There is a very serious problem with the game right now (Actual Mafia Activity)

**I know that immediately after posting this my time in wreaclast will become a living hell and I will be unable to play the game ever again without interference. Participate with this post at your own peril.**

The subject matter of this post requires me to talk about things the exist outside of the game that are potentially ToS violations and because of that reality I will have to talk around them to the best of my ability without directly mentioning them and possibly even scapegoat an entity that is benevolent in place of a malevolent one... think critically please.

This is something that I dealt with in PoE 1 when I was participating in the community as a content creator and it has completely ruined my enjoyment of the game and something about PoE2 has created an opportunity for the people who do these kinds of activities to be even more brazen and the problem is actually even worse now and i think i know what the mistake I made as a player was that put this target on my head and gave these people an entry point into my account to completely ruin my experience in this game.

Once upon a time I wrote a post about how exceedingly unlikely it is for an average person to craft an item good enough to overcome the pinnacle content in PoE1 by legitimate means. without describing the otherwise illegal means by which a player could go outside of the game to overcome this invisible hurdle I wrote a profoundly detailed forum post that pointed a finger at GGG indicting them and accusing them of being the entity that was most well positioned to have a financial incentive to keep this hurdle in place and as incredibly narcissistic and insane as it may seem. something like 3-6 months after that post GGG gave us Harvest league which completely and totally addressed all of my accusations and undermine those external entities entirely and ushered in a legitimate golden era of build diversity and accessibility for the average and casual player.

Like I said though... this dramatically undermined the business model of the nere-do-well external entity and it stands to reason that this period and very shortly after that post I was Doxed and my account was hacked and many exceedingly valuable items were stolen from my standard account and i was routinely disconnected from the server and I experienced non-stop lag spikes that rendered the game literally unplayable and I had to quit after spending 5000$ on a new PC that did nothing at all to overcome what i interpreted as a hardware problem... it was not a hardware problem and having spent the past 4 years educating myself about cyber security and how the dark side of the internet works I think I now understand what happened to me, and its happening again... and I fear I am simply on a list and it will never not be happening to me and I do know where I messed up and how these people are able to completely ruin my gaming experience.

If you don't believe my story that is fine but if you look around you tube right now there are actually quite a lot of videos detailing the realities of videogame mafias... which is a term that makes me feel insane to even utter out loud but is something that absolutely is happening and absolutely is ruining the experience of and increasingly growing number of players so this post is a cautionary tale wherein I hope to provide a small bit of insight into where the security weak points exist so that you can protect yourself and hopefully one day GGG will decide they actually care about and reinforce so as to protect players like me on the Mafia's hit list.

Lets start with Account privacy and the many datapoints that are available to the public that can be abused to harm your account starting with this very forum.

1) your account name. it may come as a surprise to some players, but your account name as it exists on the PoE website contains quite a lot of mostly hidden information that can be used to break into your account in a great many ways. Any post you make on this forum... or more horrifyingly... any item you list on trade... links directly to you full account name. not just you character name but the full blown account which can be used to dm you, add you to a friend list and in many other ways. why does adding you to a friend list matter... because then people can know when you are playing and exactly what you are doing when you are playing... are you only getting trade spammed during pinnacle boss fights and trials of ascendancy?... well its because they think its funny to distract you. They also know that spamming you can cause you to lag and potentially even kill you if they spam walls of blocks that completely cover half of your screen. this will become important later in this post as well.

2) Session ID. most players who become enamored with this game enough to make it to endgame maps will become so overwhelmed by the loot drops that at some point they will want to download a Loot filter to sort out the items they do wish to collect from the ones they don't... an extremely handy tool that seems to some extent be required beyond map tier 10 or so. There is one terrifying component to these filters though... they require access to your session ID which is a numeric code linked to you actual in game activity and it is bound to your account and I assume unique to your account... this is also linked to your profile here on the PoE flagship site. In order to import these filters into your game you must provide the creator of those filters access to you session ID... This is a vulnerability. No matter how secure GGG's site is... these sites are third party and cannot be held to the same standards. even worse... these third parties could easily just sell off this information if they wished.

