Not long ago I went through the extremely frustrating process of having my World of Warcraft account hacked. Now this would have been my Battle.net account actually and here is a story of how things went. The biggest thing I took away from the experience is that companies are getting better and getter at dealing with hackers. Besides the wait on the phone, my experience with getting my account back up and running was fairly easy.

So I download the Patch for Cataclysm coming up and basically don’t log in for a few weeks after. I just hit the wall with Warcraft again in the beginning of the summer and decided to take a few months off before the expansion. So after a break I log in to check out the new talent system and run around a bit with some free time. Well, the Name and Password are incorrect comes up. Ugh, I thought, please don’t be a hack. After many attempts I realize there is no getting in. So I decide to follow the step by step process that Blizzard has set up.

I put in the ticket to have my account restored and follow through the process of getting my secret answer and all of that. I try to go through resetting my password and all but have no luck. Still I got my ticket in to restore the account. In many ways not getting into the account right away to solve the issue was incredibly lousy at least through Blizzard’s website. They have improved the system tremendously but I still did not have success through their website. So I gathered my wits and decided to go to option two which was calling their customer support.

As almost everyone knows the phone queues for Blizzard customer support are worse than the login queues from WoW’s old days back in 2005-2006. After trying to go through the Website the first night I waited until the next day to call them. It was late and with work looming, I had to wait one more day. So the next night it was a straight phone call. I tried to get back in on the Website while waiting but had no luck. Then the wait kicks in, ten minutes, twenty minutes, it was endless. I can honestly say that Blizzard needs to do something for the players who have to call in and endure a forty five minute wait. Play the Tenacious D concert from BlizzCon on the phone or something. Play interviews with developers about upcoming games, anything to break the boredom. Like all customer service calls you are forced to sit and wait out of fear that if you walk away someone will pick up. So I waited. I guess in the end it was not so horrible as my wife had her sewing friends over and I was hiding at my desk to begin with.

Finally someone picked up, a voice in the darkness that could solve all of my problems. The customer service rep was very friendly to start off with. We checked the account and he quickly said, yep you were hacked it is an IP address from the other side of the world. Within about two minutes he had things cleared up. The account was reset and I could at least get in to change my password. The service rep stayed on the phone until I was sure I could log in. I thought that was great and we talked a little about Diablo 3.

Finally I was able to log in and find that all my stuff was gone. The rep said to hang on we took care of your ticket to restore the account today. Aha, I thought the one I submitted yesterday. Well, now I go to the mailbox and happily find all of my gear and materials. That made me happy. So my shaman was okay and my Death Knight had been used as a mule or farmer. There was a bunch of junk on him that I sold off. Still everything seemed okay in the end. I thanked the Blizzard rep for staying with me and was finally up and running.

Please understand, this was my personal experience with being hacked and dealing with Blizzard customer service. Yours may have been drastically different. Overall I thought they did a good job. The worst part was waiting on the phone to speak to someone. The forty five minutes was brutal. I wish Blizzard would put something on to at least listen to. So from that day on I have used an authenticator on my account. I have no idea if that makes it harder or not to hack, but it definitely feels more safe. Over the years I do think Blizzard has gotten much better at customer service compared to where they were in the older days of Warcraft. There is still plenty of room for improvement, but I came away happy with the experience.