Raiding, the Bank.

Raiding was OK last night, but to be honest my heart wasn’t in it. Nothing to do with the game though, I’d just had a hard day at work and the last thing I wanted to do was anything ‘organised’. Ever feel that way, when you just want to chill? I think it was obvious a few were feeling the same way as we had some silly wipes, the last two I was involved in and were to do with the pulls on the Three Sages in Palace. First pull went fine until I died, then second pull someone pulled before I had finished my countdown so my Sage ran off, then third pull I clicked my taunt a second or so too early and with a bit of delay on the countdown over voice too this meant I got all three sages on the pull. Lazy mistakes really. These are easy fights and we have done them what seems like a million times with no issue at all. I honestly think we were all a bit lethargic with it yesterday. But, it’s the Christmas break from our raids and they won’t now resume until January, so I’m reckoning everyone, including myself will turn up at the start of the New Year all refreshed and ready to rumble. We are going to be running a few raids just for alt loots, but those will be run of the mill farming missions.

Of course the New Year will bring a new expansion too, and with that comes more raid loot. We know it’s always the same, the next expansions kits is usually far far better than the old exiting expansions stuff. Which got me to thinking. The kit at end game currently is ridiculously tough stuff, so goodness knows what the new stuff will be like. We will all be soloing Nagafen before we know it. One thing that is quite interesting about the new expansion is the announcement that they are not just going to be regurgitating the old armour looks. There have been some pretty cool looking sets recently (mainly on the marketplace) and those are the Heritage Armour sets. SoE have announced that instead of just changing the texture to old armour layouts like they normally do, they will be designing new kit from scratch with some (apparently) great looks. EQ2 Wire has a piece on this and there is comment here from Covic on what he plans to put in place. Sounds quite interesting. Now if only they could spend the same amount of time trying to get my toon to sit in a chair or lie down..

Nasty stuff this week in Guild. One of our leaders defunct accounts was reactivated by someone who stole it, they logged in with an alt, then one of our other leaders saw the alt, thought, ‘Oh, there’s....’, and promptly promoted the alt to leader and all the privileges that go with the rank, like bank 4 access. The person who had stolen the account then went and cleared the hundreds of plat from our guild bank. Now I know the dude who owns this account and I think it extremely unlikely it is him. For one, I have had a lot of conversations with this dude and from his general demeanour, I am confident that theft is something he would dislike immensely. Unless of course he has the most amazing scheming mind ever and has been planning this mini heist for years, lol. Not likely. I know you can never know for sure whether someone is responsible or not. But, unless someone is actually caught with their hands in the till it’s hard to say for sure. I confident it’s not the actual owner of the account and certainly haven’t had any of the warning signals at all from this particular leader, in fact far from it and the opposite. Secondly, he has the kit and toons to fund his own game play. It wouldn’t be hard for him to make lots of plat legitimately. I like the guy a huge load but even so if putting my like for him aside, I really do not think he would do something like that. So that leaves us with hackers. Now I don’t know enough about this to comment really, but I do know it’s happened plenty of times before. Some from real hackers, others coz folks are lax with their account security.

Our Guild changed its access rights to the main guild bank for this very reason. It was only about 18 months ago that one of the junior officers (who back then had access to the Guild Bank) logged in and stole all the money from the guild bank. The rights they had back then gave them full access as an officer. Those got changed very quickly after that and SoE reimbursed us. But the problem still remains really. We have a system where you have to let someone have access, and currently it is only leaders in our guild, which I think is as it should be. That doesn’t avoid however, when one of the leaders gets hacked. I guess it’s a vulnerability we have to live with. There are some changes I think needs putting in place. For example, one of our leaders is such a warm trusting fellow that I know he would pass his log in details to someone he ‘trusted’. That kinda thing can come back to bite you on the arse. Not because necessarily the person you trusted is going to shaft you. But what about their roommate who we don’t know but can quite clearly see the notepad with the log in details on, or their brother, or sister, or bent uncle? You pass your log in details to someone and you could be leaving yourself open. But a few of our leaders could be that trusting, they are all so nice.

Anyhow, it’s over and done with now, and to be honest it’s nowhere near as bad as last time where one of our own stole from us and we never found out who it was. SoE wouldn’t tell us but they did suspend the persons account for three days. Problem is with such a large guild there were many who weren’t on during those days, so we still never found out who did that. For all we know they could still be with us today. That created quite a bit of bad feeling really. At least this time it looks like it’s not a guildy but hacker ‘fun’ that’s been responsible. Still not nice but we move on. We have already done one PR plat raid to help replenish the lost plat. A few more runs and we should have enough to cover our rent for a while anyhow!

As for your own account security, personally I would only ever pass my log in details to two people. That’s because I know those particular two would treat the information with the same care I do and my details would be safe. I haven’t though and no one has my details apart from me as I haven’t yet had the need to pass them to one of those two folks. Aside from that, even folks I know well in the guild I wouldn’t give me details to. Not because I don’t trust them, just because I don’t know the folks they hang with, or how tight their security is. Oh, the two I would share my details with, well, let’s just say one of them is not my wife. She leaves her handbag on the table when she goes to the loo in a bar for goodness sake! I wouldn’t trust Ema with important stuff like that. It would end up on the forums or Facebook within a week ;)

Keep your accounts safe. Take a moment to go change your passwords

Be well.