Customer Service Concerns Before Joining

[BigJake]

I have been lurking and observing this server community for about a week, and had been hopeful that this was a place that I could feel comfortable joining.

First, Nostalrius seems to have their stuff together with the scripting and all of that. To even contemplate being able to open a PVE server speaks to that. I've played around with ManGOS and stuff before so I know that it is all non-trivial, so congrats there. I also appreciate the zero-tolerance policy on gold buying, botting, and hacking.

However, I start to get a lot of cold and pricklies when I start to read posts about things like players losing max level toons, only to have the administration basically shrug it off. In some cases, these seem like players who know what they are doing and presumably would not delete a max level toon "for the lols."

Likewise there seems to be a lot of claims of accounts being lost, compromised, and stolen, with the same shrugtastic response. I also boggle over the 10-day inactivity cooldown on resetting an account password. I have never seen that anywhere else on the internet, and it seems less than optimal.

An often hidden, but core feature of the Blizzard experience is knowing that they have your back when the chips are down, for instance, having the security of knowing that an accidentally deleted toon can be recovered. Heck, Blizzard will recover a deleted toon even in the event that you delete it intentionally and just regret it later, assuming not too much time has passed. It should be pretty trivial to restore a toon from a backup database. Blizzard has also been known to go out of their way to restore rightful account ownership.

I realize that as a free service Nostalrius may not have the resources to doggedly pursue every case of someone crying over lost progress when they did not take proper precautions, and I realize that some of these claims made by players may be false, though there are some that chillingly give me pause, like the player who recently switched to an alt for a few seconds only to find their main gone when they tried to return.

Unless I start seeing some of these more concerning situations turned around, I won't be able to join all of you on Nostalrius, despite being very excited to see a PVE private server opening up.

[AverageJoe]

There's always going to be people complaining about being banned or saying they don't know how characters, gear, gold, etc. was deleted on their account in the Support forums. A long time ago, there was no "Account Issues" subforum, there was only a "Support" forum but account problems became such a frequent topic that they actually made a subforum dedicated solely to accounts.

Many of them are just feigning ignorance if they broke the rules, or are backpedaling after they dabbled in some forbidden activities (Shared accounts with others online but the ones they trusted changed their password, tried to sell their account on third party websites but had it stolen because of compromising their account info, etc.), or some are even incredibly gullible and tricked by others. I'm reminded of that one guy who posted in Support saying he "lost" all of his armor and weapons and he needed the staff to restore it. Later someone ratted him out saying he tried a macro someone shared on 4chan that deletes all your gear. Very rarely do any of them fess up and tell the whole story; you're only getting half the truth from them. Long story short, as long as you don't engage in any activity that's against the terms of use and are smart about your account security (Don't share, don't download cheats or hacks, avoid questionable websites, etc.), you'll be fine.

We pretty much go through this every month. There's always a new ban wave after some cheat or exploit is discovered and those who heavily abused it are banned. For about two months following the server's launch, there was a ton of bans for people using hacks and nearly every topic that protested their ban shared a common theme: "I didn't hack, it was my brother who used my account." Since Nostalrius has grown very popular in recent months, there's been an uptick in gold sellers spamming chat channels and players buying gold. One admin mentioned this in a post recently saying they're becoming more efficient at busting gold sellers: https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic. ... 10#p129082.

tl;dr: You should probably quit browsing the Support forum if seeing so many ban threads disturbs you. Keep in mind there's nearly 70,000 active accounts on Nostalrius; 30,000 of which play everyday and nearly 8,000 players online everyday during peak hours. In comparison, there's only 500 bans per week, majority of which are either bots or gold sellers. You're seeing but a fraction of the players complaining about these things. You'd be doing yourself an incredible disservice to not play on Nostalrius if only because the Support forum makes you uneasy.
https://en.nostalrius.org/assets/upload ... aphics.jpg

Also, the password reset feature was never intended nor designed to aid in the recovery of lost or stolen accounts. It was created solely to help players who hadn't played in a long time and legitimately forgot their password. The terms of use clearly defines account security as being solely up to the player; Nostalrius assumes no responsibility. This server has always put a focus on making it inconvenient for hackers to steal accounts, such as the 15 minute temporary IP ban you can get when logging in too many times unsuccessfully or being unable to reset someone else's password if they're actively playing the account. If the account is already compromised, you're basically SOL but it should never get to that point in the first place.

There's a lot of threads actively discussing the role of security and account protection more in-depth in the Suggestions forum if you want to voice your concerns.

[Castro]

There's always going to be people complaining about being banned or saying they don't know how characters, gear, gold, etc. was deleted on their account in the Support forums. A long time ago, there was no "Account Issues" subforum, there was only a "Support" forum but account problems became such a frequent topic that they actually made a subforum dedicated solely to accounts.

Assuming your server is based on some kind of Mangos version there may actually be a real issue with characters being moved/deleted: https://github.com/cmangos/issues/issues/735 With as many players as you got on your server this could explain the frequent reports.

[SeTiDaYeTi]

Necroing a little here: the link you report, Castro, clearly states that the OP's the *only* user who reported that bug to the cmangos devs. It's quite unluckily a "common" bug.