For lack of a better name to call it.
One day, every profile in the metaverse were altered, mainly all player's name were changed to "oops". The community took this in a much too light-hearted way. Some suggested somebody on the staff screwed up with the server, some thought it might be some kind of hacker attack. The metaverse, and the players' profile information, is stored in a Microsoft SQL database. We all know the track record of Microsoft in regard to security. It seems some people had access to information about the incident directly given to them by Stardock, and were claiming the mess was indeed the result of a hacker attack.
It took a whole day to fix the mess, I waited that day out figuring the staff must be so busy fixing the mess that they didn't have the time to inform the customers about what was happening. Then a week passed without an official word from Stardock. It could be that Stardock isn't "man" enough to admit to an internal goof with the database. It could be they don't want it to be known that some people outside of the Stardock staff have administrative access to the database and goof badly. Or it could be a regular run-of-the-mill hacking incident.
Regardless of the cause, Stardock has decided I don't deserve to know what happen, what was the extent of the damage and what is done to avoid similar incident in the futur. Should I change my password? Should I cancel the email adress I used to register with Stardock? What about my real name, is it stored in the same database? This may seem pretty harmless info but then I though, hmm if I had pre-ordered the expansion, would my credit card number be in the same database?
At this point, I have no reason to believe whatever Stardock might say about the incident. Long ago, in the early days of Galciv, I had a look at the website and was about to order the game when somebody asked why personnal info was kept in a Stardock database, and freely shown to whoever looked at player's profile. Stardock gave no official answer to the question and the genuinely concerned customer was drowned in an ocean of apologetic spam, at first dismissing his concerns, then dismissing his own person. That pretty much stopped me from buying the game. The only reason I have it now is because I found it at my local game store.
I was on the fence as to whether I should get AP or not, AP's description didn't led me to believe that serious gameplay issues were addressed. The hacking incident brought back my concerns about giving any kind of personnal info to any online shop. The lack of interest from Stardock into keeping me informed leave me with only one reasonable choice, don't give them sensitive information and don't give them more money.
You make your own choice, you should try and get others to tell you what happened during that incident and how they feel about it. A word of warning though. If you take this to the Stardock forum, be warned that your post will be dismissed and torn apart by a very vocal minority followed by a majority of sheeps, specially if the RB empire logo his attached to your name.
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