About a week after we launched patch 11.0.2 in August, we began receiving reports of an issue where some players were discovering items missing from their guild banks.
As we investigated over the next couple of days, we found the culprit—a technical update that was made to support cross-realm guilds. An unexpected bug caused one of our maintenance processes to make some items disappear. Many of these items were related to professions materials from prior expansions, but it was possible for players to lose other items from their guild banks as well.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been packing up the missing items that we’re able to identify as lost by this process, and we will soon mail those to the guild leader character for each affected guild.
Due to how some of the data was lost, we’ve reached a point where the result will be an incomplete restoration for some guilds, and we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items for them.
We apologize for that and for the long wait here. We really appreciate your patience as we’ve worked through this difficult issue.
Thank you for the update. This hasn’t affected me or my guild, to my knowledge, but it raises two concerning points for me:
Data loss. Hearing some items will never be restored doesn’t sound great. I think this creates reasonable worry about using other types of storage in the game like warbanks, esp since we know those had technical issues. While those of us with level heads realize that these are sophisticated systems that may have issues, is it important for us to not use these features or for them to be disabled until they become more ironclad? I don’t think it’s going to go over well if items are lost again in the future from any of our in-game storage systems.
As someone else above me pointed out, it was a long time without communication here. I know I would be frustrated if I was one of the users who lost valuable items here and didn’t hear about it for a month. I am one of the users who didn’t get any crests from delves last week which puts me far behind other players and there hasn’t been any communication about that. Are efforts being made to communicate more quickly? You guys have done an amazing job at upping the content cadence but communication is lacking.
The fact that the people missing items from their guild banks aren’t going to be made whole doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the Crest issue for me.
Blizzard has usually done right by players who didn’t correctly earn rewards. And I know that many users out there according to Reddit did receive compensatory crests in their mailbox this week. The question is, why did only some users receive them?
Can y’all make your own thread for this Crest stuff, please? I’d like clearer answers on the actual topic of the guild bank and whether this has all been resolved.
What an absolute NIGHTMARE this is going to be. My inventory is nearly full, my guild vault was completely emptied and was nearly full before being affected by this issue. Is there really no way to restore the items directly to the guild vault in the tabs they belong in? Also, I find it a bit ridiculous that “some items may be missing permanently, too bad, so sad (basically)” is a thing.
Thank you for the update, Linxy, and for the explanation as to what went sideways.
I do have a concern, though: What steps are being taken to ensure that this kind of process failure is avoided in the future? Are there methods and processes being explored and/or implemented for more rigorous testing in the implementation of new features such as this?
The reason why I ask is because there have been stated plans to convert personal banks from bags to tabs; the loss of trust in the guild banks and warband banks over the last two months has been rather sizeable, and I personally don’t trust that such a conversion will go cleanly now.
