S
Serdan
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- Thread starter
- #91
Found it in my cache:
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The inside story (10/09/03)
First words:
I would like to apologize for lying to all the people asking about what happened to my accounts during the past month. Obviously I, contrary to what I said, knew why my accounts had been banned, which I guess a lot of you probably figured out anyway. I'll get back to that later.
I also realize that this post will agitate a great deal of people who will be slagging me off, but as I got screwed over by GOA, and won't be playing again, I really don't care what people will say or think about me. I just thought the community deserved to know what really happened.
People are likely to be blaming me for all GOA's systems being down for the past 3 weeks, cause you need a scapegoat, and now you have one. To be honest, I couldn't care less. If you feel like you need to blame someone else than GOA, you can blame me.
In no way is this written to "win" sympathy from anyone.
English isn't my mother tongue, so bare with my written english.
I don't have any precise information on the technical aspect of this story (ie. how information was obtained) as, like described below, MrX was the backbone.
I have intentionally left out some bits of the story that contained a lot of "confidential" information from GOA, which I obviously have no interest in publishing.
It all began about 5 months ago, when I got to know a nice person (hereafter referred to as MrX) through a DAoC Emulator project, Dawn of Light. The friendship with MrX didn't really get interesting until about 2 months ago, when he confronted me, saying he had gained access to a gamemaster account on one of the german servers. Obviously I didn't believe MrX, so I went to Avalon to create a character, to have him prove that he did indeed have gamemaster status. By the time he had ported me to the Hibernian Dragonlair and altered my level to 70, I was convinced. MrX had indeed obtained access to a gamemaster account. He played around with altering my character for about 15 minutes until I decided it was too risky, and logged off the account. This all happened the night between the 22nd and 23rd July. I later, that same day, proceeded to submit a RightNow report about a "Hacked GM account", and also contacted Kemor (Prydwen Gamemaster) directly over ICQ telling him about the incident. I also had them wipe the level 70 stalker off my account that was created the night before. Needless to say, I never mentioned the reporting to MrX, and he didn't seem to care about the gamemaster account not working anymore at the time either. Also, as you might have guessed, the RightNow ticket was handled within 10 minutes, which must be some kind of a record.
As the day went by, MrX told me he found some cool documents, which he proceeded to send to me. Of course, I was curious, and started to read through the documents he had sent me. The documents were the internal Customer Support manuals from GOA. While I understood very little about the contents of those documents, I started to wonder where MrX got all this stuff from. Up until this point I hadn't questioned him about that. I didn't give it much more thought, and just ignored it. One day later, 24th of July, MrX contacted me again, asking me to log on to Carnac, a new french server. I'm not a complete moron, and I thought to myself "I bet he got hold of another GM account" and then proceeded to log on to Carnac. Surely enough, MrX had himself another character with gamemaster status, and wanted to play around some more. I had to leave for a few hours, and told him I would be back later that same evening. I returned the night between 24th and 25th of July around 1am, and at that time MrX had figured out how to create new working gamemaster characters. I won't bore you with all the details about what we did, but mostly we did harmless stuff like flying around, hitting epic mobs while invulnerable and stuff like that. I decided at the time not to report the incident again, and to be honest I don't really remember why. I guess my curiosity about what MrX was able to just shadowed my conscience so much I completely ignored the fact that what we were doing ingame was exploiting.
A couple of days later, 27th of July, MrX had obtained gamemaster accounts to all the european servers. I got greedy, and wanted to be able to do what he was doing (in terms of ingame actions) on the english servers, which is where I played, so I had him promote characters on my personal accounts to gamemasters on excalibur and prydwen. At the time, I didn't give much thought about my accounts getting banned, which was probably the biggest mistake I ever made. I mean, obviously they would find out eventually, and when they did, the chance of my accounts not getting banned would be very slim. But, I still went ahead and have gamemaster characters made. At this time, MrX had also got hold of the actual gamemaster manual, which he had also sent my way, so not knowing the right commands for doing stuff was not an issue anymore.
About 2 weeks passed without talking a lot with MrX, so I figured he had lost interest in what he was doing, so I didn't give it much thought. But, 12th of August, MrX once again contacted me very breifly, and sent me a character analysis tool for the us servers which wasn't working, so actually I have no idea why he sent it to me. I guess it was just a way to show me that he wasn't "done" yet. Another 4 days passed, now 16th of August, before I talked to MrX again, and this time he contacted me because he apparently needed a character promoted to gamemaster on Prydwen. I was busy at the time, but the day after, 17th of August, I promoted his character to gamemaster.
