Oo-er. ArenaNet are discovering that popularity comes with its own price – namely the need to halt sales entirely to preserve “game experience” – and a nasty side effect: the attention of thieves, cheats and ne’er-do-wells.
Hackers have been acquiring email addresses and passwords from other games and websites via spyware, and are systematically entering them into Guild Wars 2 to find matches. ArenaNet are advising players to use a “strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else”.
Over the weekend, three hackers each changed the email addresses of their accounts thousands of times to find which were already in use in the game; ArenaNet have since limited the number of times account names can be changed. The developer has also disabled the option to reset passwords – to prevent successfully matched accounts being stolen by the hackers – which means it’s frustratingly too late to change yours to something more sensible for now.
So keep an eye on your inbox and spam folder.The game’s email authentication systemshould let you know every time your account is accessed from a new location. If you suspect your account has already been hacked, you’ll want to work your way through the process here to make sure ArenaNet get wind fast.
“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),” say ArenaNet.
“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.”