[Balfree]

My friend can't get his account back.

We won't get into details of how he lost it, and any comments in that regard will be removed.

If you lost your account due to lost password, hacking, viruses or whatever, post here and say something.

I feel like we as a community should try and get SE's attention on the urgency of this matter, people are taking months to get their accounts back, this is unacceptable, if other online services took this long to recover and restore people's accounts, they wouldn't last long in today's online market, it is a serious situation because people are paying for good service and in my opinion this is as low as it can get from a customer's perspective.

"SE is investigating."
- And why does it take so long? Get more employees if that's what it takes, we are paying customers and we demand better service.

"It takes time to investigate."
- Then make it so it won't take as much time, devise a system where it can be solved upon providing CC information, registration codes, POL ID, EVEN PERSONAL DOCUMENTATION (like the driver's license), what else do you need? Just what is the investigation about? Reading all the user's logs? AH Transactions? History? ... just what are you investigating that it's taking so long for your employees to give your customers a solution?

SE needs to realize that many people will take their business elsewhere unless they fix their customer service FAST.

1. I realize people need to take care of their own accounts.
- And SE needs to realize that if their service is this restrictive, there will be more harm than good in their future subscriptions.

2. I realize SE doesn't suffer much for losing one or two customers.
- But FFXI is already frowned upon by so many for so many reasons, if SE keeps hurtin itself and slowly but eventually shuts down FFXI, we won't be able to play the game we love.

3. I realize you have your own opinions.
- But if you have nothing worth saying, don't reply to this thread.

All that being said, please, post a reply if you have lost the access to your account and are in the grueling process of trying to recover it.

Also, if you did manage to ever get your account back, please do post any relevant info, like how long it took, was your character fully restored? did you lose valuables? Try to describe the process you had to go through to restore your account if you may, thank you.

[MrMageo]

Not myself but my buddy (another account I own and pay for) This is a segment of the email I received from SE on August 11th (at my request) after almost a 6 month wait, he still does not have access. It took them 5 months to shut down the account thankfully my CC company was able to stop payment (unfortunately not before a server transfer charge which SE has still not reapplied.)

Report Date: February 21st 08
Recovery of POL : August 10th 08

Reasons: Hacked Account

Investigations: Investigating Account details, Tracing log in identification, Item Logs, Trade Logs, Chat Logs.

Notes:

Was used in gil transfer services of RMT

Was banned June 19th of 2008

Status:

Confirmed Recover for Mr. Kurtis J Moore Aug 10th 08(pending further investigation).

Notes:

Further Investigation Required into item content prior to February 21st 2008.
Further investigation of past character logs prior to February 1st 2008.




Full access and recovery pending further investigation. Please feel free to Use other POL services such as chat and mail. Unfortunately we can not accommodate to you content ID's for additional content at this time. Thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,

Square-Enix Customer Service



I quit 3 paid accounts good bye,

Sincerely My ASS

I mean seriously my bud has waited 6 months and now has to wait longer while SE checks item logs, and other logs from before februray that is total BS.

[Aksannyi]

Two people I know got hacked and got all of their stuff back within two weeks. SE seems to be entirely random with the return of hacked accounts. Perhaps some consistency would be nice, or more notifications to those whose accounts are taking longer to recover, so that they at least know where they stand.

[MrMageo]

Oh I guess I should add you are legally entitled to a overall report on the status of your account. Via Email or Paper Mail. You can request anything ever done to your account or in sections (such as I did from january to august)

As a company that provides a product you are entitled to know exactly what is going at any time. They (SE) can not deny reports nor can the legally prolong anything. Your monthly fee gives you access to everything they are "investigating".

Next time phone them and request an email of you account history, etc. For two reasons.

1. As soon as your account is hacked they have the password to access your personal page which gives them (the hacker) access to your entire personal identification (address, name, birth date etc etc etc)

2. As soon as you are hacked your credit card will still be registered to the account which allows them to make charges to it through server changes. (like what happened to me)

These are strict violations of the privacy acts of most countries and if SE is operating in those countries they are legally bound to upholding this strict law. (Which they have failed to do with the apparant ease of hacking.)

You have rights to know what is going on, so use them.

[Raydeus]

It seems like they are able to recover accounts recently lost, but have huge issues recovering accounts that were lost a more than few months ago.

Maybe they did implement a better system for recovery process, but it just doesn't apply for accounts lost prior this?



PS > This is solely speculation, thankfully no one I know has lost their account so far due to hacking.

A friend did lose his account like more than a year ago (for other reasons) and SE was completely unable to recover it. Which is why I think the system change happened very recently (probably within the last 4 months or so).

[MrMageo]

Yes they just did update there security settings and such so I imagine it is "easier" to track down lost accounts.

However,

Account ID:
Password:

Should be all you need. Most places keep a lists of your common passwords for easy over the web recovery. They just reset it to a recent password on the list if you can verify Identity. This is how I recovered both my online banking and credit card passwords when the companies computer software crashed, all passwords had to be reset to the original password issued.

[Ziero]

I thought they confirmed it was easier to recovery newly hacked accounts because the information is still fresh on the server.