This is about when things started to go bad (in my point of view). 18th of August around noon, my accounts (2) were terminated. This is about 3 weeks after it all started. I submit a ticket to RightNow asking why I had been banned, as I hadn't got any notice about it. Obviously I knew why I had been banned, but I wanted to hear it from GOA, but as you might have guessed, all I got was a typical standard form answere saying "You account has been banned for multiple illegal activities".
That same evening, MrX had his account(s) banned as well. Up until this point, all I knew was MrX had access to a lot of GM accounts, but boys was I in for a suprise. Apparently, the time where we hadn't been communicating, MrX had been harvesting information from the GOA network. Obviously I won't share the information he gave me, but he had access to almost everything inside, that being RightNow, databases, gameservers and support/gm client machines. He even packed a copy of one of the gameservers for us to download! At this point, I was starting to get cold feet. Part of me was thinking, "I'm banned, why not have some fun with it" but the other was thinking "This is getting way out of hand".
After being frustrated with the RightNow answer I got, I decided to grab a couple of random unused accounts from the RightNow interface and cause some havoc. A good friend of mine, who will remain unnamed, joined me that evening with the "event". As you might have figured out, the "event" i'm talking about is the one that happened at APK in Emain on Prydwen the night between 20th and 21st of August. After about an hours fun with various epic mobs, we decided to log off. We had a great laugh doing that, and I was personally "snooping" (listening in on) the Bad Omen group that was in Emain at that time, and from what I could tell they were having fun as well. And my apologies to Blejsarus, the other person that was with me that evening seemed to hold a grudge against you, so he pretty much just put /stick on your ass and spawned mobs in your trail.
During the day of the 21st of August, I decided to confess my sins. I told MrX that I was going to come clean with GOA and tell them about what I did, and needless to say he wasn't too happy about that, since that would involve me giving GOA all the information he gathered for the past month. So I proceeded to contact Lawrence (a German Gamemaster) on IRC, and asked him if I gave them all the information I had (which supposedly could help them close their security breach) could I get my personal accounts reopened. At that time they still didn't know what information I could give, but Lawrence told me he would ask his teamleader (or supervisor) and let me know. He came back to me a couple of minutes later, saying that if I had information that could help them close the security breach, he had been authorized to reopen my accounts. This is also why I didn't come clean about what happened sooner, as I was hoping to get my accounts, and characters, back without too much information getting "out". I then proceeded to hand in all the information I had, which resulted in a 4 hour chat. Lawrence the told me, that he would pass the information to Kemor, who was the one investigating the case, and any further contact would be made by him. I later that same day asked Kemor about an approximately time of my accounts being reopened, and the answer was "early next week", that being around 25th/26th of August.
Nothing happened for 3 weeks. I was held off by being told, by Kemor, that they couldn't reopen my accounts because of RightNow being down. Then today, 10th of September, after contacting Kemor on ICQ, he told me one of my accounts had been reopened. I logged on, and was suprised to see the account completely stripped of characters. I contacted Kemor once again, asking what happened to my characters, and why only one of my accounts had been reopened when the agreement was reopening both my accounts. The answer I got was "I was told only to open one". Needless to say I wasn't very pleased with that answer, as logs I have of all the chatsessions clearly show the agreement was to reopen both my accounts. I then proceeded to ask why all my characters had been stripped, since that was never mentioned to me in the 1 month period. The answer was "You got your account back, be glad, period". Again I was really displeased by the answer I got. I know many of you will say "haha you muppet, that's what you deserved" and you might be right, but nonetheless I made an agreement with Lawrence upon first contact, and they screwed me over. So, now I have one account with all the characters stripped from it, which is also why I decided to write this "confession", as I very much doubt I will ever be playing again, and the community deserved to know what happened instead of all the lies published by GOA/Mythic.
As some of you might think after reading this (if you made it this far) is that i'm making all this up to slag off GOA even further. However, I have logs of all the chatsessions I had with Lawrence/Kemor from day one, which I have been reading through while writing this, and nowhere did they mention stripping off all my characters, or did they mention I would only get one of my two accounts reopened. In the end, the "good cop bad cop" act Lawrence and Kemor put up almost had me fooled.
It's been a nice 17 months of playing on and off, but unless GOA decides to do a 180 and stick to their original agreement this will be my official goodbye.
