[eticket109]

Has anyone in here actually dealt with a lost account?

POL doesn't ask for the original information to verify an account. They ask for the current information. How can that, in any way, be beneficial to the person that lost their account by whatever means?

The policy is by no means consistent either. Some people have been able to provide registration codes and reclaim accounts, others have not. When the general advice is 'keep calling until someone helps you', then things need to change in my opinion.

I agree that some responsibility lies with the account holder, but to say that SE bears no responsibility for resolving the situation is ludicrous. Yes, the recent hackings were the result of a nasty keylogger embedded into a script on a well established FFXI resource site. Most people would know how to protect themselves from such things but not everyone is as computer savvy as we are. I deal with college educated professionals on an hourly basis that don't know where the Start button is in Windows. It's easy to see how someone playing a game in their free time for fun may not be up on what Active-X or Javascript is. Sure it's obviously something they should educate themselves on but that by no means should wipe any obligation off the hands of SE and POL.

Here's a more personal example. Just about 3 months ago, my linkshell's forum database was hacked. All in all, 8 accounts were compromised and moved to different servers. The compromised accounts had shared login information within the PM system of the forums. This wasn't someone casually handing out their info. These were sacks sharing info due to being unable to miss a run or two longtime friends giving info out to watch each other's accounts during a trip or whatever. They weren't IMing or emailing the info. They weren't sending it in game. They were doing so on a private and secured site. Luckily, 7 of the 8 were able to recover their accounts. However, despite SE/POL admitting the accounts were compromised, not a single account had their server transfers reversed.

Recovering lost items and restoring the account to wear it was before may not be an easy task. I can grant you that. Other MMOs though, especially that real big one, seem to have an easier time at restoration though. Maybe that's something to look into. However, the reclaiming process itself is horrendous and can easily be changed. Simply allowing someone to reclaim their account by giving their original billing info would be a huge step forward.