Guild Bank Missing Items Bug -- Aug/Sept 2024 (Part 2)

Support Bug Report
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Continuing the discussion from Guild Bank Missing Items Bug -- Aug/Sept 2024 (Part 1) - #5143 by Veritable-thrall.

Previous discussions:

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So, my guess at the maximum size of a thread was wrong. (Maybe the limit was set lower on purpose, since other active topics in these forums are allowed 10k posts before autoclosing.)

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Figures they’ll just ignore it until people give up begging blizz to do the right thing. On the bright side, I’m saving so much money I would’ve spent on wow, and I’m having a blast catching up on some other games that won’t delete my stored items

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It might be because it’s the bug forums and not general? But yaw I was sure it was set higher as well and when I saw the forum was locked my 1st indication was, they got tired of people and not because it was starting a part 2, which to me means most people will not follow what happened initially and this is the way for it to slowly fade away.

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So, is this still called “The Maw?” Unofficially, of course.

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The Maw II : Dawn of the New Maw. Instead of snd ever enlarging moon its just a slow close up of Xalatoes.

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Re-posting my timeline comment here for convenience.  I also encourage others to re-post here if you had a particularly insightful comment from the prior thread (like Kurnmogh’s comment on sociology).  No better time to do so when the thread is still fresh.

TIMELINE

2024-08-13
     Patch 11.0.2 is released.

2024-08-14
     Main bug report thread for issue posted by Vaelhaeyn-Wyrmrest Accord US.  https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-what-happened/1918643

2024-08-17
     Support article created by Blizzard Entertainment acknowledging the issue, but no communication elsewhere.

2024-08-19
     I added mention of the guild bank issue under “Known issues” on the “Patch 11.0.2 (undocumented changes)” page on Warcraft Wiki (WCW, formerly Wowpedia).
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Patch_11.0.2_(undocumented_changes)#Known_issues

2024-08-18 — 2024-09-19
     Other than an EU Customer Support rep that stated work was ongoing for the bug, there is absolute radio silence.  https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-items-gone/528709

2024-09-20
     Support article unpublished.  Update announcement posted to the US General Discussion and pinned by Linxy.  Find out Blizz knew the cause just a couple days after (but chose to not say anything).  And it turns out it’s not just a bug but outright data loss.

     Restoration system mail sent out to guild masters several hours later. It doesn’t go well (soulbound BoE bags, items with no charges, etc.), with no communication about its problems.

     Other than Linxy stating in a follow-up that it was fine to use guild banks, the update post remains the first and only time Blizz ever truly said anything on the topic.

2024-09-21
     I added a section specific to the 11.0.2 problem to the “Guild bank” on WCW. https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Guild_bank#Patch_11.0.2_issue

2024-09-23
     Bug thread quietly closed by Kaivax.  Any new threads on the matter from this point on are moved and merged into the GD thread.

     GD thread has become a support group basically.  Preferred bug report thread as it attracted way less trolls though.

2024-10-05
     Still no clarification to questions regarding the blue post itself, such as whether there will be any more restoration “waves” or that the rollout on Sept 20 was a one-and-done deal.

     Still no confirmation from any player posts that any guild received everything back, or even a majority of what was lost. Everyone has been stating that they either received a minuscule amount or nothing at all.

2024-10-07
     This thread [Part 1] is briefly unpinned from the top of GD forum.

2024-11-13
     Thread renamed from “Guild Bank Missing Items Update” to “Guild Bank Missing Items Bug – Aug/Sept 2024” and moved from the General Discussion forum to Bug Report.  Remains pinned.

2025-02-26
     Thread unpinned.

2025-03-27
     EU announcement thread locked.  Standard “appears to have run its course” and a warning about bumping.

2025-03-31
     NA announcement thread reaches threshold cap of 5000 replies. Part 2 is created. Guild Bank Missing Items Bug -- Aug/Sept 2024 (Part 2)

News coverage remains sporadic. Only started picking up at the beginning of October, it seems.

2024-09-20
     https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/12691-Guild-Bank-Missing-Items-Update-Complete-Restoration-Not-Possible

2024-09-21
     https://gamerant.com/world-of-warcraft-guild-banks-items-missing-gone-war-within/ – very mid article

2024-09-23
     https://massivelyop.com/2024/09/23/world-of-warcraft-data-loss-fiasco-deletes-items-out-of-guild-banks-and-blizzard-cant-fully-restore-them/
          https://massivelyop.com/2024/09/26/massively-overthinking-do-you-expect-compensation-for-mmorpg-trainwrecks/ – follow-up opinion & thoughts

2024-09-27
     https://blizzardwatch.com/2024/09/27/495-wow-guild-bank-bug/ – podcast segment lasted ~5min IIRC, very disappointing takes