Signed,
Laroma
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The inside story (10/09/03)
First words:
I would like to apologize for lying to all the people asking about what happened to my accounts during the past month. Obviously I, contrary to what I said, knew why my accounts had been banned, which I guess a lot of you probably figured out anyway. I'll get back to that later.
I also realize that this post will agitate a great deal of people who will be slagging me off, but as I got screwed over by GOA, and won't be playing again, I really don't care what people will say or think about me. I just thought the community deserved to know what really happened.
People are likely to be blaming me for all GOA's systems being down for the past 3 weeks, cause you need a scapegoat, and now you have one. To be honest, I couldn't care less. If you feel like you need to blame someone else than GOA, you can blame me.
In no way is this written to "win" sympathy from anyone.
English isn't my mother tongue, so bare with my written english.
I don't have any precise information on the technical aspect of this story (ie. how information was obtained) as, like described below, MrX was the backbone.
I have intentionally left out some bits of the story that contained a lot of "confidential" information from GOA, which I obviously have no interest in publishing.
It all began about 5 months ago, when I got to know a nice person (hereafter referred to as MrX) through a DAoC Emulator project, Dawn of Light. The friendship with MrX didn't really get interesting until about 2 months ago, when he confronted me, saying he had gained access to a gamemaster account on one of the german servers. Obviously I didn't believe MrX, so I went to Avalon to create a character, to have him prove that he did indeed have gamemaster status. By the time he had ported me to the Hibernian Dragonlair and altered my level to 70, I was convinced. MrX had indeed obtained access to a gamemaster account. He played around with altering my character for about 15 minutes until I decided it was too risky, and logged off the account. This all happened the night between the 22nd and 23rd July. I later, that same day, proceeded to submit a RightNow report about a "Hacked GM account", and also contacted Kemor (Prydwen Gamemaster) directly over ICQ telling him about the incident. I also had them wipe the level 70 stalker off my account that was created the night before. Needless to say, I never mentioned the reporting to MrX, and he didn't seem to care about the gamemaster account not working anymore at the time either. Also, as you might have guessed, the RightNow ticket was handled within 10 minutes, which must be some kind of a record.
As the day went by, MrX told me he found some cool documents, which he proceeded to send to me. Of course, I was curious, and started to read through the documents he had sent me. The documents were the internal Customer Support manuals from GOA. While I understood very little about the contents of those documents, I started to wonder where MrX got all this stuff from. Up until this point I hadn't questioned him about that. I didn't give it much more thought, and just ignored it. One day later, 24th of July, MrX contacted me again, asking me to log on to Carnac, a new french server. I'm not a complete moron, and I thought to myself "I bet he got hold of another GM account" and then proceeded to log on to Carnac. Surely enough, MrX had himself another character with gamemaster status, and wanted to play around some more. I had to leave for a few hours, and told him I would be back later that same evening. I returned the night between 24th and 25th of July around 1am, and at that time MrX had figured out how to create new working gamemaster characters. I won't bore you with all the details about what we did, but mostly we did harmless stuff like flying around, hitting epic mobs while invulnerable and stuff like that. I decided at the time not to report the incident again, and to be honest I don't really remember why. I guess my curiosity about what MrX was able to just shadowed my conscience so much I completely ignored the fact that what we were doing ingame was exploiting.
A couple of days later, 27th of July, MrX had obtained gamemaster accounts to all the european servers. I got greedy, and wanted to be able to do what he was doing (in terms of ingame actions) on the english servers, which is where I played, so I had him promote characters on my personal accounts to gamemasters on excalibur and prydwen. At the time, I didn't give much thought about my accounts getting banned, which was probably the biggest mistake I ever made. I mean, obviously they would find out eventually, and when they did, the chance of my accounts not getting banned would be very slim. But, I still went ahead and have gamemaster characters made. At this time, MrX had also got hold of the actual gamemaster manual, which he had also sent my way, so not knowing the right commands for doing stuff was not an issue anymore.
About 2 weeks passed without talking a lot with MrX, so I figured he had lost interest in what he was doing, so I didn't give it much thought. But, 12th of August, MrX once again contacted me very breifly, and sent me a character analysis tool for the us servers which wasn't working, so actually I have no idea why he sent it to me. I guess it was just a way to show me that he wasn't "done" yet. Another 4 days passed, now 16th of August, before I talked to MrX again, and this time he contacted me because he apparently needed a character promoted to gamemaster on Prydwen. I was busy at the time, but the day after, 17th of August, I promoted his character to gamemaster.
