Addressing Recent Concerns about Created Characters

[Guest Fenrir]

Greetings,

For those who are unaware of who I am, I am the new QA lead having taken over for Nano after he stepped down some time ago. I tend to not engage publicly as much as my predecessor did however I felt this was an important time to step in and bring some clarity to some recent issues.

There have been many reports of characters will incredible items popping up out of ‘thin air’ recently and I wanted to give more specific information for clarity to the public.

Through our investigation of the recent database issues, we have continued to find additional issues that one of the infiltrators had put on our plate. Through the help of our newest team member, Auya, we were able to discover a number of characters that were created with the sole purpose of selling the characters for real life money. To this point, we have identified and banned 38 characters. Our investigation continues as we dig deeper as I am certain that there are more created characters that are still out there and need justice dispensed. In regards to a specific warlock that has been reported to our team by dozens of players, there was clear major exploitation in both raids and PvP and, as a result, all accounts associated to this person’s IP have been permanently banned.

We have dealt with this situation with intense severity and it has consumed our time in the past few days as we are determined to rid the server of any outside interference that could invalidate the legitimacy of the server. We have confirmed that the blackhat hacker no longer has access to any sensitive information and that our jobs now are cleaning up the mess he left us. We have also confirmed that these issues are isolated to the Anathema realm.

Public witch hunts of specific players is against the rules of our server and our subreddit and any further posts will be removed. There have been ‘false positive’ reports about certain players and your witch hunts are killing their playing experience. Any more reports about specific characters who you believe should be investigated should be reported through our in-game ticketing system. The GMs then forward those names to me and the rest of our investigation team. I should also mention that links to Realmplayers profiles are not definitive proof that any shady business has occurred. Realmplayers is not an official armory for our server, so while the information provided by the Realmplayers service can be useful to our investigation, we have much better tools to confirm the legitimacy of specific players.

The Elysium team is fully committed to ensuring the legitimacy of all achievements on all our servers and we appreciate your partnership in that pursuit. We will have some more news soon that may prove more enjoyable as we near the launch of Blackwing Lair on the PvE realm and restart the work on Ahn’Qiraj on the Public Test Realm.

 

Fenrir
Quality Assurance Team Lead

[Baracoot 0]

And what about the guy who hacked GM accounts and granted levels to characters on Elysium? It can't be limited to Anathema.

Edited January 19, 2017 by Baracoot

[Koar 4]

What about your profile image?

[AzAMOuS 2]

Thank you for making this announcement, everything you do is greatly appreciated.

[mbee 4]

1 minute ago, AzAMOuS said:

everything you do is greatly appreciated.

This Bud's for you, Mr. private WoW server QA guy...

[Serakta 0]

18 minutes ago, Fenrir said:

In regards to a specific warlock that has been reported to our team by dozens of players, there was clear major exploitation in both raids and PvP and, as a result, all accounts associated to this person’s IP have been permanently banned.

What about his guild? Di they get banned? There were very clear screenshots showing they were in on it and exploiting on purpose. 

[Davyjones 5]

[mbee 4]

The question is, while I appreciate banning specific accounts of known hackers what about the techniques they were found to be using to hack? While it's better not to disclose these methods, most people will feel better if that has been addressed.

[Pat Laflame Lanez 1]

Cash money

 

Thanks for your information. As any normal individual, I expected an official statement from the staff and you have done so well, As for those that are younger and less experienced at handling issues, its time to grow up.

 

[The Fapmonsoon 14]

@Veyloris - Wow kid, rage issues much? It's a private server and they are doing more than you are for the Pserver community last I checked. 

 

Please continue to fill your room with tears saltier then the great salt sea.  

[Pat Laflame Lanez 1]

3 minutes ago, Veyloris said:

I don't want to grow up to be like you...

lol.

 

Are you one of those kids with posters of conspiracies in your room and "don't trust anyone" bumper stickers?

 

regardless - it is what it is my dude, enjoy the game for what we've been given

Edited January 19, 2017 by Pat Laflame Lanez

[Uglyaf 9]

1 минуту назад, Veyloris сказал:

I don't want to grow up to be like you...

 

stop defending a lying dev team with a breached database just because you want to play with your toys. It's checkmate and us the players are the fucking losers.