2024-10-03
     https://www.ign.com/articles/world-of-warcrafts-latest-expansion-wiped-out-some-guilds-inventories-seemingly-for-good-and-players-are-furious – Probably the best so far, surprisingly

     https://www.dualshockers.com/world-of-warcraft-expansion-bug-wipes-guild-banks/

2024-10-04
     https://hothardware.com/news/missing-items-in-world-of-warcraft – skimpy read, but whatdya expect from an obscure website :woman_shrugging:t2:

2024-10-05
     https://dotesports.com/wow/news/wow-players-from-72-year-old-vet-to-decades-spanning-guild-lost-their-gear-and-it-may-be-gone-for-good

     https://boundingintocomics.com/video-games/blizzard-offers-minimal-recovery-to-world-of-warcraft-players-whose-guild-banks-were-empited-by-recent-glitch

2024-10-06
     https://www.fragster.com/wow-error-frustrates-players-as-guild-banks-suddenly-become-empty

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As they’ve closed the discussed about this on the EU forums, I’ve edited the last post I made (under character Poisonenvy) again, to suggest people could come post here if they wish.

I’ve probably broken some forum rule there by editing my post even though the thread was locked 
 I’m sure they’ll let me know promptly :stuck_out_tongue:

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I hope she doesn’t mind, but wanted to post link to Kurn’s first video (she made a series of them) explaining what happened, and why it’s significant to everyone, including people who lost nothing.

They won’t let me embed MEDIA (they didn’t like something I said in response to this issue) so I hope using quote marks helps.

Copy and paste the following with no quote marks.

‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82aOsQhrK_I’

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Eu atĂ© hoje nĂŁo recebi os meus itens de volta. meu personagem Ă© o Ășnico na guilda. usava o banco da guilda para estoque de itens. o que faço?

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Nada, eles não vão fazer nada para ajudar qualquer um de nós. É por isso que desisti do jogo.

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Mas ainda não consigo entender, tem histórico de retirada, tem tudo lá mas os itens não estão lá
 e não vieram para a caixa de correio. se vieram, eu não recebi lá
 muita coisa perdida


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Sim, muitas coisas foram perdidas, mas não vão consertar. Eu tinha 7 abas completas no meu banco de guildas, e tudo se estava perdido, e eu não tenho nada enviado de volta para mim. Esta é a nova Blizzard e como eles funcionam. Basta olhar para todos os bugs no fórum de relatórios de bugs. Muitos deles são meses, até anos, velhos, sem consertos.

Eu sĂł falo inglĂȘs, espero que o translate esteja funcionando bem o suficiente para vocĂȘ entender :slight_smile:

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You did very well with how it looked to me. Thank-you for using a translator to talk to our Portuguese (Brazil) player.

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Stopped playing after this whole incident and just came back to check on if things ever got resolved. Sad to see they didn’t.

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Reposting my post about the very carefully crafted “we lost your stuff” post. Again, this is a repost from October 16.

I’ve mostly weighed in on this topic due to my experience with technical stuff. I work in tech, I deal with databases, etc. However, my university degree is a Bachelor of Arts with a Specialization in Sociology.

As such, I did want to talk a bit about the communication and the problem I view here with the communication from Blizzard.

There’s a theory called Audience Reception Theory, by Stuart Hall. (Here’s Wikipedia’s entry on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_reception) In brief, it states that any message has a sender and a receiver and that the goal of the sender is to ensure a clear message has been received that properly conveys their meaning.

The possibilities for the receiver of the message are that the receiver does get the meaning the sender intended, or that they do not get the meaning the sender intended. It also essentially says that the sender has the responsibility/power to convey the meaning they want.

Let’s take an example and then I’ll talk about the Blizzard communication issue as it relates to the guild bank stuff.

Originally in WoW, you had four Horde races and four Alliance races: Orc, Troll, Tauren, Undead, Human, Night Elf, Dwarf, Gnome.

To look at them, you could easily classify the Horde races as “ugly” and the Alliance races as “pretty”. This classification also steers into “bad” vs. “good”, as, typically in our media, the “bad” characters are shown as “ugly” and the “good” ones are shown as “pretty”. (In The Wizard of Oz, the good witches were conventionally “pretty” and the wicked witches were conventionally “ugly”.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeautyEqualsGoodness

So, one can read the meaning of the original WoW races as saying that the Alliance are the good guys and the Horde are the bad guys. Is this what Blizzard intended? Probably not. But it’s one of the messages that can be conveyed by the choices Blizzard made.

Let’s take this back to the message from Linxy, specifically this portion:

This single sentence has been, from my perspective as someone with 3 years of sociological theory under her belt, carefully written in order to confuse matters while simultaneously allowing people to read into it what they want.

Honestly, it’s quite clever, though this kind of cleverness has absolutely no place in an official communication to customers. Still, it’s almost worthy of praise.

