Sunday, September 2, 2012
Account Security & Hacked Accounts
Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.
To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you've never used anywhere else!
We're prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of customer support requests. If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions.
As of this writing we have completed all prioritized support tickets for hacked accounts and other blocking login issues submitted prior to Friday, August 31. If you have an older ticket that has not been completed, that means it's not correctly prioritized. Submit a new ticket using the above instructions, and in the title write, "Hacked Account - Ticket submitted August xx - Ticket number xxxxxx-xxxxxx" (fill in the date and ticket number of your existing ticket), and we will prioritize your existing ticket.
Over the past three days we've received approximately 8,500 new support tickets related to hacked accounts and other blocking login issues, and we've resolved issues to get approximately 9,500 players back into the game (most from tickets submitted prior to Friday, August 31). We're aggressively ramping up our customer support team, with 28 new support representatives starting today and more coming online in the next few days, to provide the fast response times our customers expect.
Scanning Accounts & Email Spam
Yesterday, three malicious users each changed the account names of their own Guild Wars 2 accounts thousands of times, scanning through lists of email addresses stolen from other games and web sites, presumably to determine which email addresses were available (not already used for a Guild Wars 2 account) and which were taken. It obviously shouldn't be possible to change your own account name so frequently. We temporarily disabled account name changes and have now restored but limited them to prevent this.
To the thousands of people who received emails stating, "the email address for your Guild Wars account has been changed," and are not even our customers, we sincerely apologize for the spam. Please be aware that your email address is on a list of account credentials that hackers have apparently stolen from other games and web sites and are systematically scanning.
To Guild Wars 2 customers whose email addresses are being tested by hackers but not stolen, thank you for protecting your account by choosing a new, unique password for Guild Wars 2. Even though your unique password should protect you, we think you deserve to know if hackers have your email address on their list of credentials stolen from other games and web sites, so we'll send you periodic notifications when we see hackers testing your account.
Reset Password
We're leaving "reset password" disabled for now. Please contact customer support if you forgot your password.
We believe hackers also have lists of compromised credentials for email accounts, and we don't want to allow them to login to a compromised email account and then use "reset password" to steal the associated Guild Wars 2 game account.
Email Authentication
Once you validate your account email address, we help protect you from attempted account hacking (even if the hacker guesses your password) by sending you an email every time you attempt to login from a new location, asking you to approve or deny the login attempt.
Because you have to first validate your account email address by clicking on a link in email in order to enable this feature, you should be able to receive email messages from us. If you don't see email authentication messages, check your spam/junk folder. Be sure not to flag an email authentication message as spam; if you do, your email provider may prevent all future email authentication messages from reaching you.
If email authentication is preventing you from logging in, contact our customer support team following these instructions and we'll disable it for your account.
PvP Tournaments, World Transfers, Character Creation/Deletion
We experienced multiple outages of PvP tournaments, world transfers, and character creation/deletion today, and ongoing issues with PvP tournament rewards. We're working to address these problems.
Parties & Guilds
We've made significant improvements today to capacity constraints that have caused issues with parties and guilds. However, players will still notice some intermittent issues with party members not appearing on the map, parties not staying together as they travel between maps or into dungeons, and guild manipulation not working.
Trading Post
We're still working on expanding the Trading Post's capacity to handle the huge volume of requested trades. We had the Trading Post down for maintenance earlier today but currently it's online and available to all players. We're still working on some issues, in particular buy and sell commands sometimes appearing to hang although they actually succeeded. We know the Trading Post is a big part of the game and we're working around-the-clock to restore full functionality to all players.
Storyline Steps
Players have reported blocking issues with certain storyline steps. We're preparing fixes for "Stealing Secrets", "A Grisly Shipment", and "The Battle for Fort Trinity", hopefully for tonight's update, and are investigating issues with other storyline steps.
Worlds & Overflow
We created three new worlds in each data center this week, and are periodically increasing the capacities of existing worlds as necessary to handle all the new players coming into the game.
During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it's common for players to be directed to overflow servers. To play with a friend on a different overflow server, form a party together, then right-click on the friend's portrait in the party list and click "join". We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.
Exploits
As promised by lead producer Chris Whiteside, this afternoon (72 hours after the bans) we removed the account bans from those customers who were involved in the karma weapons exploit and who correctly submitted appeals agreeing to delete the items. Anyone who remains banned, follow the instructions in the linked post and we'll get you back in the game quickly.
If you discover an emergency game-breaking or economy-breaking bug, do not exploit it, but please notify us immediately at this email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net. You may also use this email address to report suspected security vulnerabilities. Thank you to everyone who has sent reports. However, note that we cannot respond individually to emails to this address.
GM Actions
Here's a summary of recent GM actions to police the game. In the past 24 hours we permanently banned 292 accounts for RMT-related botting and spamming, and suspended 23 accounts for using very offensive language or names.
Forums
Our most important priority at the moment is to ensure that the game runs stably and flawlessly. So as to not create additional demand on our infrastructure and on our programming team, we made the decision not to open the forums until the initial mass influx of players has calmed down a bit.
Next software updates
We're making non-disruptive changes throughout the day. We'll publish the next back-end server update tonight at midnight Seattle time. The game may be unavailable for approximately 20-60 minutes while we perform this update.
