Immersion, already deep in turmoil and struggling to rebuild hit the bottom of the pit of despair this morning when our GM got hacked.
Fortunately, 2 of his real life friends saw him online outside of his normal hours, got no reply from their /whispers saw him doing odd things and reported it to a GM as they were on the phone to him. Blizzard acted quickly but not before the guild was disbanded presumably after emptying the vast amounts of gold and items from the guild bank. The process is being reversed but I'm not sure we'll ever know what was lost and especially as the por fellow had our pre-guild bank, guild banker on his account also that was still used for auctioning stuff off for the guild.
The big shock for me was the lack of authenticator on our GMs account. The lesson has been learned many times the hard way and still some people insist they are immune to hacks and key loggers. Sadly, there are too many cheats in this game that buy gold, why I have no idea because gold is retardedly easy to get and really there is not that much to spend it on. I guess that its the new generation of people who have come desensitised to purchasing online items for use in games and I'm sure as more games go free-to-play many more people will see the purchasing of hacked gold as a valid play style.
If you don't have an authenticator, get one. If not every day you risk losing your wow belongings and if you have access to your guild's bank you risk losing that too.
They are cheap £6.29 or $6.99 (euro) and that is purely to cover the postage costs. Sadly, most times they are out of stock but keep trying if they are as Blizzard is always renewing their stock levels. They can be found at the EU store and the US store. Blizzard should use the Cataclysm expansion pack as an opportunity to get us all an authenticator by putting one in the box, to my knowledge, sadly this is not going to happen. Shame on you Blizzard.
If you have a iPhone, iPod Touch, Android phone or other modern phone there is a Mobile Authenticator and it is free for most. For a full listing of compatible mobile devices go to http://mobile.blizzard.com/uk-en/support-compat.html/.
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