According to the Times Online, Britain police have been given the green light to hack your computer if they think you may be involved in any online crime. This will allow officers to hack your computer in your home, office or even a hotel room to gather evidence.
Do i think this is to intrusive? Yes. But at the same time we see it daily here that gamers are scammed or hacked. Most criminals here know that not much will or can be done. We do turn over evidence every time we get a request from law enforcement. We have even seen a few people jailed after scamming in our forums. But not enough of them are caught or even investigated. So do I think more needs to be done? Yes.
So now we have a catch 22. Yes it's intrusive but yes we need something more done. Prevention is the ultimate answer. But until people can figure out how to not get scammed or hacked we need the assistance of the authorities to prosecute.
So my thoughts are that we let them try this. If the overall benefit to the public is good then maybe we can put up with it.
"Attention EA: Your customer service sucks" This is a quote from the home page of Stratics. www.stratics.com . The actually full statement is as follows.
Quote:
Adventures in Tech Support: EA Edition Submitted by SWATJester on Thu, 12/25/2008 - 21:53.
Attention EA: Your customer service sucks and I hate you. With that out of the way, Warhammer players, this is an example of what you can look forward to in dealing with EA's abysmal customer support.
They have a link for more of the article on their site. But the link is currently not working properly. Hopefully they will get that fixed because this opening statement really strikes a cord with me at the moment. You see. As a fan site of Ultima Online I've been dealing with EA support since 1997.
Now that someone at Stratics has opened the can of worms I feel it's time to spill my guts.
I'd like to start out by saying that EA does some things very well. One of those things is that they have made some great games. But they have a very corporate way of dealing with fans, players and resellers. They could use some big improvements in these areas.
Back in 1997 I started all of this buying, selling and trading of virtual items in Ultima Online. A group of us started offering game time codes in exchange for in game gold. We would then sell the gold on eBay and through the process would double our money. We would sell dozens of game time codes daily and sell hundreds of millions of gold pieces. Several of us made a living doing just this.
We would spend thousands of dollars monthly buying codes from EA. At first we would buy the game time cards in retail stores. Later we did get some good customer support by getting access to electronic versions of the codes. We were spending a lot of money with EA. Several of our brokers reported doing sales in the $150,000 to $300,000 range per year doing this. Having a contact at EA to support us was a good thing.
As the game had a lower number of subscribers the markets changed. We could no longer make good money selling the codes for gold. All of the brokers are gone these days except for just a few. www.markeedragon.net, www.uotreasures.com and www.uoresources.com. At MarkeeDragon.net we had been selling the gametime codes. We had been selling them for around 10 years. Last year we sold around $40,000 worth of the UO codes. You would think that would be enough we were spending to at least get a little support.
Recently we have pretty much run out of stock of the codes. We have not ben able to purchase them. EA keeps changing their tech support and no one knows at this time how to buy the codes any longer. Some of the tech support reps don't even know what the game Ultima Online is! How ridiculous is that? I'm sending you 40k a year in US dollars and I can't get any support? I have gone as far as contacting the producer of the game about this issue. I would think that the person running the show for the game would have a vested interest in the game making sales. I know they read my emails because I got a very hostile email back telling me to never contact him again. So at this time we just are not selling their codes any longer. It's not because we don't want to. It's not because our customers are not asking for them any longer. It's only because someone is lazy or has their head up their [censored].
Adding insult to injury: Markee Dragon's 11 year old UO account gets banned!
I did not tell anyone publicly about this until now. I did not feel like it would do any good for the gaming community other than to provide a little drama. But in the interest of someone at EA reading this and possibly thinking that improvements could be made and taking action. I'll go ahead and spill my guts and tell what happened.
6 months ago or so my main UO account was banned. The account had been active and open for more than 11 years. That's around $1600 in subscription fees for that account alone. When it was banned I contacted the former producer of the game who put me in touch with the current person who was responsible for the game. He phoned me and stated "We had a GM that went a little overboard and your account was deleted". I was very happy to have been contacted back. I had tried contacting through the normal support methods for help as to why the account was banned. The only information that I got was that it was banned for a gross violation of the terms of service in regards to duplicate items on the account. My thought was that maybe there was a new gold dupe I did not know about and we had taken in some gold that was duped.
Since it is impossible to know if what another character is handing you has been duped we have no way of knowing if the stuff is ok to own or not. In the past what has happened would be that anything that comes into your possession that was duped would just be deleted by the system during it's maintenance or whenever they check for duped items. This had happened to us a few times where we purchased items or currency and it later disappeared. After a few times of GMs telling us what happened we just learned to accept it and take it as a normal loss or cost of doing business.
This account by the way was no normal account. This was the main account that we did sales though. Sales that were not in violation of the TOS as we had been grandfathered in as a seller in the game since we were doing it because anyone had ever thought of making it a violation. On this account we had over 1 billion gold (worth several thousand dollars) and we had in game tokens, plus some other items.
So we pestered support for more information. If we were banned for having something on our account we wanted to know what it was. After all. If we were to avoid taking any dupe items onto our accounts in the future we need to know what it is we did so that we could take corrective actions to make sure it did not happen again. We don't want to take losses again but also we want to respect the policies of the game and do our best to abide by them. So we contacted support again asking for more information.
