I received an email from Nexon Games a few days ago that there was a mandatory password reset in effect, and that to login to any installed games I would first have to change my password. After logging into the my user control panel at Nexon I went ahead and made the change but ran into a huge roadblock: any changes made to my account would require a confirmation email first be sent which would contain the link to reset my password. Unfortunately for me I had created my Nexon account quite some time ago - several years in fact in 2007, at which time I was using a hotmail account which has since been deleted by MicroSoft due to non-use.

This is not the first time it's happened to me, as this old email account was one which I had for many years (since 1999 actually) but had set up that all email be forwarded to an actual active account. The problem is that Hotmail used to require that users log into their account at least once or month or the account would be inactivated, and that is exactly what happened to me. I've lost only several game accounts due to this such as my Runes of Magic account which Frogster Games refused to re-activate under a new email address and there have been a couple others that I don't care about. RoM I did care about but that is water under the bridge at this point, and I've put in behind me, especially since I'm rather burned out on Fantasy MMO's at this point.

However, I had forgotten that I used that old now-deleted non-restorable Hotmail account to register with Nexon so it seems as now I've lost access to all Nexon games. I originally registered with Nexon in the first place for Combat Arms way back in '07 which I stopped playing long ago for superior games such as A.V.A. so no big loss there. The problem is that I do have several current games which I'm active in which includes DFO, most recently Dragon Nest, and most importantly Vindictus which I have put roughly 100 hours of playtime into - all lost to me now. Very sad.

Nexon - like several other game portals - use the player's email address AS THEIR USER ID and therefore the user is inextricably linked to their original email address at the time of the account creation and no changes are allowed to be made due to this link. I like security as much as the next guy, but I think this is just a very bad method of account creation because of the situation similar to my own which the use occasionally finds themselves in.

Over the past several years I have developed a personal method of Game Account creation across the various game portals (Aeria, gPotato, ijji, T3Fun etc etc) which I've honed to perfection to avoid such circumstances, but I still feel the sting of losing accounts from an earlier time before I was wise to the ways multiple game accounts. Its a tough lesson to be learned though.