---

Don’t look now folks, but week three is upon us and the game
still shows no signs of slowing down. Even with the empty promises that
many mouth breathers are making over on the official style="font-style: italic;">Rift forums that
they have indeed canceled their accounts, I still find some peak hours
where I have to wait for my chance to log in. Hey, I don’t mind the
queue so much anymore; it gives me pause enough to peruse said forums
for valuable info or vapid douchebaggery – mostly the latter. However
there seems to be a marked uptick in the amount of valid and thoughtful
posts, including several threads that offer constructive criticism and
honest feature requests.

This weeks Soulwalker will look at the hottest topic among the
fledgling community, that of account security. I promise not to rant
too heavily, you see I spent most of that pent up rage on an href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/rift/editorials/winning">editorial
this week that looked at our unrealistic expectations of an
MMOG
launch. Actually I may have enough left for some more expletive laced
tirade – so don’t say you weren’t warned.

---

Is it just me, or do you also hear that catchy tune made popular last
year by the Gregory Brothers whenever someone talks about their account
getting hacked? You know the one, it advises you to href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw&feature=relmfu">hide
your kids, hide your wife – only in my head the words are
far funnier. No? Maybe it is just me.



Its ok, you don’t have to come and confess because they ARE looking for
you and if you play these games long enough, chances are they will find
you. Fueled by the insatiable 3rd party currency trade, or gold farming
as it is more commonly known, account hacking is at an all time high.
You see it’s easier to hack your account and steal your stuff than it
is to go out and slave over a hot keyboard and pilfer gold the old
fashioned way. Of course the truly ironic part is that many of those
that have been hacked are the very same folks buying up in games
currencies from these insidious famers. An ironic cycle for sure.



As with most bad things that happen to us, its easier to blame someone
else than it is to step up and take personal responsibility. But like
most things in life this isn’t a black and white issue; too often
players who do seemingly everything right can get malicious code snuck
onto their machines – most recently through href="http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-06.html">vulnerabilities
in Adobe
Flash. What can further compound the issue is that many MMOG
players
support gold selling companies without even knowing it. The parent
companies of some of the biggest gold selling sites in the world have
snapped up many well respected community and media websites, creating a
layer of protection for them and generating advertising revenue off of
many users who would never knowingly participate.

Is there a real long term solution to this epidemic? Some would say
that the only solution would be to take the item shop model found in
free-to-play games a step farther and have the publishers themselves
sell virtual currencies. However even with a successful implementation,
such as the live exchange servers in EQ2, the idea is far too radical
to fly with today’s gamers and would alienate the masses. As long as
there is big money to be made, and as long as players are willing to
pay for these services, the illicit 3rd party market will continue to
flourish.



What can we do then to keep our accounts as safe as possible? Here are
a couple of tips to help you safeguard your logins beyond the typical
responses of “don’t go to bad sites” and “run a virus/malware scan lulz”

• Use a randomly generated
  password; sites such as random.org are a nice resource for this.

• Change your password often.

• Try not to use the same
  password on more than one site. 

• Create a text file with your
  passwords in them and copy/paste them into the login screen
  

[protip]

• If the game login is done
  with an email address for the use name, create a unique email account
  for that game using a free service such as Gmail or Yahoo. These
  services have built in forwarding features that will allow you to
  manage any messages from your main account.

[/protip]

• Don’t support the gold
  selling marketplace – directly or indirectly. 

I am definitely of
the opinion that account security is the player’s
responsibility, but perhaps adding a tertiary level of security would
be well advised for Trion given the massive interest it has garnered
from gold sellers. We hope to have a direct response from the style="font-style: italic;">Rift team
soon as we will be sitting down with them this week at href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/events/paxeast/2011">PAX
East – stay
tuned for that interview, it should be another good one.





And now for something completely different:

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align="center">

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