What do you guys think of this anti-hacking measure Trion put into place for RIFT?

http://rift.ign.com/articles/news/7423/Anti-Hacking-Measures-Coin-Lock

 

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Let's just hope that people don't use the same password for their email as they do for Rift.

Authenticator is safer -- it's something you have.

 

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Interesting twist on it, to be sure. Of course, if the security around your registered email address doesn't prevent hackers from changing that, then this seems like spitting upwind.

 

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That was my concern as well.

They are coming out with Authenticators in addition to this.

 

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I had (e-mail) conversations with several of their Customer Service people and ended up with someone who said they were the head CS person.

To each person I explained what a VPN was and how it worked. Then I asked if there was going to be any problems with logging in from various cities across the US and changing IP's while playing.
Every single person automatically said I would have no problems except the head of department who (said) they checked with the programmers before saying that I would be fine.

So, the next day I set my VPN to normal operation where it changes cities every hour. Sure enough, I was quickly booted from the game with the message, "our IP has changed since logging in."
I have never played since.

Luckily this was the day before regular release and I was able to cancel both the game and the 3 month collectors edition with little fuss over the phone.

Now, I don't want to call these people lairs. I prefer to think of them as simply ignorant. Except for the head CS person whom I WILL call a bold faced lair.

I can see they have ramped up their obnoxious security efforts to almost Blizzard levels.
Blizzard will freeze your account under these conditions and force a password reset before you can have your account back.

Also, there is no way you can opt out of this monitoring with either company. I asked. The Trion people said that they don't monitor IP's but you can see why I did not believe them.

What are your security recommendations?

 

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USB Fingerprint scanner would be nice. Though the keychain option seems to work fine.

 

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After reading this I'm not shocked that you have had account problems.

 

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Who said I was having account problems? Not me.

I will not say Blizzard is behind the times but that is what I am thinking.
All they have to do is add the ability to turn off all this account monitoring and they would be up to date.
To be ahead of the game they would have had to already have this capability.

So, what do you think is going to happen when I start traveling throughout Central America? My account frozen every time I log in from a different location, right?
How about I just set my VPN to make me appear from the same US city each time I login in and not have it change from that city at set time periods?
That would solve this particular problem and yet I will still be accessing my account from multiple locations from multiple different countries.

If an account scammer has your account name and PW then they are going to have the rest of your account information too, like where you live.
The set their VPN (needed to get past the blocked IP addresses of account scammers Blizz keeps) to a city near yours and poof, they are in.

You see how easy and pointless these "security features" really are. All they do is get in the way of legitimate players and do NOTHING to stop scam organizations.

I detect scarcasim but I am glad you asked.

A normal player uses one computer and one account. They hardly ever play from a friends place or Internet Cafe (or whatever).

I have 2 accounts and play across three computers. Several times a day I will change servers and accounts depending of whatever task I am working on at that moment. Compiling gets done on one computer, video and audio editing another. Comp 3 has transcoding and a few other things going on most of the time.
One computer is by my feet, another is to the left and the other to the right. The right one is on a 4 way KVM switch along with 1-3 machines I am working on.

The reason I will not use the current Blizz dongle is because I have to read something off it each time I want to login. Even with USB extender cables it's a PITA to be moving it from one machine to another then back then to another all day as I jump on and off WoW. I just am not going to do it no matter how many threatening e-mails they send me.

All they would have to do is make one that simply needs to be plugged into the machine trying to login to WoW. I remember them well from the 80's so it's not like this is new tech. Throw on some 1024 bit encryption and you are GTG.

While this would still be a pain it would be a much less obnoxious intrusion than their current "read a number" model.
No dongle, no play. How is that any different than the current one?