[POLICY EXPLOIT] Dupe Your Char/Items/Equipment (Live Server)

[Daeity]

FYI..

I was going to release this information next month, but with the very recent public rantings in regards to holes in the Transfer process, it wasn't going to take long for others to figure this out. I'm hoping that you can still do this before it's fixed!

**** WARNING: DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! ****

First, a couple things you need to understand:

1. GMs are simply "Chat Agents" working from an interface at their PCs to interact with virtual characters (ie, the customer).
2. GMs are over-worked, underpaid, and generally apathetic. But they're genuinely nice and their job after all is customer service.
3. GMs do not have readily available access to highly detailed Transfer/Deletion/Character logs, however they _can_ submit Character Restoration requests from their SAN _very easily_. Even then, many of their records are inaccurate or missing data.
4. GMs are required to cover large quantities of helpdesk tickets in their queue, so they will never thoroughly investigate a simple/innocent request.
5. Because of all these things, you want a GM for this Policy Exploit. You do not want to raise suspicion, otherwise the Ticket will be escalated to a Specialist (next level of GM who are more thorough investigating requests.) All of this will make sense below.
6. This *probably* won't work if your account has been Restored once already (they typically allow 1 restoration per account.) However, it will depend on the
mood of the GM (we've have never tested it though.)
7. Ensure that Character Transfers are not delayed (ETA should be 24-48 hours or less.)

How To Duplicate Your Character/Items/Gold/Etc:

1. Level up your character to 55-69 and fill up XP bar until it's near levelling. (*)

2. Report your own name or have a friend report your Characters' Name for violating the TOS Naming Policy.

a) If you already have an offensive name, great! You can have your name changed easily.

b) If you don't have an offensive name, claim that you are reporting your own name because you discovered a business with the same name and you realized
that you have violated the TOS. Or, you can claim that your Character's name as a religious significance and discovered that it was offensive (named after a god or deity, accidental racial slur, etc).

Note: Read the Character Naming "Terms of Service", it's very extensive and there are tons of ways to have your name changed by reporting yourself.

3. At this point, a quick investigation will take place and when approved, a forced Character Change Name task will happen. You won't be able to log into your character until you change your name.

4. Don't change your characters name right away! Wait until just AFTER Tuesday's weekly backup (Wed/Thu is fine), then change your name to something non-offensive.

5. Immediately request a server transfer for this character to any other server. (Typically takes 24 hours.)

6. When the transfer is complete, login to the character and change his configuration around. (This might not be required, but we did it anyways to "differentiate" this character from the previous server one.)

For example: Level him to the next level, change their gear, sell off or buy supplies into your bank, change their talents, join a guild, etc.

7. Login to the old server, and create a NEW character using the NEW NAME. Level it to 10 or so. (Once again, this may or may not be required, but we did it for the reasoning below.)

8. Before next Tuesday's maintenance, open a Helpdesk Ticket IN GAME and on your OLD SERVER using another Character on the OLD SERVER. These tickets will go immediately to the normal GM Queue and not Specialists.

Tell them that your Girlfriend/Boyfriend or family member deleted your character by accident. Or that you deleted your character by accident while cleaning out your account. Or, say that you got drunk and deleted a single or multiple accounts.

You need to be as innocent as possible to avoid escalation. Do NOT report that your account was hacked, otherwise they will fully investigate before issuing a Restoration task!

Also, tell them that the deletion took place on the date 1-2 days before the previous Tuesday's maintenance day. (Tell them the exact date, don't mention Tuesday's maintenance.)

9. The GM will issue a restore (usually during Tuesday's maintenance) of your OLD CHARACTER on the OLD SERVER. The NEW CHARACTER on the NEW SERVER remains intact.

10. You now have 2 characters on 2 servers.

(*) The process above can be changed slightly. Changing their configuration might not be required, but we did it anyways to differentiate our OLD character
from our NEW character. Reason: If they were ever to look back through their records, they would simply see a 69 Hunter and a 70 Hunter on two different
servers, with two different names, and with completely different gears and specs.

If you run into any problems while trying this, just claim ignorance. "Whoops.. sorry, forgot that my character was transferred! I guess by Girlfriend
didn't delete my account after all! Sorry."

Summary:

Everyone in our residence has been running this process for a good 6 months now. All of our friends' friends' have been doing this now too, so it was getting to the point where the knowledge should be known. We have typically done 1-2 characters simultaneously (report both names for TOS violations at once!) and there are about 70 characters that have been duped across multiple servers now (all 60's to 70's).

It was pretty easy to figure out (knowing GM policies/procedures & logging/backup process) and we suspect that there are probably thousands (if not tens-of-thousands) of duplicate accounts across all servers. I can't even imagine how much gold/items/characters out there are duplicates, considering how easy this way.

Hope this helps, and I hope this doesn't get fixed too soon!

[leo_ash]

screens please. :]

[Trucido]

If this works its really great! Will give you +rep when it gets confirmed

[Marlo]

Nice guide :O lets see if someone can get it to work.

[Numsu]

woah nice dude :P

[treyska]

this is a very very nice post, and very well explained. i hope to see more posts of this quality coming from you! +rep

[Tenni-T]

+rep for an awesome guide! would this work if you transfer your char to another account, and then ask for a restoration?

Peace, Tenned.

[uGGlan]

sweet dude ! +rep

[Firefly192]

Very nice guide! I think i'm gonna try this out

[Erasor]

Hope it works :O I must try this some time.
Edit: Now i've thought about it abit more. This seems to be fully do-able, so i'll just +rep right away.

[Nitereaper]

Great work! + rep for you.

[Cun]

I did something similar to this a while ago

After I moved my character, changed the name, gear etc then went to my old realm and said it was deleted, they said that they can see in the logs it was transfered to X realm a few days ago with the new name X.

Maybe it's just luck of which GM you get

[Phase228]

hmm
-Well detailed
-Evenly spaced
-a complete follow through
-a warning tag...
i rate this guide 5stars!
great guide if only i could do it but very very nice guide

[Daeity]

Originally Posted by tenned

+rep for an awesome guide! would this work if you transfer your char to another account, and then ask for a restoration?

Peace, Tenned.

Yeah, that should work too.

Timing is crucial too, make sure you change your name immediately after Tuesday's backup (Wednesday in other geographies).

The character restoration process is still pretty new when you think about it, and Blizzard hasn't worked out all of the bugs yet. Each Gaming Server or "World" has it's own database, with nodes connecting each of them together to fulfill transfer requests or simply for GM's to manage Helpdesk queues/player requests from multiple servers.

Basically, each server has it's own database of characters. When a transfer takes place, it is a simple copy from one DB to another, then a delete of the old one. GMs track all information by names (I assumed there was another type of unique identifier, but GMs don't seem to have access to that level of detail. If they do, it's ignored and this is where an apathetic attitude is advantageous. Their interface is also streamlined as best as possible to make their job easier.)

Since the name change is completed immediately after the old character information is backed up, their records only show the OLD NAME on the OLD SERVER, and a different character name as having been transferred.

The primary issue is GM Policies. Character Restores are "point-and-click", and they're not trained to dig deeper before issuing a transfer. They may see that a character was transferred at one point, but it won't be the character name that they are being requested to restore.

[LTGH]

Nice guide dude.