Information Diablo III Accounts Hacked

Remember people: every time you support Bobby by buying his shitty games, you are supporting the Chinese gold farmers in their never ending quest in raping all cows.

Supporting Blizzards means you support cow rape. Don't support cow rape.

 

The Wealth Of Nations

:wind whispers through:

All this mystery, and the counter spin that may be misdirecting attention to a clear focus on D-blo3 website security weaknesses.

All this redistribution of wealth, and the ways and means are lost in the warp and weave of the, ah, an Invisible Hand(™ Adam Smith: 1758,1759,1776).

All this loss, and all this gain, to what unintended greater good.

:/wind whispers through:





4too

 

Wonderful .

 

Goddamned, why wasn't I born in China? WHY?

 

How much ingame gold will it be for 1 real? curently hackers are stripping 1 per minute with an average of 400k gold each making 24mil an hour. I wonder how does that compare to minimal wage....

 

I think you just cracked the secret of the Chinese economy.

 

From what I saw it appears to be 5 dolars per 100k

 

http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6266573/3ds-is-brilliant-activision-coo-

Can't see security guyz

 

I bet they don't have toilets either, and why waste time eating when they could be making games!

 

If you work 8h a day at a 5 day working week you can be making 2.5mil a year... I'm going to become a d3 hacker, thank you very much. Now I'm off to buy diablo

 

I was playing with Jon from GameBanshee and literally saw his account get hacked mid-game. Someone joined on another character and emptied his stash out before he got kicked back off.

Great stuff, Blizzard.

 

Warning.....massively overlong train-of-thought TL;DR approaching:

As much as I'm laughing at Blizzard, it's also kind of disappointing in terms of the potential flow-on effect for PC gaming generally. Blizzard aren't much better than the console dev's, but that's sort of the point - they've long been the shining disproof of the notion that you can't make big money selling PC-exclusives and PC-oriented genres. Other companies would have made Starcraft 2 into 'an FPS inspired by the Starcraft universe, capturing the essence of the original Starcraft through exciting modern gameplay!' In this age of major-label-decline, it's more surprising that a company like Blizzard retains the isometric perspective and traditional game genres than it is that they trash them through removal of player choice and loss of the IP's mood. It's really quite a minor miracle that the RTS genre even exists, given what has happened to almost all other PC genres.

I can't help but wonder how much pressure Blizzard will be facing from young post-PC-era turks going around the chain of comand to Activision and promising them that they can make Blizzard many times more profitable by adapting their IPs to console-friendly genres, dropping 'dead genres' like RTSs, and making Playstation the core system for Diablo because PC gamers will buy a shitty port anyway. The massive sales of Starcraft 2 and Diablo head that off, but this kind of shenanigans makes idiot execs who don't understand their customer base think that they can achieve even more sales on consoles without this kind of hassle.

So yeah, I'm in two minds on this one. It's good insofar as it's a blow struck against online-only gaming - but I suspect that ship has already sailed. Oddly enough, if Diablo 3 was a PURE single-player game, they could pull this online-only shit without having to worry about hacking - it's only the social features like auction houses and goldfarming that makes it a problem for them. I couldn't really give a shit what Bioware do with their IPs right now, but I can see how making DA3 online-only would look attractive to them without opening up the same worries as D3, as there'd be no means for hackers to transfer items away from players, let alone monetise them. People were talking about online-only gaming being the inevitable future as soon as they realised that there really wasn't any way that developers could stop piracy, and it's not much a surprise that it's started to arrive. I'm hoping that this event makes publishers re-assess whether online-only will be any more secure from piracy than offline gaming (though there'd need to be a means of piracy that doesn't rely on private servers - that just creates a great big target on which to drop a shitstorming lawsuit + criminal charges) - they already know that first week delays and shitty launches don't deter customers, nor theft of customer information including credit card details (the 'it won't happen to me' effect - also known as the 'how the fuck did Sony escape without even a dip in profits???' doctrine), so I'm guessing the only thing that can stop online-only now is if it turns out to be just as vulnerable for greater cost than offline DRM.

