(09-16-2013, 11:45 AM)Gimlette Wrote: "Hacked" ...or were they simply stupid enough to go to the wrong sites or to give their information for powerleveling. Â If they were truly hacked i'll feel badly for them...but honestly, i wonder how many of them made a bad choice.
It's highly likely that more than a few of the compromised accounts are the result of people getting hold of Riot's password databases a little while ago. A lot of people may well have used the same password for FFXIV and never changed it, under the assumption that the people who got Riot's data could only get into their account on there.
'Hacked' is something of a scary buzzword, but if you use the same password in more than one place then it's scary easy to compromise your account. People get hold of the databases of old forums all the time, and then sell the lists of usernames and PWs on to companies like our gold sellers. Then the sellers check all the different name/email/pw combinations in various places to see how many match up. Sadly, enough usually seem to to make this profitable.
But that's largely off-topic. The good news is that this will probably slow down after the 30 free days are over. People aren't going to continue to pay subs for their compromised accounts, after all, so after the first 30 days there's going to be a much higher barrier to the gold sellers getting in. There'll likely be some still, but in more manageable amounts.
And if FFXI is any indication, chances are that SE are/have been collecting information right now and plan to do mass bannings at some point in the future. They like to let these things go on long enough to get to the cause and to put together a huge list of suspects, so that they can deal with them all at once in a short period of time, to avoid people finding ways around it.
For now, the important things are to use a secure, unique password and the authenticator if possible and to not interact with gil sellers in any way other than blacklisting them. Even sending them a 'stop doing that' message could potentially false flag you (and since they're being controlled by bots, they won't see it anyway). You don't get in trouble or anything, but if they look at their records and see that after someone offered to sell gil you were sending them a Tell then they're going to have to investigate that - at best you'd just be wasting their time.
