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Hello guys, i've been thinking of making this thread for a while now as every day i see people complaining about tradelocks. So we all know that system that claims to make your account more secure by preventing people to trade your items if they stole your account, but while one of my friend and i had a tradelock i noticed a bit problem about that system. Trade locks actually do not make your account more secure at all, it only makes you think it does, and will only slow down a person with bad intentions. Here's why : Im sure many of you guys reading here got a trade lock out of nowhere and didn't knew the reason of it, well that's one of the problems, you don't get a reason on why you have been tradelocked , let's keep that in mind alright ? When i was tradelocked , i noticed that while my account was locked on my main machine, i was not on a computer that i previously logged onto earlier , which makes sense as it's already one of my known locations, but that's where the problem right there : You are tradelocked ONLY if you're playing in from a location that's considered to be a new computer. That means if im on my main computer with my main character, i log off ,and my hacker uses my account to login, he will get a tradelock , he will then logout Here on my side i can login back up on my account and i don't have a tradelock, everything looks normal, and i never knew anyone logged in from a new location Basically the only thing my hacker has to do now , is wait 3 days to steal my items . So that's the first flaw of the trade lock system, you do not get any notification that your account was acessed from anywhere else. Now to the second part ; there are no reasons given on why you have been tradelocked and that is another big problem, so you guys probably got a trade lock at some point and didn't knew why, usually that's caused by any big hardware change or a windows update (and that may vary still...). The problem with that is that it makes people diregard the tradelock, all of them usually just wait 3 days and tell themselves " another one of those false positives by that dumb system " not seeing a reason for your tradelock will basically make people ignore how important that message actually is. and thus they won't change their password completely making the trade lock system useless. Still following me yet ? Not sure if you noticed by this point but what i said above contradicts the first problem with tradelocks i mentionned, remember ? tradelocks is only showing on devices that are considered new computers, you actually don't get a warning anywhere else than on the hacker's computer. That means when you see a tradelock on your computer, it is ALWAYS a false positive. So why did i say that then ? : Well all of this is to prove my point : -The current trade lock system is completely pointless and doesn't give any kind of extra security for your account if you understand how the system works : -The current system is actually more of an annoyance to people only to give them a sense of security. Here's a few solutions widely used by games : -2FA (which is already in APB, it doesn't work really well but at least it does work fine). -2FA by email (Which is my favorite type of 2FA). -Email warning on connection from a new device. 2FA by email could simply require to enter a code(which is sent to your email) when logging in from a new location. that would prevent anyone from logging in without your email acess. An Email warning on connection from a new device could also be another solution, you could basically login from anywhere, but you would get tradelocked from everywhere as long as you don't confirm that new device from your recived email. (Sligthly riskier as a hacker could still delete your items without stealing them) In the end this shows that APB's current account security is more of an illusion that anything else if you don't use 2FA. On an extra note : i also thought of making tradelock more of an account lock by making you unable to use the delete button anywhere in your inventory, and preventing you to use the chat and spend money. (basically making any kind of account intrusion impossible to affect you negatively). Thanks for reading.