But conversely, I'd hate it if this just adds another nail in the 'LONG-JOHN SILVER IS MAKING PC GAMES UNPROFITABLE!' flavoured coffin. Yes, I'm as excited for the kickstarter incline as anyone - I'm from a generation that played the 80s rpgs when they came out, and I know numerous friends who would love to jump back into gaming if only the games they like were there. For all the talk of broadening the computer game customer base, when you have to juggle kids and work you really don't have time for online gaming - maybe the odd squad-based game, but even then you won't have time to 'get good' at it, let alone to play the mmorpg grinding games. All this online gaming crap is wasted on the older generation of gamers - and we're the ones with enough money to not think twice about paying full price for games. When you've been at work all day, then looking after the kids and spouse all evening, you don't game to get online and deal with somebody ELSE'S rugrats. You do it so you can be antisocial, to chill out by yourself for an hour. Why devote the industry to kids who can only pay for a handful of games a year (including presents), when there's a market of dedicated gamers who are willing and able to buy games like they used to buy music albums, 10-20 a year even (including retros/indies/sales that is), if only games for them were there?

But to turn that around, the kickstarter games need to do more than just be great games (and that in itself isn't exactly locked in yet) - and they need to do more than have a Minecraft mega-success (how many AAA+ Minecraft clones have you seen?). They would need to produce a whole series of Minecraft-level successes, beating the big players time after time until it just becomes impossible to dismiss them as freak successes anymore (if that is even possible - note how when Bioware finally did another party-based semi-tactical rpg that was promoted as a spiritual sequel to BG, that became their biggest seller despite being pretty average in a lot of ways, they couldn't bring themselves to accept that people might actually want games with larger parties and more tractical options and instead insisted that it was all because of their shitty Mills and Boon dating-sim component...to the point where they sank DA2 by working on that assumption). It would make it a LOT easier for the kickstarter games to have that kind of effect if there was already an example of an AAA developer producing PC-genre games and making bucketloads of money from an underserviced market.

 

I missed those.

 

I think the main reason why da2 sucks is that the dev are gay... and want to make games about gay elvish sex - can't blame them if thats what their dreams are about. Unfortunately for bio non gay community kinda wants different games. Funny thing is that they have not learned their lesson and thought that they've put in too little gay sex and are going to fix that in DA3. With their reputation gone, and most DA2 sales went purely on that, I wonder how many their new game will sell.
All is not lost through - have faith in free market and with time our dreams will come true... my only fear is that it might not happen during my lifespan.

 

It's not for gays. It's for women, which are a significant part of the Bioware audience.

 

Blizzard finally admits it's an IP exploit and not just "keylogger".

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5150110791#3

Unedited post:

 

What's an IP exploit?

 

I can tell you it was less than 17 characters

 

- Do you think most of the cases are just people being careless with their passwords and/or getting keylogged?

 

- I doubt it.
- I don't know if it was maximum length, but Jon uses different passwords for every site and I doubt he went for "puppies" or something similarly easy to crack. He's started using stuff like 3VCAaIfHnC0vD8IW now (yay LastPass).
- None of those excuse Blizzard's poor security all around.

 

- I think there is something else going on and Blizzard is not making official announcements yet since:

1- It would be bad PR and hurt sales.

2- They are not sure or are not ready to announce it yet.

3- The hacks happened recently and they are still working through them.

I've heard far too many reports about someone having the authenticators and still getting hacked. The odd thing is people, from what I have researched, are only losing their Diablo items. Not their accounts, not their WoW accounts, not anything else. They get kicked and have their items taken... and that is it. It's a bit too specific to just assume it's a keylogger since they could get other things from all these users... but I've heard of nothing. If it were mass keyloggers, wouldn't we hear about more cases where people have had their Diablo 3 accounts hacked AND their other accounts on other sites also hacked?

 

Activizzard is going to declare war on China, send in Xtreme Sleeveless Soldierz.