Paid to Play: Account Recovery in Destiny 2

Over the weekend, I had the chance to chat with my associate and friend Michael Thomas Elliot. The topic of discussion: “Account Recovery,” something that I had never looked into and had barely heard of. By the end of our discussion, I had learnt about a fascinating subsection of competitive gaming that had never crossed my mind. Paying others to use your account seems ludicrous at first, but as someone who has been doing part-time Account Recovery, Michael made a strong case for this fascinating way to earn money.

(Please forgive my more basic questions which come from a lack of Destiny knowledge.)

Spencer: At the most basic level of explanation, what exactly is it that you do?

Michael: So it’s colloquially called “Account Recovery,” and it’s basically where someone gives you their account information, so their email and password– which is really insecure and I don’t know why so many people do it, but they do. So you basically play on their account and do stuff they don’t want to do.

A lot of the time it’s competitive, because they aren’t good enough to do it, but usually it’s kind of a time constraint thing. It’s mostly for endgame, hard-to-grind-for stuff, because Destiny has a notorious endgame grind, that I find satisfying. For literally hundreds of different things that take anywhere from an hour to a hundred hours.

So people use Account Recovery to avoid that?

Mhm. If you want everything in Destiny, you have to play as much as those streamer guys do. The content creators.

Wow, so are there a lot of people who do Account Recovery, is it a burgeoning market?

Yes. It is surprisingly large. I’ve been seeing it around for a long time, and I thought it was kind of scummy for a while [laughs]. But I kind of turned around on that just because of how much there is to do.

But yeah, especially because with Forsaken, which was the September [2018] DLC they released. They released a lot more things to strive for, to the point where almost nobody can get all of it. So because of that, [Account Recovery has] been really taking off. And there are a lot of things in Destiny that are kind of skill-capped. Like if you’re bad at certain tasks, you can never get certain things.

Are major parts of the game locked behind these skill barriers?

It’s moreso specific bits of loot. So it isn’t like “beat this really hard level to play this other level.” It’s mostly gear and loot. The main use of Account Recovery you see recently is for Player vs Player, because there are “Pinnacle Weapons,” which reward you for getting to the highest point in competitive that you can. And it’s similar to an Overwatch or League of Legends-type competitive system, except it’s a little bit more catered towards leveling up to a finite point, instead of settling where you’re at. But most people cannot get there. I am an average to high-skill player, and it’s hard for me. And it will take hundreds of hours. So it’s mostly Player vs Player, but I do mostly Player vs Environment [when doing account recovery].

Does it pay well?

Generally, at least for me, my rule is minimum wage. So if I’m doing random tasks, because a lot of what I do on the PvE side is semi-monotonous grinds and not necessarily difficult stuff, but the standard for miscellaneous work, as in grinds without a challenge, is about $10 an hour.

The harder the content, or the more in-demand it is, the more you can charge. So Last Wish is a raid, a big raid at the end of the game. You have to be skilled, knowledgeable, and a certain level to do it. Even though it only takes me about half an hour, I know that the person who is trying to get me to help them would take several hours. So you kind of meet in the middle. The harder the challenge is the more it costs.

If you do everything right, it takes 35 minutes. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’ll take a few hours to learn each segment. So usually it’s somewhere more in the middle, like instead of $10 an hour, it’s $40 for how long it might take you. Those are kind of the ongoing rates.

Earlier you said that before you started, you thought account recovery was kind of scummy. So how do you feel about the ethical side of account recovery when it comes to people who want to play more competitively, but don’t want to put in the work to get to that point?

So the reason that I used to think it was kind of scummy was because I was very much of a believer in the “we should all help each other” mindset, which I still am, and I do that a lot in my spare time in the game. But I realized that a lot of people just don’t want to do the stuff. A lot of people play it like they’re just kind of scavenging. They just want the toys, they don’t want to do any of the things for the toys. So that requires somebody else to do it for them, and I think it’s more unethical to have people just do things for you that do take hours of work and of skill to do.

Interesting, so do you know of any high-level or high-profile players who have had people do account recovery for them? Or is it primarily lower level casual players who just want to save time and effort?

I don’t know of any high-tier players that need other players to log into their accounts to do stuff, because most of the high-tier players that I can think of are skilled enough to get everything on their own. Some easier than others, but I’ve never seen one have a friend log onto their account to get their comp weapon. But I personally had a high-profile YouTuber log onto my account. Not to do something for me, but because I had a weapon that was unlocked randomly in the first few hours it was released, and they couldn’t get it, so they logged in to play with it. I’ve seen account recovery for that purpose as a high-tier, but medium to high-tier players can get everything, so it’s not like obtrusive how hard these things are to get.

