I feel what happened is the first person you spoke to was completely uninformed and didn’t realise that the characters were set up to go onto BCC if no action was taken.
I’m resigned to start over and have a handful of characters from 10 to 40. You could hop on the seasonal server for the next three days with your wife and get a jump on leveling. Note, the level 40 mount is half price on these servers, xp is doubled on quests. That could be an option for your first characters to get a little boost.
Still doubtful they’d delete that database… 
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My guess is the server they found your “lost” characters on what is now wrath classic servers as the Classic Era servers were completely new and you had to use that now gone copy/clone service to get them over there.
I don’t mean this in a snarky way, its an unfortunate reality, but if you care about something that much then you just have to pay attention to the developments, everyone was given the chance to copy their characters to classic servers, and it was a good amount of time, sorry that you got stuck 
but I will say the classic servers are completely empty anyway, I copied one because it was completely BiS, I log in once in a while and its a complete ghost town so I just admire it : /
I totally get you, life during 2020-2022 was not a good time for me, had to fix a lot. I just didn’t have the ability to log in and handle that unfortunately. Games were my last priority then.
I did hear about cloning but it just didn’t make sense to me that they would by default move characters to BC or WOTLK so I thought “I don’t need to clone my characters will stay on Classic.
That was extremely wrong.
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I have to say I get a chuckle out of these threads. Considering there was numerous warnings going into TBC how this was going to work. You could choose to move on or stay.
Fast forward to end of TBC. There were numerous and detailed warnings that cloning was ending. You had to make your final choice. If you made no choice, Blizz moved your character on.
Now…you come back after a long absence and want to come to the forums to cry a river about it. Meanwhile, if Blizz did it the other way around there would be someone else crying.
Just stifle it, take this tissue and wipe yer cryin’ eyes and level a toon up. Or quit. Either way, one less whiner will do all of us good.
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I’d prefer to lose someone who types meaningless mean spirited drivel, someone like you. You are one of the most negative posters here, and that is quite a feat.
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Its alright, people like them are just sad people to be pitied.
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Yeah i know, the person who points out the whining negative people is the negative one. I get it.
He didn’t lie. There was a clone in both versions of the game. The Classic Era ones were purged from the system, and Wrath versions activated.
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I didn’t find the OP whiney at all. Just because this issue isn’t concerning or important to you doesn’t make it whining. The feedback in this discussion may help prevent this type of mistake from happening again.
It’s okay to skip subjects that don’t affect you, the sky won’t fall.
I guess my point is the 9,252nd thread of this gets old. It appears to me many of those who post here hate the game and the developer. Why not just move on then?
I guess the difference is I dont find their implementation a ‘mistake’ since a choice had to be made, right?
Again, you don’t have to participate in or even read threads that “get old” for you. Because from typing that, I would assume they make you unhappy. Just move on, the sky will definitely stay where it is.
I would assume, as OP did, that the default would be Classic. After all, we battled the wall of NO for a very long time to get a Vanilla reboot. IMO the cloning gig (money milking) made a mess of it all. Characters should have had to request to progress, not the opposite.
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Most people moved to BC which completely killed the OCE era realms, so it kinda made sense to move these toons as well… even if you weren’t around to make that call.
Better yet they should consider using the “Tracking” drop down menu below the last posted comment (or the “paw print” at the top to the right of the original post) and select “Muted” so they never see such triggering things again.
Agreed.
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Yeah I don’t want to really assert they were intentionally trying to lie, most likely they didn’t know or something.
But this happened into the same open ticket I have that’s still open.
My suspicious though come from this, if I had just accepted what the first GM said then my characters would have never been recovered. It wasn’t until the second GM came, did my character become restored… but onto a WOTLK server. Sooooo that makes me think they have the ability to move characters to wherever. Because the first person said it would be impossible to recovered “deleted clones”
That was untrue.
yes, this is what happened. it simply made the most sense to do it this way, from a technical point of view. the classic era servers are new servers. you might think they’re the original ones but they’re not.
the wrath servers are the original servers. the character is still on the server you created it on. it’s just that that server is now running wrath, not vanilla lol.
I just logged into classic and it showed my 8 toons on Grob. Then I tried to log into one, and they all disappeared from the classic server. The implementation leaves something to be desired.
I’m not complaining, I knew the drill, but for people who leveled to 60 before TBC was even mentioned, well, I understand the frustration. No one thinks that passivity would equal forced progression. Remember, the original Classic was released with no definitive indication of Blizz ever saying that they would progress to TBC let alone WOTLK. So, why they would force progression on people is beyond understanding. Holding the characters back should have been the obvious default.
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I still don’t think you’re understanding how it works.
When TBC launched, they split the servers into Classic Era and TBC servers. All characters existed on both servers, but you had to choose which was active the first time you logged in, or pay the cloning service to activate both.
If they hadn’t been touched since then, then both copies still existed. Except when the cloning service ended the Classic Era characters were purged, and the Wrath ones automatically activated.
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Again, I get that, it’s been said a few times here. It still though, doesn’t make sense. Why would any classic player or server host ever force progression? To me, it’s totally illogical to force that.
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It absolutely doesn’t make sense. It’s the opposite of what they should of done, which would have been to activate the Classic Era versions and purge the Wrath Versions, since these characters were made for Vanilla, not Wrath. Forcing them into Wrath without their creators’ permission seems very wrong. But Blizz doesn’t care about Classic Era and want to inflate the Wrath numbers, perhaps.
I’m just saying you weren’t lied to. Your characters weren’t suddenly moved to Wrath. Those copies have existed since TBCC launched. It’s just that all the Classic Era copies that were in limbo are permanently gone now. ‘Purged’ is the expression GMs used, and yes I’ve talked to them.
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