There are a lot of individual posts asking exactly the same questions about account restorations. I’m creating this merged thread and hope that anyone who wants information about this subject will read this thread and not create new ones.
The Search Engine is your friend. 
Hello. It was said that the possibility to have an account fully restored (after a hacker’s attack for example) and thus character rollbacks will become possible. I have two questions regarding this:
1. When are we to expect this to happen? Any approximate date?
2. Will this be retroactive? As in, if it becomes possible in say a month from now, will people who have been already hacked and lost rather valuable items be able to have their characters rolled back?Thanks a lot in advance.
Answers:
They’re working on the ART (Account Restoration Tool). By the time it goes live, it will only be able to help those people hacked moving forward. Gaile has confirmed this in the Account Issues forum repeatedly. This is a major priority for them, and although it is a huge labor cost and development time cost, they are doing this to help people like you. So don’t think you have to rally the armies against ANet or some such; they’ve already heard, and are already well underway with the solution.
That said, it doesn’t matter what you do in real life. Passwords can and will be cracked. No matter what you say, your security measures were at fault here. If there were a security breach of ANet even insofar as a single account could be stolen from their databases, they are bound by law to come out and tell us. As such a statement has not been made, I am confident that your claim that “it must have come from the GW2 site” is illegitimate.
Furthermore, the hacker got into both your email address and your GW2 account. The only way he could achieve both is if you had poor security measures on both, reused passwords, used simple passwords, have a keylogger, accidentally logged into some phishing website designed to look like the GW2 website (I’ve seen some fancy ones), or so forth. The best thing you can do is change all of your passwords, change your email address if you can, and be more careful moving forward. Good luck.
I am very sorry for what happened to you, VincentBalmont, and I’m so happy that we will be rolling out the ART in very short order. I know that this may not seem a comfort to you, but development and testing continue and we will get that tool into the hands of our CS Agents as soon as possible.
I think RisingDusk expressed things very well. The hacking of your email account and your game account points fully away from Guild Wars 2 as the source of the compromise. The fact that we don’t have tens of thousands of incidents points away from Guild Wars 2 as the source of the issue. The fact that our Security Team (we actually have more than one team focused on security) confirms that there is not an issue with game or server security also points away from Guild Wars 2 as the source of the issue.
Again, I truly do sympathize with the fact that you were hacked, but out of fairness to the company, I feel it’s responsible for me to point out that the theories that point to ArenaNet or Guild Wars 2 as the source of the problem are simply not accurate.
Hahaha, now I can safely say that even an ArenaNet employee has mistaken my name for Rising Duck (This is frequent!)! Gaile, you just made my day!
Shhhhhh… I fixed that in <1 minute. You were not supposed to notice! blush
I think this thread has been addressed as fully as possible, except to answer one question that was posed somewhere in the body:
The ART is an all-account restoration. It does not restore an individual item or a certain character. In cases of compromise — and qualifying compromised accounts are the only once eligible for restoration — I don’t really understand why it would make a difference. The fully account was compromised, and in most cases, the account was stripped (and sometimes characters deleted). So rolling it back to a snapshot/saved state is the way to go.
We will have news on account restorations in the near future.
I’d like an answer on this too considering I’ve been compromised twice in a week, if it happens a third time with all the precautions I’ve taken + the mobile authenticator (though I could’ve sworn I added it prior to being compromised the second time) it’ll be clear that the problem isn’t on my end.
No it will be even more clear that the issue is on your end.
If someone is hacked twice in a week, it’s nearly certain that he/she has a trojan or keylogger on the computer system. Most virus detection systems miss the newer keyloggers, and I’ve been told that sometimes, the only way to clear the system is to “flatten it” and reinstall from the OS onwards. (Not a happy prospect, for sure.)
Feel free to discuss the matter with Support, because they may have tips for you, or a means to check for the keylogger situation. But please don’t assume that this is a problem on our end.
Loufly — As I have posted many times in the last week or so, we’ll have information about the Account Restoration Tool, including the requirements under which it can be used, in the near future. It would be premature for me to answer individual questions at this time, but we will have more information to share with everyone very soon.
