OSI - UNABLE TO BAN HACKERS, HAPPY TO BAN COMPLAINERS [Author: Arcadian Del Sol]
A representative of OSI stated that they are unable to determine if people logging into UO accounts are the actual owners of those accounts or not.
This is not the truth.
If a UO player hacks several accounts repeatedly over a period of two hours, OSI has admitted that it is entirely and completely helpless to stop this hacker. However, if the persons being hacked aren’t happy with this half-truth, and begin to post about it repeatedly on the UO Forums, OSI can and will ban for that.
(customer)”I was hacked”
(OSI)”Cant help you.”
(customer)”While waiting to hear from you, my friend was hacked.”
(OSI)”Your problem – not mine.”
(customer)”Then I’ll just post about this and see what the rest of the players think.”
(OSI) “We have banned your account. Good day.”
I never thought I’d see the day when Asheron’s Call took a harder stand against exploiters than Ultima Online.
Just to restate: OSI can and does track IP addresses of everyone logging into your account. And in ages past, they *have* followed the ‘hacker’s trail’ across many accounts, in order to nail and ban someone from Ultima Online.
True, they will not restore your account because they dont know how to restore individual database entries from the backups. Silly OSI. What’s this? They can’t restore anything without restarting the server? Who designed this game? Suggestion: hire a DBA for your next big project and you wont have that problem.
“But we cant tell if someone is lying just to get restored to before something bad happened to them.”
If you own a restaurant and you set out a candy dish for exiting patrons, you can’t tell who is taking one mint, and who is taking twenty mints – that doesn’t mean you stop putting out a mint tray. It means you have your waiter dispense the mints to each customer, and regulate the access the patrons have to your mint supply. You never dissatisfy your customers because you are worried one of them might try to take advantage of your fine service. Every owner of every restaurant that ultimately went out of business can tell you that.