Do you think this is a viable/stable job with longevity, or do you see it as unstable or likely to die out?

I see it being viable as long as Bungie releases content with rewards that people care about being obtainable through difficult or long quests and activities.

So is Destiny the main game to have a lot of account recovery? Or is it prevalent in other major games, like Overwatch and what not?

I don’t know, but I imagine it’s there in Overwatch. I haven’t seen it personally, though I have seen it for other similar sorts of games like The Division or World of Warcraft. I think WoW is where I first started really seeing it, but it seemed a lot more scammy then. Like I wouldnèt have done it had I played WoW, seeing what it looked like. It looked like Chinese ad pages almost, but now you can just go to eBay and type in account recovery. You’ll probably find a bunch of games. Actually, let me just check real quick.

After a few moments of typing, Michael read off a small part of what is only the first page of eBay listings for people advertising their Account Recovery services.

Yeah, and there are a lot of websites dedicated to just that, like teams of people and stuff. From what I can see here, it’s mostly Destiny, oh but there’s Grand Theft Auto V, some other stuff.

GTAV makes sense, that seems like a very grindy online game. Now how does Bungie feel about all this? Do they have an official stance on it?

As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a big thing about it. There have been some people complaining. More recently I’ve seen it come up in forums without an official response, but the biggest opponents to account recovery are on the competitive of things. Because, so the ranking system is between 0 and 5,500, and basically, for me, I’m a mid to high-skill player, so I’ll get like a 1.3 kill/death ratio. I’ll get like 20 kills and 15 deaths or something. Which is barely standing out among people of my skill level, so say I’m at like 3,000, I’m expecting to face other 3,000’s.

But who I’m really facing are people who are logged on to their accounts, and it’s kind of almost like smurfing; [smurfing is when a high-level player makes a new account to be matched with low-level players instead of people at their own skill level]. So like, they’re on their friend’s account, so it’s not a smurf for their own benefit, or they’re on the account of someone who’s paying them. Sometimes you’ll be like  “okay, we’re similar skill levels, we have similar stats”, but then it’s very obvious that you got steamrolled by somebody who is not that person.

So there are multiple different motives for different people then. Is it a side thing for you, just when you have the time and want a few extra bucks?

It’s definitely a side-thing for me. I have listings on eBay that I can take down or put up whenever I want. And I got a regular through eBay who’ll text me, like “hey are you free tonight? I want to do this” and I’m like “yeah I’m free”. So basically I can give them appraisals based on how long it will take. But it’s definitely just whenever I want to, because they understand that it is real chunks of time.

The idea of having a “regular” for this sort of thing both baffles me and makes complete sense, since it’s your personal account.

Yeah because they need somebody they can trust, and that they know can guarantee them completion in activities.

And it’s your personal info that’s required to login.

Yeah exactly. The main motive is that people want the stuff that is rewarded for putting in a ton of time and effort, but they don’t have a ton of time, or they can’t put in enough effort. I know of websites that are dedicated to it that get hundreds of people all the time, like businesses.

So I’m assuming there’s a fair amount of people who do this as their main job, doing high-level stuff, because of how it pays?

Yeah, so my rate is PvE, and PvE is a little bit shorter, a little bit more guaranteed, a little bit more segmented. Because it’s like, a raid, that takes me one hour, $20, it’s individual tasks. Whereas the competitive side of things, from my understanding, to get from 0 to 5,500 in the shortest possible amount of time, you would have to win 87 matches in a row. And the way that Destiny‘s matchmaking works, especially recently, is on the slower side, so it takes 5-10 minutes to get into a match, and they’re around 10-15 minute matches. So three matches is an hour to an hour and a half, so for 87 of those, assuming that the person is good enough not to lose a single one, you’re looking at at least 30 hours.

There’s two weapons in competitive that people want. The Luna’s Howl, which you’re given at about the halfway point and would take me around 10 hours, which is significantly easy. And then the Not Forgotten, which is the reward for hitting max rank. So to get those two, Luna’s Howl would be about $400, while Not Forgotten goes for upwards of $1,000.

That is absolutely crazy. It kind of makes sense timewise, but it feels so wild to hear.

So wild. So many people will pay $500 for a gun in a game.

Now as someone who does account recovery, are you worried that, at some point, Bungie might have an issue with it and take action?

I don’t foresee them having an issue with the concept of logging on a different account, because everybody has the right to multiple accounts and like, who’s to say you aren’t at a friend’s house sitting there playing. What I do hope they institute, and what I think they, if it becomes a rampant problem as they commit to this high-tier competitive reward system, is kind of like a “smurf detector.” I know other competitive games, they will rank you against people at your competitive rank, but if they can sense that you are not where your account should be, they’ll know it’s smurfing.

