Keeping Your Account Secure

As the Community Coordinator for Robot Entertainment, part of my job is making sure that Age of Empires III players who play online on ESO can have a good, safe time with their favorite game.  There are a lot of parts to that job, but today I wanted to speak to the issue of account security, one of the larger issues in the Age3 community.

Age3 and ESO have a lot of rules regarding account security, as we take it very seriously.  Your account is only as secure as you make it, and sometimes people try to take shortcuts or make mistakes that can compromise the security of their account.

Here are some tips to help you make sure that your account remains safe:

• Never give your password to anyone, for any reason.
  • ESO Admins/Mods and Robot Employees will never ask for it.  Ever.  A lot of unscrupulous people will pretend to be an ESO mod employee and ask for your password, either to “fix” your account, or under the threat of banning.
  • If this happens, take a screenshot (hit F5) and email the screenshot to age3support@robotentertainment.com explaining what happened.  Screenshots are saved to the My Documents\My Games\Age of Empires III\Screenshots folder.  You can also hit PrintScreen and then open up MS Paint, paste the image in, save it and email that to us.
  • The person attempting to steal your account will be permanently banned.

Have a secure password.

• Do not use your account name as your password.  A lot of unscrupulous people will try to guess other people’s passwords by trying their username or other common passwords.  This can lead to your account getting stolen.
• Microsoft has a good website on how to create a secure password.  Check it out here (http://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/create.aspx).

Never let anyone log in to your account, and never log in to anyone else’s account.

• A majority of issues regarding account security on ESO come from users logging in to other users’ accounts, sometimes even with their permission.
• Here is an example of how logging in to your friends account, or letting your friend log in to your account can cause you to be permanently banned from ESO:
  • Alice plays on ESO with her friend Bob.  Alice is going on vacation, and Bob asks her if he can use her account while she is gone.  Alice gives Bob her password and goes off on vacation.  Bob also plays with Chuck, and Chuck asks Bob if he can use Alice’s account.  Bob gives Chuck Alice’s account information and they play a few games together.  Bob beats Chuck, and Chuck becomes angry and changes Alice’s information.  Alice returns from vacation and finds out that her account has been stolen.
  • Alice then emails to age3support@robotentertainment.com with her username, and product ID, and explains the situation.  Robot Entertainment Support then examines the login history of Alice’s account, and sees that several people have been using it.  We then permanently ban everyone who has ever logged in on the CD-keys of Bob and Chuck (and any other keys and usernames that logged in with Alice’s information) for Account Theft.
  • This can cause a chain reaction in which users find themselves suddenly banned for account theft even though they never logged in to anyone else’s accounts. They gave their account information to a “friend” who then passed it along, or logged in to another account reported stolen.  This is a side effect of letting other people use your account, which can result in it getting permanently banned if it is used to steal accounts.
  • Those users can email age3support@robotentertainment.com with their username and product ID and we can restore your account (provided they were not logging in to any accounts reported stolen).

You can see that we take account security very seriously at Robot Entertainment, and we encourage all of our users to do the same.  If you ever have any concerns about your account’s security on ESO or any question about Age of Empires III, check out the community at http://www.agecommunity.com/ or email age3support@robotentertainment.com