Account Compromised! Guild Bank Looted!

Fortunately it wasn’t my account.

Nor was it any of the accounts of the regular instance group.

One of our friends, who rolled up a character and started playing about the time we switched over to horde (because isn’t that how it always goes?) and kept playing on Eldre’Thalas in our guild while we were off to Lightninghoof, his account was compromised.

Among the things assaulted was our guild bank, to which he had full access.

I would not have even noticed this except that Blizzard sent me an email this morning about the guild bank.

Recently one of the members of your guild was the victim of an account compromise, and during the course of our investigation it was discovered that items were removed from the guild bank while the account was out of the control of your guild member. The items have been returned to you as attachments to an in-game mail. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

So I logged in to WoW and, sure enough, there were 7 in-game messages waiting for me, all with attachments.

I’m not sure we would have missed a lot of the stuff that was taken.  According to the bank log, it all went out the door at least 11 days ago, and it might have been a lot longer before any of use took note of our own accord.

Of course, our guild bank wasn’t exactly a Fort Knox of treasure.

There were a few minor valuables in guild bank.  They took all the elixirs, all the primals, all the eternals, a pile of Northrend herbs, some potions, some imbued netherweave.

But they also took a bunch of crap.  Netherweave bandages?  Two Scrolls of Intellect III?  A copper modulator?  Health and Mana injector kits?  All four stacks of pygmy oil?  Really?

And the crap list is made more amusing by the list of stuff they left behind.  That stack of khorium ore which was next to the copper modulator.  A quarter of a bank tab of enchanting materials.  All the motes and crystallized materials that could have been turned into primals and eternals.  Heck, they even left behind a Scroll of Intellect VII, preferring the III instead I guess.

But we have it all back now.  And I was prompted to kick a few really old accounts from the guild, lest we find out that their accounts got phished and reactivated.

More tales of accounts being hacked and Blizzard having to retrieve things.

The Strangest Parental Control Default

I looking at the new and, in my opinion, screwed up parental controls page, I actually played with some of the controls I normally do not use, just to see if they changed as well.

One of the options allows you to select a pre-filled out time grid.  You have the options, that are kind of self-explanatory, of:

• Weekends only (all weekend hours)
• Friday and weekends only (which is really Friday after 3pm, so after school)
• After school and weekends (3-6pm daily and weekends)
• After 6pm and weekends (6pm to midnight daily and weekends)
• After 3pm and weekends (3pm to midnight daily and weekends, i.e. sleep, go to school, play WoW life)
• Break Time

None of those are particularly useful to me.  They would allow my daughter to play much more WoW than we would want.  But that is why I am annoyed by the new parental time control grid, because we dole out time in much smaller increments when we feel it is appropriate.

Now you will notice that I did not explain the option “Break Time.”  The others were, as I said, somewhat comprehensible by their description.  You knew what to expect, if not in full detail.

So I had to see what that last time template offered.

I've got your break time right here

Essentially, “Break Time” sets a pattern of regular two and a half hour play slots, each broken up by a 30 minute break.

This limits you to 20 hours of play a day and makes you step away from the computer at least every three hours.

I’m just wondering who would find this sort of schedule useful.

That is way too much play time to be allowed a child and way too regulated for any normal person that I know to follow and be aware of.  I would, I am sure, constantly be logging on to play about 10 minutes before break time.

Would you find this useful?  Do you know somebody who would?