 

I thought you quit server 10 hours ago lmao. But you still posting same nonsense about server collapse, Just leave us already. 

[Ohhgee 3]

20 minutes ago, Baracoot said:

And what about the guy who hacked GM accounts and granted levels to characters on Elysium? It can't be limited to Anathema.

This is my first question as well. There is at least one player running around Elysium server with the ability to add levels, gear, items, etc. Just because he is cautious (smart) and not churning out r14 chars on a brand new server doesn't mean he is not still at large.

The evidence presented in the previous threads about this (especially the hacker's ownedcore post) suggests that the person or people behind this are #1 still playing/still exploiting and #2 these hackers are also effecting Elysium

[Ohhgee 3]

2x post

Edited January 19, 2017 by Ohhgee

[Pat Laflame Lanez 1]

Not even word yet on an AQ event or new content releases on servers and we got @Veyloris trying to recruit for the conspiracy department lol.

 

Veyloris - Head Conspirator  - Elysium Project

[Ironsides 35]

Why are witch hunts not allowed when they are seemingly the only way to get attention brought to actually important issues?

 

This is old school valkyrie management. You need to change the people, not the name.

[Serakta 0]

Looks like we shouldn't expect anymore responses. They made one very vague post about the issues and now they fuck off to not communicating again. 

[taladril 43]

Whew, for a second there I was sad that Fenrir's post was going to kill all the drama on the forums. Thankfully you all are still at it and looking for ways to complain. Thank you kind community for continuing the entertainment! Gosh I'm sure that situations like this can easily be fixed by any competent IT person in, oh at most what do you think? One hour? Yeah that's about right. Oh Elysium is so slow it took them overnight Euro time to wake up and deal with it. Slackers! I bet they aren't even trying!

Chill. Out.

[Ohhgee 3]

7 minutes ago, Ironsides said:

This is old school valkyrie management. You need to change the people, not the name.

 

[Serakta 0]

1 minute ago, taladril said:

Whew, for a second there I was sad that Fenrir's post was going to kill all the drama on the forums. Thankfully you all are still at it and looking for ways to complain. Thank you kind community for continuing the entertainment! Gosh I'm sure that situations like this can easily be fixed by any competent IT person in, oh at most what do you think? One hour? Yeah that's about right. Oh Elysium is so slow it took them overnight Euro time to wake up and deal with it. Slackers! I bet they aren't even trying!

Chill. Out.

Because this comment is REALLY gonna help the situation. Maybe if you stopped being condescending and horrible to the people bitching (while bitching yourself of course) this community wouldn't be rapidly going down the drain. 

[taladril 43]

Do what he suggests and stop whining. Find suspicious behavior and report it. 

[Serakta 0]

9 minutes ago, Ironsides said:

This is old school valkyrie management. You need to change the people, not the name.

I cannot fathom why anyone thought this team would deliver good wholesome content without any hiccups like this.

[Serakta 0]

Just now, taladril said:

Do what he suggests and stop whining. Find suspicious behavior and report it. 

You are in this thread whining about whiners mate. 

[taladril 43]

Not really whining. Trying to bring some sanity. You people really have no sense of scale or the bigger picture. This project has 4 servers all running far beyond vanilla capacity. FOUR! While other projects are happy to maybe break a thousand concurrent players this team has to deal with an active player base of over a hundred thousand people. The fact that anything gets done, any tickets get answered, etc is honestly shocking.

And yet people complain about schedule slippage (population forces development work). And people complain about hacking (huge target and huge player base of potential attackers plus huge reward and notoriety). And people complain about corruption (yeah the odd characters stood out like a sore thumb and have been and would have been found by the community). And people complain about communication (communicate too much, wahh why are you talking instead of fixing the problem? Too little and reverse that). And people complain about how much of a dick Pottu is (actually does his job with no favoritism, the devil!).

Yes I guess I am whining about whiners. But it's because you people are so moronically narcissistic and lack basic sense of the absolute scale of this undertaking that it makes me dumber to read it.

[Oakenlix 79]

3 minutes ago, Serakta said:

You are in this thread whining about whiners mate. 

No he isn't, get you head out of your ass and read his post again.