I am no expert in cyber security but it seems to my laymen mind that your account name and your session ID can provide more or less unfettered access to what you are doing within the game in real time, and if you are on the hit list this means any risky encounter, difficult map, or critical moment in your gameplay is vulnerable to their outside manipulations.

*Tinfoil Disclaimer* as a person who undoubtedly has been targeted by these entities and most assuredly will again and always will be I can say that i have had moments in PoE 1 and 2 wherein nothing is on my screen at all and i fall over dead... my characters stats do not accurately reflect how I am interacting with the game (very high evasion but never dodging. playing damage over time but every rare monster has life regen and ES recharge that completely overwhelms my dps and my curses that should turn off their regen instead buff their regen [by simply turning a - into a +], and worst of all, full blown disconnects when a boss begins a slam animation resulting in a guaranteed death).

Its become quite clear to me that these nefarious entities are handily capable of entering individual players game sessions and in real time manipulating the numeric information that the player is sending off to GGG's servers including populating the map with unkillable enemies and deleting loot drops from the map and even spawning rare monsters out of bounds to make maps unclearable.

recently I have experienced multiple disconnects from my sanctum runs and upon returning to the game my honor total is something dramatically different from what is was before the disconnect (Last night i went from 16k honor to 7 in an otherwise empty and completed room and my damage was reduced by more then 90% and upon returning all the rares populated in the subsequent room had massive ES and life regen monsters because i play ED contagion and this made the room impossible to clear).

In summary:: your account information is insecure right now. participating in trade is a vulnerability, identifying your account on discord is vulnerable right now, linking an item filter to you account right now and god forbid you participate in any third party sites you are literally handing the enemy the keys to your entire account and they will take advantage of you if you do.

with the recent wave of streamers and players getting hacked and robbed it is very clear that GGG does not have the upper hand in this war and it is imperative that players do the utmost to protect their information from prying eyes and greedy hands

GGG... Please create an interface for players to create their own loot filters either in game or exclusively on the flagship site... please create 2fa systems for players... please make the friend list more secure... please protect player information better and please eliminate the perception that players NEED to utilize third party sites to make their game sessions more enjoyable and to provide themselves with some semblance of "Quality of life features.

This is a real epidemic... It is really happening... and these entities are extrapolating millions of dollars of revenue from your game and many other games and you guys and so many others are losing the battle in a way that is detrimental to the longevity of an otherwise stellar game that so many of us love dearly.

Do...
Better...

yeah man those drones flying around are really something ....
(the moderator opening this thread must be like : please let there be something offensive in the first two lines so i can remove the post and not read the whole thing XD hahahah)

Bro it's okay to critisism the account security options like 2fa and so on, but really.... We all have disconnects, we all have bugs, we all dying without any clue - but that means nothing. Play the game and have fun, dont think too much about these abstract scenarios, no one thinks about you because of a forum post, you are not so important, you are a normal person like everyone else, accept it and have fun.

"

Giorap90#2103 wrote:

Bro it's okay to critisism the account security options like 2fa and so on, but really.... We all have disconnects, we all have bugs, we all dying without any clue - but that means nothing. Play the game and have fun, dont think too much about these abstract scenarios, no one thinks about you because of a forum post, you are not so important, you are a normal person like everyone else, accept it and have fun.

What I actually wrote is that this is something that I am seeing more and more players posting about... making youtube videos about... and being negatively effected by.

therefore... I am not special and never indicated anything other that the fact that I am a former youtuber.

Furthermore: I have had other people log into my account and strip items off my characters... delete those characters... and steal headhunters from my standard account

TLDR...

ctrl+f mafia:

protect players like me on the Mafia's hit list.

what lol

I liked the thread where you said that your atlas fog should be investigated by the FBI better, but this is still pretty good.

Vids or it didn't happen

It's okay. TFT scumbags can't hurt you here.


I think

"

Fauxxx_NL#0133 wrote:

I am no expert in cyber security but it seems to my laymen mind that your account name and your session ID can provide more or less unfettered access to what you are doing within the game in real time, and if you are on the hit list this means any risky encounter, difficult map, or critical moment in your gameplay is vulnerable to their outside manipulations.

Only one thing here is true

Somebody forgot to take their meds.....