Like if you have a 20:2 kill/death ratio while playing with a bunch of starting players with far lower than that.

Yeah exactly. So I’m hoping that they have a detector for that. And I’m hoping they do either a Dark Souls route, where exploiters get put with other exploiters, or they’ll just put you with people at a higher rank. Not associated with your in-game rank, but kind of the background statistics. Because some of the people that you’ll face at lower ranks will be some of the best players in the world. And they just curbstomp people, like 99 to 2.

How is that even fun? You’re winning against people nowhere near your skill level. Is it just for that instant-win endorphin release?

Yeah, it is. Just for some people it’s a job. It’s doing the quickest and most efficient job. And if you’re getting $500 for it, you’re like “I’ll mindlessly walk over bots, essentially, for money”.

So if Bungie were to take issue with account recovery, what would you or most people who do it do in response?

I don’t think there would be a massive reaction from the community, as it is a fairly small part of the community and a somewhat taboo subject among the community as a whole. The biggest issue people would have would be with the difficult PvP weapons, as they aren’t guaranteed to be completable. If you aren’t good, you will never be able to get them,. So if Bungie were to somehow counter account recoveries, those players that utilize them will be upset that they’re effectively skill-locked out of a small set of weapons

Do you have anything you want to say about account recovery? Any misconceptions you want to clear up, advice, etc.?

So I just want to talk a little bit more about what I do on the PvE side. So PvE, a big point is that some of the best stuff in the game, from an objective point of view, is usually locked behind raids, which are, for a lot of people, really hard. Because raids are challenging. Even six players who know what they’re doing have to react properly, know what they’re doing.

It’s very punishing, and there are a lot of mechanics in raids that aren’t found elsewhere in the game. And they don’t tell you what to do in a raid, it’s just, you walk into a room, you see a bunch of plates, you see a bunch of pictures, and you’re like “figure it out.” Once you do, it makes more sense, but you have to have knowledge external to the game. So, a lot of people just don’t want to go to the effort of that, and it’s very evident. You can see that evidence very clearly in the newer raid, The Last Wish. Not the newest raid, but the Forsaken raid.

In the beginning of that raid, there is what they call the “wish wall,” which is like a wall of like 16 plates that you can shoot to put in a key-code. But there are like 16 different symbols and different combinations of symbols do different things, and there are hidden chests throughout the raid as you’re walking from one fight to another, there will be like a chest hidden in a cave. What you can do is, you can teleport to the beginning of an encounter, turn around, do some jumping, and get to one of those chests without having to fight or do a single thing. A lot of people who just want stuff have opted to never play the raid, but just log in every week, put in a key-code, and jump there by themselves, because they don’t want to go through the effort of learning it, the stress of playing it, or the effort of getting six players together.

And the other thing I wanted to say is a big warning, basically, about this whole account recovery thing. Because you’re giving away email, and account information that, in some cases, is linked to greater things.

Oh, like if you use the same passwords?

Yeah, and Microsoft has your Xbox Live password linked to an email, you have an MSN email for the account. So be VERY scrutinous about who you give your account to if you intend to do this, and always, when you’re done, change your password.

Finally, is it hard to break into doing this kind of work? Is there anything people who want to do account recovery should know before they start?

I try my best to list my credentials while obscuring my account name. Because doxxing [releasing personal information online to harm and expose the victim] and DDoSing [flooding a person’s network connection with meaningless content to kick them offline] and all those things are a big issue specifically in the Destiny community, and some people are opposed account recovery as a whole, so I don’t want people to message me angrily or try to haggle me down or something. If I want messages, I want them in eBay or Craigslist, but yeah, essentially you’ll just take a snapshot of a raid report or your Destiny tracker, and you’ll show like “look, I can do it, I’ve done it this quick, I’ve done it this many times.”

And I wouldn’t say it’s easy to break into, just because a raid, best-case scenario, takes 40 minutes. That’s kind of the average high-tier speedy run.

And you said you were average to high-skill, so you definitely need to be at least that level then?

Yeah and that’s in competitive, in PvE I’d say I’m a pretty skilled player, and I can do all the content, including the raids, on day one. I was like, 117th in the world to do Scourge of the Past, which took three days off work, with like twelve hours into the game each day. For everything, you have to be very high skilled, and you have to be able to prove that with statistics and if you muck up at any point or haven’t put in the time to back this up, people aren’t going to want you to recover for them.

As our discussion wound down, I found myself impressed not only with Michael’s Destiny prowess, but with his knowledge of this entire side of gaming that flew entirely under my radar. I’ll certainly be keeping my eye on this practice though, as I’m certainly interested to see how it evolves as the industry marches on.