So yes, you misread. It’s not a big deal. Own it and move on.
When this service was announced, you were given three choices…
Choose to have the character permanently moved to either Era or TBC.
Choose to clone your character so that you can have it exist on both Era and TBC.
Defer the choice, leaving your character to exist in limbo until such time as you are ready to make a choice.
There was no indication that this service had a shelf life and, as stated, given WoW’s history of never losing character data, it would be completely reasonable to assume that you had unlimited time to make this decision. After all, why should a simple data copy be time limited?
Had Blizzard stated this was a time limited offer, or that the choice was eventually going to be made for you, then that would have been fine. They didn’t. Instead, they left it running for 2 years and then, with 3 months notice only on the battle.net launcher and no email to account holders, they shut it down and forced any characters currently in the 3rd state above to WotLK.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to aggressively defend Blizzard here. They made a communications mistake and a lot of people are rightfully confused. Nothing changes, by all indication that character data is gone, but Blizzard can still blunder from time to time. Why are you taking this so personally?
Some people stop playing WOW don’t keep up with any news about the game for months, years and decades. As a company Blizzard should take this into consideration and keep the data of their characters. (greatest potential of a customer is a returning player). There is really no excuses of not keeping the option open for cloning, they keep dead servers operating.
If OPs characters are sitting untouched in Cata, there should be no reason that they cannot be copied to Era. Microsoft, money for nothing to be had here.
This isn’t a topic about gdkps.
It’s about cloning and missing out.
I explained you missed out on your betting action because it’s likely already happened.
Go haunt a gdkp thread and let Charles vent about cloning here without your attempts to derail.
I’m glad you asked, it isn’t really personal other than the fact you and your ilk are stupidly annoying about it. Over 1k posts of “Muh characters, muh heart, Blizzard you monsters!” after being told NO twice and told the backups are gone, deleted, bye bye, and you’re still here posting the same crap repeatedly.
Now, if all of you rubbed your brain cells together maybe by now you’d realize this tactic of sock puppet posting and blubbering like children about your “feels” and “memories” and how you’re “Oh so angry” isn’t working. How about after 1k posts of us seeing the same old whining about it you take my advice earlier instead of being combative with your same rehashed BS. No one, especially Blizzard cares you abandoned your character and missed out the first time you had two flipping years to clone. They don’t care you’re an emotional wreck without your character. You need to talk money, and not a single one of you have been able to do that.
You want them back? Give them a reason for it. 100 of you paying $30 for your clone once, and maybe playing 3 weeks in your GDKPS to go “Oh man, this is boring. I’m out.” Does what for them exactly? They invested thousands of dollars in man hours for your $30 bucks? Then continued upkeep of the service no one has any intention to actually use after their one and done. Companies want money. They offered the service for money. They got their money, saw no more money was to be made and did away with it. So what you need to do is stop your typical posting of “Me mad, bring back clone!” and put together a reason to present that is profitable.
There is money to be lost there. Coding isn’t just a simple “Let me go in there and copy this profile of Duergar into this other folder and we’re good.” They’ve changed the code from iteration to iteration and it isn’t the same as Era. It’s why we have different clients. What they have to do is pay a team to go in, replicate the code, then cross engineer it and make sure it works on old code. It’s why Windows 10 files won’t work on Windows 98 and why they are vastly different products despite a lot of the interfaces being identical. Code evolves and not all values are equal for a copy paste job.
If that’s the case they wouldn’t have had massive issues when they launched it the first time. They stated it was 100% new territory for them. Do you not remember prepatch where people were unable to play clone or character for up to an entire week after the launch of TBC? People having clones not appear at all? If it’s so easy why can’t you or anyone else actually offer a cost effective solution? Oh right, it’s always easy to talk on how simple something is when you know jack about it and it isn’t your job to fix it. Go ahead though, your tactic of “Me mad, Blizzard bad.” for 1k posts with radio silence over a year is going great guys. Keep it up and you might easily make it to a second year of silence.
You’ve painted a picture of a pretty grand conspiracy of a small group deliberately posting on alts to further an agenda, which I suppose is a way to look at it. I mean, the simpler (by far) explanation is that people, such as the OP, are coming back to the game after an extended break and wondering where their characters went. Sounds more like you’re not able to acknowledge what happened here and have restored to extremes to justify your stance but hey, that’s just me.
If you wanna bluster and pretend like Blizzard didn’t make a mistake here, feel free, but it’s laughable that your best defense is to accuse people of reposting on alts Now, people make mistakes all the time, nobody is immune. I’d be happy to forgive Blizzard when they take ownership over this one. They don’t even have to do anything other than “Yea, we dropped the ball on letting people know they were losing their Classic Era character data, our bad.” It’s not like such an acknowledgement requires anything else. Sometimes it’s just nice to hear people own it so we can all move on.