"Any future communication on this subject will be ignored" [censored]? That's the reply we got when asking how we could avoid this problem in the future. From that reply obviously we are a pest or we are the enemy. We have 3 or 4 other open accounts that were not banned. They did not tell us we could no longer be a customer. But with a reply like this they certainly told us to take a hike.
So with that I had to move up the chain of command and that's how I ended up getting the phone call from the acting producer of the game with the apology for the rouge GM. I had been told by him that they were having a meeting on how to compensate myself and a few other people who's accounts had been deleted. Deleted being the key term here. I believe it's always been EA's policy to just block the account when action is taken in case any actions needed to be reversed or if they needed to look at the account for more information. But this time it was deleted. So there was no way to know what all was on the account and there was no way to restore it. In UO they have to time warp a server back in time to restore information. Newer games do not have this issue generally.
When I pressed for a little more information I found out that our account had been deleted because of duped items on the account. I would say that the majority of the items on the account were more than 3 years old. We had previously sold items but we found it to not be very profitable. So we just left them on the account and did not do anything with them. Apparently it was some of these items that we were banned for. With the account having been deleted there would be no way for me to have them check to verify that the stuff was years old. Also there is the issue that a player has no way to know that an item has been duped unless they are duping the items themselves or they are told by someone they are duped. What a piss poor policy to ban us for something that we have little or no control over. (Suggestion for EA. This may sound stupid. but if you have the ability to identify an item as duped then you should just delete them or tag them as such. Tagging them would allow the players to see they have received a duped item. They will in many cases know where they got the item and they can avoid that source in the future. EA. You should be proactive and not reactive on this.)
I waited a couple of months for them to decide what was going to happen. I stopped getting any replies to my emails until out of the blue I did get a reply to one of them. It was very hostile telling me to no longer contact them on the issue. Since they were blocking me at this point. I went to another contact asking them if I had indeed done something wrong and had become the enemy. They replied that I was not the enemy but that the case was closed and I should not bring it up again. So I did not bring up the issue again. While I had their attention though I asked about another issue I was having. The purchasing of codes.
I let them know that I had been purchasing thousands of dollars worth of codes monthly and asked if they could let me know who we should be contacting for these now. Or if there was some change in the method for purchasing them. I never got a reply.
As most of you know. I'm pretty blunt and I speak my mind. Even though I was banned 6 months ago and the purchasing issues is about 3 months old I'm still really fired up about it. EA [censored] up on this and I'm tired of taking what feels like abuse. Why the hell do I deal with this crap? I feel like an abused wife who refuses to leave her husband. Well I've had a change a heart finally after 11 years. EA I'm leaving you! You can go [censored] yourself. I'm done wasting my energy on you now. Don't come back to me until you have fixed your issues. I've taken enough abuse and I'm out of here!
PS: If someone from EA is keeping score. I looked it up and we have purchased over 22,000 codes from you. New accounts, upgrades, gametime, token codes etc. Conservatively I can say we have spent over $250,000 on the purchases of your UO products. Nice way to treat someone who may have been your largest customer.
Exclusive for Markee Dragon members only. If you are looking to buy WoW or Conan accounts for yourself or as a Christmas present this may be the right time. This coupon will work on top of any sales prices!
You'll see a new menu category on the left called "Game Wikis". We are working on a dozen different wikis right now. All of the focus specifically on certain games except for one. The MD Trading wiki covers all games. The wiki for trading has come about because of the amount of information, guides and such that we have posted around the site. we wanted to put it all in one place. We also wanted to take advantage of all of you trading experts here on the site.
If you are not familiar with wikis. They allow all members of the site to add, update or remove information from any of the pages. With everyone working together we have a huge amount of detailed information.
These wikis are new. So far I have contributed most all of the information with some of the volunteers helping to make edits and changes. These sites are for all members of the site. So feel free to add or update information.
I think all of us have used wikis before for looking up information. But most of us really don't know how the information is added or how they work. This video is what made everything click for me. Before watching this video I only knew how to read stuff on a wiki. After watching this I now know how to edit, add pages and more.
Kudos to Customz, illusive101 and Duffz for putting this video together. Word is that if you like it and find it valuable they may make more. For those that do not like to read the safe trading guides this may be an alternative.
Note: This was up once before but Jagex (Publishers of runescape) claimed copyright infringement from content in this video and it was pulled. We challenged them on this and they withdrew their complaint. So we are reposting it now.
How does this relate to Stargate Worlds? Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment owns FireSky who is the developer of SGW. Hopefully this is not a sign of problems. I am very much looking forward to this game.
We have made a few changes to Trust Who and how it interacts on our site here. The biggest change is that we have added a Trust Who badge that shows up next to your posts.
The TW badge links to your TW verification. This also draws more attention to your posts. Showing that badge not only draws more eyes to it. It also gives you greater trust within the community.
We have another MAJOR upgrade happening to the feedback system. The new upgrades to the feedback system will address many of the problems the current system has. We are not announcing any details yet as to what the changes are. We will make another news post announcing this once it has been installed and is in operation.
As all of you who are Trust Who Verified know. We put a lot of work into the verifications. The price of the verifications was at $7.50. We have raised the price to $10. We were losing money on every verification at the lower price as it cost us $9.51 to do each verification. We hope that with the added features that the cost of $10 is still a good value.
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