This is about when things started to go bad (in my point of view). 18th of August around noon, my accounts (2) were terminated. This is about 3 weeks after it all started. I submit a ticket to RightNow asking why I had been banned, as I hadn't got any notice about it. Obviously I knew why I had been banned, but I wanted to hear it from GOA, but as you might have guessed, all I got was a typical standard form answere saying "You account has been banned for multiple illegal activities".
That same evening, MrX had his account(s) banned as well. Up until this point, all I knew was MrX had access to a lot of GM accounts, but boys was I in for a suprise. Apparently, the time where we hadn't been communicating, MrX had been harvesting information from the GOA network. Obviously I won't share the information he gave me, but he had access to almost everything inside, that being RightNow, databases, gameservers and support/gm client machines. He even packed a copy of one of the gameservers for us to download! At this point, I was starting to get cold feet. Part of me was thinking, "I'm banned, why not have some fun with it" but the other was thinking "This is getting way out of hand".
After being frustrated with the RightNow answer I got, I decided to grab a couple of random unused accounts from the RightNow interface and cause some havoc. A good friend of mine, who will remain unnamed, joined me that evening with the "event". As you might have figured out, the "event" i'm talking about is the one that happened at APK in Emain on Prydwen the night between 20th and 21st of August. After about an hours fun with various epic mobs, we decided to log off. We had a great laugh doing that, and I was personally "snooping" (listening in on) the Bad Omen group that was in Emain at that time, and from what I could tell they were having fun as well. And my apologies to Blejsarus, the other person that was with me that evening seemed to hold a grudge against you, so he pretty much just put /stick on your ass and spawned mobs in your trail.
During the day of the 21st of August, I decided to confess my sins. I told MrX that I was going to come clean with GOA and tell them about what I did, and needless to say he wasn't too happy about that, since that would involve me giving GOA all the information he gathered for the past month. So I proceeded to contact Lawrence (a German Gamemaster) on IRC, and asked him if I gave them all the information I had (which supposedly could help them close their security breach) could I get my personal accounts reopened. At that time they still didn't know what information I could give, but Lawrence told me he would ask his teamleader (or supervisor) and let me know. He came back to me a couple of minutes later, saying that if I had information that could help them close the security breach, he had been authorized to reopen my accounts. This is also why I didn't come clean about what happened sooner, as I was hoping to get my accounts, and characters, back without too much information getting "out". I then proceeded to hand in all the information I had, which resulted in a 4 hour chat. Lawrence the told me, that he would pass the information to Kemor, who was the one investigating the case, and any further contact would be made by him. I later that same day asked Kemor about an approximately time of my accounts being reopened, and the answer was "early next week", that being around 25th/26th of August.
Nothing happened for 3 weeks. I was held off by being told, by Kemor, that they couldn't reopen my accounts because of RightNow being down. Then today, 10th of September, after contacting Kemor on ICQ, he told me one of my accounts had been reopened. I logged on, and was suprised to see the account completely stripped of characters. I contacted Kemor once again, asking what happened to my characters, and why only one of my accounts had been reopened when the agreement was reopening both my accounts. The answer I got was "I was told only to open one". Needless to say I wasn't very pleased with that answer, as logs I have of all the chatsessions clearly show the agreement was to reopen both my accounts. I then proceeded to ask why all my characters had been stripped, since that was never mentioned to me in the 1 month period. The answer was "You got your account back, be glad, period". Again I was really displeased by the answer I got. I know many of you will say "haha you muppet, that's what you deserved" and you might be right, but nonetheless I made an agreement with Lawrence upon first contact, and they screwed me over. So, now I have one account with all the characters stripped from it, which is also why I decided to write this "confession", as I very much doubt I will ever be playing again, and the community deserved to know what happened instead of all the lies published by GOA/Mythic.
As some of you might think after reading this (if you made it this far) is that i'm making all this up to slag off GOA even further. However, I have logs of all the chatsessions I had with Lawrence/Kemor from day one, which I have been reading through while writing this, and nowhere did they mention stripping off all my characters, or did they mention I would only get one of my two accounts reopened. In the end, the "good cop bad cop" act Lawrence and Kemor put up almost had me fooled.
It's been a nice 17 months of playing on and off, but unless GOA decides to do a 180 and stick to their original agreement this will be my official goodbye.
Signed,
Laroma
