Item restoration in paid for MMO's

Adorabelle_2

Hello, not sure if anyone can give me any advice.  My daughter has played Animal Jam (an MMO) on and off for a couple of years.  Over this time she has spent a lot of her pocket money in subscriptions on and off, aswell as one off in-game purchases.  She logged into her account about two weeks ago and all of her items had disappeared.  She has had this happened before and had to rebuild and buy everything again.  I put in a parental request for her items to be restored but they came back with a generic we cannot restore items, here is how to prevent hackers. 

Now I am a gamer myself on MMO's and if anything is taken, destroyed in error etc, I always get in-game items restored by the game support service, for example from WoW which is a paid for service.  Am in naive in thinking if you get any sort of in-game purchase or paid subscription that these should be restored to you?  I have contacted both Animal Jam, WildWorks and National Geographic (all linked through Animal Jam) by email and on twitter to which all of them have ignored me. 

During this time games such as Animal Jam have been extremely helpful for my daughter as one of the ways she has been able to communicate and play with her friends.  She is extremley upset by this and feels like her effort and money has been stolen from her. 

Any advice would be appreciated.  Thank you

dan958

The game creators have no obligation to return the items to you.
The more important thing would be to track down HOW this happened. Majority of causes due to issues like this is the account holding giving over their password (either by phishing or by those 'hunter2'-esque tricks) , or by social engineering. Education on security is key here.

jonnygee2

Agree with the above, no way to get the items restored here if the company isn't willing.

Your daughter feels like they were stolen because, essentially, they were. As above, talk about security and go through the 'how to prevent hackers' guide you were sent carefully with her. Imagine if her bike were stolen because she had left it not locked up somewhere, it's a similar thing.