EVE General Discussion

While I realise that it is apparently bad juju to discuss the results of petitions, I have a 'hypothetical' scenario and question for the Eve Community.

Account hacking and keylogging was (and probably still is) a problem for players who engaged wholeheartedly in the alliance communities of Eve. Often you would be logging into multiple forum sites of your various corporation, alliance and third party sites.

As such account securities could sometimes be compromised through these third party sites. From my relative experience, while account assets were sometimes stolen from these intrusive hacking attempts, few to my knowledge ever lost whole accounts and/or characters. Petitioning the theft of characters from your account was handled (hopefully) with professionalism and care by CCP representatives.

My question to the Eve Community is this. Let us say that a long term player becomes overwhelmed with the game and leaves for whatever reason, be it real life or in game politics or simply a resentment in CCPs direction. He has developed a character over several years of loyal subscription and has built up quite a hefty SP tree and asset collection. Let us also say that the same player returns to the game and the community after several years of hiatus. When he returns he finds his account details have been changed. When he petitions he is told that his main character has been transferred out of his account, several months or so after he left the game. He discovers that the account was accessed, his email, login details etc are changed over and payment details are also different.

*side note*
According to the EULA , it is illegal to access or obtain account details not belonging to you, as it is to disclose them. Furthermore the transfer of characters from accounts is ONLY valid if the account and characters themselves are yours to manage. Any transfers where there has been a breach of the EULA are void, with CCP exempt from accountability or liability.
*side note*

Hypothetically, after being told of the character transfer, the player verifies his identification to CCP and has the account returned to him, minus the character in question. Hypothetically, he is then told that the character can not be returned due not to the nature of transfer, but because so much time has elapsed between the transfer happening and him petitioning. Essentially then, the player has lost the character in question, all of its assets and has been received no compensation aside from a dusting of the hands by CCP.

My question to the Eve community is this. Was this a valid and reasonable response from CCP. Should there be or is there a statute of limitiations where breaches of the EULA can only be considered invalid up until a certain timeframe? Should of CCP banned the character in question due to the reasonably suspicious nature of transfers (none of which were conducted through the char market) and should the player receive the character back, or if not, receive any form of compensation?

With many players returning to Eve because of the so called change of direction Crucible represents, we may find that this hypothetical scenario could occur quite a few times, where old accounts are found to have been hacked or misused. Should CCPs response to any potential petitions look favorably upon a returning playerbase, or should they wash their hands of their EULA obligations due to the timeframe involved.

Because this is purely hypothetical in nature and does not discuss particulars of an actual petition, it is not against the forums rules to discuss this matter.

I empathize with CCP here. It's not like they banned someone from forums for 3 months for calling someone 'dim' or something insanely outrageous like that.

Many alliance drones account share, bot, and participate in various nefarious activities. It's not up to CCP to try to piece together what happened many years later. Don't share your passwords with anybody and this won't happen to you.

(It sounds like you gave your toon away to a corpmate and now you're back and want him back. If that's the case, stop wasting our time and go away.)

TL;DR?

How does somebody prove to CCP that they were hacked? Look at it this way:

1. Player leaves game.
2. Account is reactivated and character is sold.
3. Time passes
4. Player requests login details from CCP (Forgetful? It happens to all of us)
5. Player alleges they never sold the character; requests character back.

Now, CCP could give the player the original character as it was at the time. Could they? I don't think so, at least I don't think they will be able to do so without going into a backup type scenario as the character has been played since. (It would depend on their database structure and how they deal with things)

Or should they give the player the character as it is now?

But how do they know the player was hacked? They don't. This could just be someone who sold a character and profited from it and now want it back after hearing about Crucible. So do they have a new policy of returning all characters sold if the player claims they were hacked and needs their login information?

You can see the type of mess that creates. It is a tough one for them.

On the plus side, your friend has you around to help them get back on their feet and back into the game. Yeah, re-training all those skills is a PITA but ... on the other hand ... they could also buy a pilot of the bazaar.

Some of the answers above are a waste.

The problem is theres no right answer for CCP they screw over an innocent victim either way. So its best to screw over the one who made a mistake and didnt protect their account.

The only other alternative to what they did would be to give you a premade character - Im guessing they just dont want to start doing that.

Im sure there are/were other ways to verify account securities, such as IP addresses, credit card details, history of payments, nature of character transfers etc etc

Are you being intentionally dense for the sake of discussion?

As I explained this has nothing to do with the amount of time elapsed nor does it concern effort to dig through data bases.

There are 2 innocent parties - one must accept the damage. CCP is going to side with the one who did not screw up and allow their account to be hacked.

Hypothetically you mean.

There is only one party that is somewhat innocent- the original player whose account was hacked. The person currently holding the char in question could well be just another alt of the hacker/ thief. This would be especially true if the transfer occurred through a private sale, as in this, hypothetical, example

Yeah true, I suppose. Except if CCP were to see when the account details were changed prior to the char transfer. Otherwise it could indeed look like the original player is simply trying to get back a high skill point character. If it were shown that the account details were changed though, it would lean towards the idea that someone usurped the account

Again hypothetically speaking.

The thing is, there are upwards of thirty thousand people playing EVE at any given moment, each of which is creating dozens of entries into the database. Tracing the information you suggest means finding the one out-pf-place entry among millions of similar entries.

There is, eventually, a point where policy has to give way to practicality.