The person Frotinha is referring to is me. I have no need to hide behind alts, because even if my story is sad, it might add to those who go through the same as me. Frustration, anger, sadness, depression. It’s a mix of all those feelings. I’m a Blizzard customer for years, and WoW player since closed beta. Tons of time invested in one of the best games ever created. No regrets in leaving real-life commitments once in a while to raid with my friends. WoW is about pleasure to me. I play it with my friends and for them.

I have always been a careful PC owner. Up-to-date virus definitions, firewall, anti-spywares. Not an expert, but not so stupid. Never shared my account info with anyone, under any circunstances. Passwords are personal and cannot be transferred. It’s just like that inside big corporations, why can’t it remain true when talking about a game where you somehow store your real-life time in form of itens, gold, consumables, reputations, etc? Very well.

Last night I was online during the odd server shutdown. Ok, no problem. I’ve grown used to that. “Time to go to bed”, I thought. I wake up and try to log in. Password failed. Failed again. And once more. My anguish grew bigger and bigger each step I took following Blizzard’s own recommendations. Yes, all my possessions on my two main chars were completed wiped. I cannot understand the truly meaning behind such behavior. I found out I had a keylogger trojan that somehow hit me squarely in the face, with all my PC defenses up. It happens on best families, even though I had never lived anything near that kind of invasion. Violation. Violence.

There’s no explanation for such attitude. It’s cruelty. A person who does this deserves my pity. A person with no principles, no moral, no life. I wonder if this guy has real-life friends. Or maybe, why not, in-game friends.

I was informed Blizzard is capable of investigating this kind of matter. I confess I have little hope in seeing my 2 characters restored back to what they were when I was disconnected from the server around 3:30am server time. Even if I wait hours, days, weeks and end up having a few of my properties restored, I might find problems in putting to the GM’s disposal dozens of nexus crystals, gold, shards, etc. Enchants. Consumables. Bank reserves, cash, bags. I have friends that can (and will) help me if needed be. But what would happen if they didn’t exist? Am I not allowed to keep on adventuring on Azeroth due to a flaw in the system? Isn’t there any kind of protection? Are the “villains” really one step further?

This post is not only about whining or venting my sadness. I have solid suggestions that I would love to see a blue post about them.

– Limit the number of epic disenchants on a specific character based on time and skill level. Make it available to players with 295+ enchanting skill. Make it so that one person cannot disenchant more than one epic item per hour. It wouldn’t disrupt in any way the form the game is played. Even if a guild fully DE’s the contents of a 40-men raid, there’s always 5-6 enchanters around that can stock the items on their bags and slowly disenchant them to send to the guild’s bank.

– Remove the indication of where your character is when you log in. Someone who owns a character is well aware of what server he plays. If you’re capable of hiding which server you play in, you might gain precious time to change your password and info, plus add means to locate malicious people scanning through servers after a logon. It was curious how one of my L60 toons wasn’t even touched, since he wasn’t appearing on the realm selection list.

It’s been over 12 hours after contacting the GM for the first time on this matter and I hope to have some kind of update very soon. Also, I’d like to use this post to thank my PvP russian friends that gently gathered gold to help me obtain temporary PvP gear so that I could enjoy a few hours beside them, trying to forget all the frustration this day brought me.

I sincerely hope Blizzard manages to bring up their defenses and implement a way to prevent even more that their serious customers don’t get screwed up by this kind of worthless people that enjoys destroying things that don’t belong to them.

Regards,
Leonardo
a.k.a. Suane