I’m not mad about this by the way, I didn’t lose any character data. I was active at the time of service shut down and I saw that it was happening. That doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the error Blizzard made here and support those people coming back to what was supposed to be a museum piece to find their character data gone.
There’s no option other than to reroll here, but that doesn’t mean we can’t show a little compassion.
The only person being combatitive during our interactions is you. You’re extremely passionate about this, almost like people affected this have personally offended you by the loss of characters by the sheer virtue of the fact that they happened to not be playing during the three month period between the announcement of service shut down and the actual shut down. I mean, how dare they!
People have been proven in these threads to sock puppet post. Some have posted the same topic multiple times almost word for word in new topic to new topic over the years. It isn’t a “grand conspiracy” we’ve proven it. They’ve been on the moan and groan train for over a year now about it.
Me thinks you need to read some of the other raging posts others have made when told the service is discontinued. I’m not sure why you feel your ignorance tactic works here, you’ve posted in those threads over the year. As I said, I’m not offended they lost the characters, I’m annoyed over willful stupidity. It’s like watching someone just spin their tires in the mud when there are actual ways you can get out of your mud hole but choose not to. That’s everyone here in this “My clown is gone” debacle.
You’re still posting your nonsense and none of it is an actual solution that will fix the problem. They had more than 3 months, they jacked off for two years and lost out for it. That isn’t mine, Blizzard, or anyone elses problem but their own. If they cared so much about their characters, in two years they would have logged in, said “I want to stay on Era” or choose the clone option and they didn’t do squat. Hell, they even made a huge advertisement when they dropped the service down to $5 bucks and they still didn’t take it. The three month window is not a defense for anyone here.
I mean, you’ve accused me of this and I’ve been posting on the same character since I dunno… WoD, maybe? I do change my forum avatar every now and again but it’s been a looooong time with this one. Still, you lump me in with this because I say things you don’t agree with, then disregard my premise (which is really just common human decency by the way) because you’re assuming I’m some alt. I’m not new here.
It’s entirely plausible that people come back to the game and find their characters gone. It’s much less plausible that a handful of people are posting on alts trying to push any kind of agenda. Especially when you take into account that the only people who can prove it are Blizzard… so it would be entirely silly to do exactly what you’re proposing people are doing.
There is no solution to fix the problem. Had you read my very first post you would have seen me say…
What’s done is done. The only thing I would expect from Blizzard is that they acknowledge the mistake they made but whether or not they do that, offering compassion to people affected by this costs me nothing. Especially because it’s almost certainly not their fault.
There is a chance you can recover your characters, outside of the cloning process, and while the cloning functionality is gone and likely wont be coming back, sometimes your characters will show up as deleted on the server you were playing on, to check this log into your ERA server, click on undelete, if your characters are there, you can restore one per week.
However if your characters aren’t there, if you really want to play classic, then do it, the leveling grind is part of the appeal of classic, otherwise your options are go play retail, Cata, or simply quit.
lol… why do you care so much then? your anger posting is an obsession. If you don’t care, as you state, then don’t post in these threads. Not difficult to understand?
Again, I explained that. It’s willful stupidity. You trickle in here thinking “But Blizzard you monsters, bring back my clone!” will resolve anything. You think any of us like this train wreck you call an attempt at getting their attention?
If you want them back actually do something. Get a petition going and email it over, get with other players and have them to also email in mass. I wanted Majora’s Mask remade and joined Operation Moonfall to get Nintendo to give us a 3DS upscaled release. We flooded them with virtual petitions and emails about it. I wanted SaGa Frontier to get a remaster, I started an online petition, partnered with fan sites and people on Square’s forums. We flooded them with petitions and emails supporting it. We got a remaster.
We didn’t just sit there and sob about it on forums, we put effort into it. Something you folks should try. Watching this clown show you guys call an attempt at getting Blizzard’s attention is indeed frustrating.
Then don’t read this thread and the others like it! Problem solved. If you make an in-game suggestion or bug report 99 % of the time Blizz tells you to post in the Forums to get attention on the problem/suggestion.
So it’s you who’s in the wrong place. Just leave us to fight our battle here … more so as you have nothing new to come up with. If you think it’s a losing battle, leave it alone - and thanks for the bumps.
People would probably leave it alone if posters were honest but since they publicly play victim they open themselves up to criticism and people like myself have a hard time not taking the bait.
Its not bad advice to suggest you should finally get a grip and understand clones are never coming back.
Now, people make mistakes all the time, nobody is immune. I’d be happy to forgive Blizzard when they take ownership over this one. They don’t even have to do anything other than “Yea, we dropped the ball on letting people know they were losing their Classic Era character data, our bad.” It’s not like such an acknowledgement requires anything else. Sometimes it’s just nice to hear people own it so we can all move on.