Account Security / Precautions

Alert

People's accounts get hacked sometimes - this has happened to someone in the faction at one point. What can happen is that the hacker can force log you (sign you out) while you are playing, he signs in as you, sells all your stuff and by the time you manage to get back on, you have nothing. You basically have a butt-naked character.

Safety measures you can take:

1. First of all, give your account a strong password. Use capitals, lower case and numbers in the password. (don't use passwords like "peanut" - this is very easy to break. Use something like Peanut8FloWeR. Hard to remember, but also hard to break.)
2. When you sign in, go to your bank, put all your most valuable items and most of your money in the bank and give it a password. To do this: Go to Bank > Change Safe Code. By default you don't have a code, so leave the first field blank. Enter your new password in the next to fields.
3. As an extra precaution you can use Safety Lock. This is useful, but it can also be very annoying. If you put safety lock on you cannot sell, buy, drop or repair anything (on all your characters) for the set amount of time. Most non-PKer people find it very annoying, so be careful when/if you set it. If you do change it and then want to change it back, remember that it takes 3 days to take effect. EXAMPLE: if you change it to 2 hours, then for 2 hours after you log in you cannot trade/drop anything. If you want to do CS you can't, if you want to repair, you can't, if you want to give someone something, you can't. You get annoyed so you set it back to 1 minute... BUT, now you have to wait three days before it actually does go back to one minute. So for three days you still can't trade in those first 2 hours.
Advantage: The hacker can't do anything with your account inside the safety lock time. PKers find the SL very useful, since if they (as red names) get killed during the SL time, they won't drop anything.
Disadvantage: Annoying
4. Take screenshots of your inventory, bank and pet bag. If something happens at least you have proof of what you had before. Whether this will make any difference to the GM's, I'm not sure.
5. DON'T give out your account information to ANYONE, not even your best friend in the game.

Extra thought: The factionite that got hacked had been involved in a PK-battle the day before he got hacked. It could be that one of the people he got involved with was responsible for the hack. So PKing might be dangerous in more than one way...


If you have any more ideas or thoughts on security, let me know please.