Black Raven Dragoons

[DeathAndTaxes]

Sometime during my play yesterday my inventory lost over 100G. I didn't buy anything in the auction house yesterday afternoon, so my money didn't go there. I didn't mail it to anyone else. I didn't accidentally trade it. You can't "throw away" money. It just disappeared. This data is stored on the Blizzard databases, so my computer didn't "munge it up". The only thing that was unusual was I did have WoW crash once (while on a run in lower BRS), which has only happened like 2 or 3 times ever.

I requested an in-game support ticket (which of course, wasn't responded to while I was online), and when I logged back in today, I had two cut and paste messages in my in-game mailbox.

One was the "reminder" to "All subscribers" that "certain interface addons" could potentially install keyloggers. While not directly addressing my particular problem, some GM pulled this from his Support.txt file and pasted it to me, since it must have been the "closest" to my problem. The problem is that I run the game in wine under linux, and haven't seen any lingering wine processes laying about (and I would, since that's how it would work). It would be possible that an addon would capture my typing in the password, but addons don't get loaded until after you log in (for this very reason), so that's not an option.

The other in-game mail Blizzard sent me was that basic, "Sorry we couldn't address your problem while you were online, we sent you an email to your registered email address regarding this issue." I checked my email, no such message. I checked the logs on my mailserver (since I run my own mailserver) and there has been no such email coming through (yet).

So basically, Blizzard gave me the finger. :-\

While it's only 100G, and that's not catastrophic, it is still annoying that my issue wasn't even addressed. I just got cut-and-paste generic messages. This is the first support ticket I've ever opened since I started playing in February, but I guess it's just not important to Blizzard to actually respond to these sorts of tickets. I expect that Blizzard gets dozens if not hundreds of these a day, and their policy is probably to never affirmatively respond to "missing gold" reports, but it is still damn annoying.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I opened another ticket, got someone this time.

Chatlog:

http://kahn.caglan.net/~dan/gmbs0.png
http://kahn.caglan.net/~dan/gmbs1.png
http://kahn.caglan.net/~dan/gmbs2.png
http://kahn.caglan.net/~dan/gmbs3.png

[Grimblast]

That sucks!

[cherry1]

im alittle late in replying, but WHAT THE FUCK. a narrow window is the exact time. Next theyll wanna see action logs or something. Checked gold at 12:01 A.M. MST, 11/14/06. Cast Renew at 12:01.15 MST 11/14/06.



Re Diculous.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Ok, so it's user error on my part. You know how you see those people trying to sell a stack of 20 runecloth for 99 gold? Well, when it's 3:30 in the morning, maybe that's not the best time to go buy stuff in the AH.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 18&sid=1#4

[Zancarius]

Ouch. I always wondered why those scammers continued to post over-priced stacks of items. Apparently it works, sad to say. At least Blizzard does maintain the purchase logs for items--that's the silver lining. Though, you'll never see that gold again.

Here's what I do (and would suggest doing the same): Never keep more than about 20-30 gold on your main character(s). Instead, keep the majority of your gold on your banker and don't make purchases with that character. If you need an item, transfer the gold to the character who needs it and make the purchase. This has protected me from a few unfortunate mistakes (e.g., you don't have enough gold to fall for the scam!).

[DeathAndTaxes]

That's a good tip, if a bit inconvenient. I think since Blizz has the whole AH database, it would be pretty trivial to check for an average price on an item and if it's outside the normal range by a certain percentage, it could pop up an additional verification message. It'd be really simple, and actually wouldn't pop up very often (only in extreme circumstances), so it wouldn't normally just get "clicked through".

The "expoit" is against the really crappy interface of the AH. If you buy something for 99silver, it says do you want to buy for 99 and then has a coin next to it. It does NOT say 0 (goldcoin) 99 (silvercoin) 0 (coppercoin). So it's really an exploit against our nature to just click the damned annoying buyout button. We get used to performing an action so often that the one time it might actually help you, you just ignore it. :-\

I'm not really all that concerned over the lost money, my initial concern was that my in-game GM (and you guys all know his name now) showed absolutely no interest in actually investigating the matter for me and blew me off.

[Zancarius]

It's a pain. Unfortunately, it's the only decent workaround for a rather awkward system. If the system works against you, sometimes the best option is to put yourself at an inconvenience in order to defeat it.

Believe it or not, the interface used to be much worse than it is now. The color of the coins used to be so similar, scammers simply had to post something for 99 copper and then stick a few stacks of the same item for 99 gold immediately underneath. Since the visual clues were even less obvious than they are now, anxious buyers were much more likely to waste in upwards of 200g before realizing what happened. There were enough complaints then to warrant a rather extensive overhaul of the system, including an additional prompt--but that still isn't enough to completely eliminate scams...

Should Blizzard change the AH UI to be even less ambiguous and more obvious? Probably so. There's a few more visual cues they could add without having to calculate an average cost of a specific item just for one purchaser. As you suggested, they could expand the coins to full words, such as "gold". But humans have a tendency to grow complacent with regards to familiarity. Perhaps they could add another threshold, where if an item is posted for more than 10 gold, a second dialog will appear indicating the expense of the item (plus it would save the calculation steps).

Regardless, there's one thing that bothers me in addition to the initial GM's lax nature, who decided not to actually check your AH logs. Clearly, as the Blizzard post in that thread suggests, they have access to these. Any rational person would be able to determine that was a scam. They know who's account the gold was sent to. Why not do something about it? There's only two reasons scams such as this survive: 1) It works and 2) it goes unpunished. 99g for a stack of runecloth? That's not like selling a Krol blade for 350g--that's selling an easily obtained item for well over any acceptable threshold. If they're not going to punish the scam artists, this will continue to be a problem.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Yeah, we're discussing that this can be considered a form of "griefing".

I take responsibility for not paying close enough attention...This is my own mistake, but clearly things can be improved to avoid this from happening.

I've been trying to think back and I think I remember when this happened...I remember being in the AH and something happened, and I wasn't quite sure what had happened...I'm pretty sure this was a simple "bid" and not a "buyout", and as such never got the confirmation prompt (and since I "bid" on it accidentally, I couldn't retract my bid...However, I didn't realize what had happened until after the funds were removed, which was like 20 hours later or so).

I expect that if I had realized I had placed a bit, I probably could have gotten a GM to rescind my bid before the auction closed, but didn't realize it until it was too late.

The only visual cue of this going on is a simple message in the chat pane about a bid being placed (among all the trivia bot spam) and there words "your bid" are put on the item entry line in the AH search results (in like 9 point font). The color of the highlight of that item doesn't change, and no other widge on your hud indicate that you have bids placed. I could have clicked on the "Bids" tab in the AH, but I never actually place simple bids, so I don't go through and check that tab every time.

Basically, I got tricked due to some really crappy interface issues with the AH. Things could easily be better, but there is no indication from Blizzard that things will get better, which is an issue.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Huh, this mod seems to do just what I want. I have it installed and it shows really good promise. I'll let you guys know how it goes (like if my gold ends up going missing, etc.).

http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/addo ... inued.html