my car without any oil in the engine. It's unwise to do so, but I do have that option. Is it really Ford's responsibility when my engine block siezes up?

Maybe a better example is this. If I speed through a school zone 1 day in a year, there's a good chance that I'm not going to get a speeding ticket. If I speed through a school zone 5 days a week 52 weeks a year... there's a much higher chance that I'm going to get tagged with a fine.

Don't be a target. You may still become a target, but the chancers are significantly lower that it will happen.

I feel sympathy for people that are going through this, but I don't understand why people aren't using every single piece of protection they have available to them. Nothing is 100%, but crooks like easy targets. Don't be an easy target. Use every piece of security you have available to you. Don't reuse passwords. Do use virus scanners. Do use malware scanners. Do use 2-factor authentication devices.

PS: Apparently I took forever drafting this because now there are extra replies that make my post superfluous in some areas. I would not suggest that SoE/Daybreak has any gold standard in security. I think their dismal past speaks poorly all by itself.

Yet, I do believe that we have the responsibility to protect ourselves.

There may be a ton of old people playing, but cyber security gets soooo much press time nowadays... being old is not an excuse. It's a cop out at best.

We all lock the doors to our house when we leave it. We lock our car doors when we leave it. It's time we all started locking down our accounts and our computers without making excuses for why we didn't get it done.

The line may be gone, but I'm sure the mindset behind it hasn't changed.

I was thinking I really got to pee!

and its not just children, over the years I have heard of girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands (especially if breaking up) brothers and sisters, parents etc thinking they are teaching someone a lesson and deleting characters or doing it accidentally (I thought i was shutting the game down for you!).

Really most hacking is not done through infected computers or key loggers, hackers learn of your passwords because people are creatures of habit and tend to use the same password(s) all over the net..

While the games themselves are fairly secure the thousands of message boards people use are extremely easy to hack.

Guild boards, Class boards, General Game Sites, all of those message boards are very easy to get your passwords from, and often people will use the same passwords there as they use to log into their accounts in EQ or other on line games.

They seriously want us to quit the game don't they ? I wouldnt like to be hacked and have my character deleted/stripped, after 15 years or whatever it is. Seriously DAYBREAK fix this before you lose your entire customer base. Not just for EQ but every game you now own. Holly/Roshen care to chip in for the decisions made on this new CSR policy?

Somewhere out the I can hear Yakov Smirnoff saying " In mother Russia the game deletes you!"

if there plan was/is to push us to one of their newer IPs, I certainly wont be playing any of their other games after they sink this one. thank god for Destiny

Who honestly cares. How many years has it been of people waving the flag of threat "Do this or you will lose your customers" - and yet, people still play or come back after a 2 week retirement from the game. SoE knew this and passed that tidbit on to Daybreak during the acquisition (/sarcasm but likely true unfortunately).

"tough love" works for parents because kids don't have any options. "tough love" works for cops because they have the legal system and prison to back them up. "tough love" does NOT work for an entertainment provider dealing with their paying customers.

The term "EverCrack" did not come out of nowhere - they know their customers well and no matter what happens they'll get paid on the comeback.

Speak for yourselves, most of who i knew left and never came back.
Bit tired of the everyone comes back Eq fairy tale.

So pretty much with poor customer service, its gonna drive people away from playing EQ at some point which is sad

First of all, you mean personal responsibility.

And people are exactly what I just said...people. We are not robots. We are prone to mistakes, hiccups, accidents, etc. There is a reason why insurance companies exist. You're not allowed to own a car without insurance. Everyone who owns a car must have a driver's license. In order to have a driver's license, you must know how to drive well enough to pass a test. Does that mean once we get this license, we will never crash a car? No, hence insurance.

Having us pay for a game and not giving us proper means of insuring our mistakes is preposterous and uncalled for. Isn't it common knowledge that an entertainment company must be aware of the satisfaction of it's consumers? If not, you don't have a company. We are paying for their services and they are falling quite short on all areas. Now we have a lack of customer support, lack of current contect, lack of creativity, lack of stable gameplay. We are getting deteriorating results for our money and it's occurring more often at a much more rapid pace.

what a piss poor attitude, i hope this isnt your attitude on life as well. Yeah it is my bad, but it is also THEIR game that I AM PAYING FOR. The check they get each month to pay for rent and food and gas? Thats coming from me paying them to provide the service i want to play their game. They want to provide inadequate service, then they can begin losing money and eventually lose their job due to customers leaving.

I am a police officer in real life, based on your logic, should i tell people, "sorry maam that is your problem you didnt have an alarm system and a security guard in your house when that burglar came in and stole all your stuff" or tell the woman who gets punched by her husband " sorry maam that is your problem for marrying and not mine, deal with it or re-roll your husband"

Someone forgot to inform us that it is more fun this way.

Well, just keep plugging away w/ those stakes, you'll eventually find the heart!

For a business, it's always a choice of how friendly it wants to be to their customers. Customers are people, they make mistakes. Some customers are not as intelligent as others. But all money is equally good. By refusing to help a customer who made a mistake you lose that customer and his/her money. You better be sure that your time spent helping such customer is not worth the money you receive from him/her, as well as potential reputational loss. A happy customer may tell his/her friends good things about you and attract more customers. A customer who was denied help will definitely not recommend your business to others, and may also tell bad things about you to everyone they know.

Daybreak's decision, and especially the original choice of wording, shows that they no longer consider helping their customers in a complicated situation worth the time such help would take. That is, the amount of money they pay to a high-ranked GM who can restore deleted characters, multiplied by the time it takes to do that, is more than what you pay for your subscription and station cash purchases and any good reputation you may generate for them. It's easier for them to lose some customers than pay to more GMs. They just saved 15% by switching to GEICO money by laying off some GMs. Now they will lose some money by refusing to help the players whose characters got deleted for whatever reason. But they think they saved more.

It may have been about something more than just money for Verant/SOE, but for Columbus Nova it's just about the money.