In this part of the communication, which is a single sentence in length, the following conclusions can be drawn:

  • Data has been lost
  • Some guilds will receive an incomplete restoration
  • There is not currently a way to restore other missing items apart from those that will be restored

All of that is fact, as per Blizzard. With those facts, we can draw multiple conclusions, which is where the problem arises. Here are just two of the conclusions one can draw from the above facts.

  1. Data was lost. Some guilds will get an incomplete restoration. Some guilds will not get an incomplete restoration, which means some guilds will get a full restoration.
  2. Data was lost. Some guilds will get an incomplete restoration. Some guilds will not get an incomplete restoration, which means some guilds will get nothing.

I think we’re all in agreement that those are two of the possible meanings, right?

So then we have questions.

  • What will happen to guilds that don’t get an incomplete restoration?
    • Do they get everything back?
    • Do they get nothing back?
  • Are restorations on-going or have they been completed?
    • If they are on-going, by which point does Blizzard anticipate they will be completed?

And then we get into the questions surrounding the data loss itself.

  • How was the data lost?
  • Don’t you have backups?
    • Do you really expect people to believe that you don’t make production backups before pushing a patch to production?
  • Why can’t you restore the backups?
  • What assurances do we have that other data won’t be lost?
    • If other data is lost, will that be restored?
      • Again, what assurance do we have that other data will be restored if this “can’t” be?

As such, I find the original post by Linxy (and I’m sure it was just handed to Linxy to post, not written by Linxy) to be very disingenuous. An official communication should answer questions that are being asked as well as the follow-up questions, if not in the original communication, then in a follow up.

I think that Blizzard crafted this carefully to allow people to read into it what they wanted and avoided any kind of discussion (we haven’t heard from Linxy since September 20) about it since. It brought up more questions than it answered.

Had this been done appropriately, we wouldn’t have any question regarding the meaning of the original phrase, nor would we have several other follow-up questions. I believe that this was done intentionally to try to smooth things over without firmly saying “be happy with what you got, lots of people got nothing, because we’re either idiots who didn’t make backups OR we’re idiots who don’t think it’s worth our time and money to restore these items”.

What’s going to get less bad press? A bug that loses items in guild banks or Blizzard admitting that they either don’t make backups or they refuse to restore things even when they do have backups? Clearly, it’s the former, given the lack of many news items about it.

So there you go. That’s my view on how Blizzard crafted this carefully. That’s one reason I’m still upset about this. They had the opportunity (and every day is a new opportunity, too!) to put this to rest on September 20 and they did just the opposite, by deliberately (IMHO – which I think is proved by the lack of responses in this thread) sending out a message that could be interpreted in different ways by different people and their subsequent silence when it comes to the other questions the statement brought up.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk! :grin:

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Meanwhile, I read into their post as some guilds will get a full restoration, while some guilds got an incomplete restoration, with an incomplete restoration meaning either partial restoration of varying degrees or literally nothing at all.

Why would they get everything back if the restoration was incomplete? No, they either got nothing or some level above nothing that may as well have been nothing in some cases.

Its been 7 months and was pretty clear that the compilation of lost items was concluded by the time they made the post and all that was left was to mail out returns, incomplete as they were.

Again, it’s been 7 months and it seems that such information is never going to be disclosed to us.

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Yeah, Battlecruisr, this was reposted from the original thread that has now been closed for hitting 5000 posts.

So that was from October 16.

I still thought it was worth reposting due to the misdirection in it. Glad we agree on the main points – they’re not giving back anything else and we’re never going to know anything about what happened.

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I still have 10 guilds that were mostly emptied by the great GB theft. I STILL keep checking to see if maybe all the valuable and sometimes sentimental things have been returned. Playing since mid BC, I had collected alot. I had one GB for each profession, 1 for rare pets and mounts, and one for all those quest & rep items plus reagents and those horrible low drop rate currencies in DF like “Sinews”. Devestated & empty. I am still afraid to use my GBs & probably always will be due to no compensation, explaination, or resolution. :frowning:

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I refuse to pay them any more money (cancelled in October) as long as they are being scumbags, vut I still keep checking back here in case they miraculously decide to do the right thing. Needless to say I’m not holding my breath.

I feel “fortunate” that my 7 tab bank that was 100% wiped out with NO returns was mostly just rare/old mats and recipes, and not anything heartbreaking to lose.

To reiterate, it’s primarily the way this was handled, the negligence that allowed it to happen, and the disrespect they’ve shown with essentially no communication on the issue, no attempt to make up for it, and the REALLY silly things people have gotten back as “restoration”, that have made me so upset, and cancelled a game I played for nearly 20 years.
I will never buy into one of their games ever again, knowing the way they treat paying customers.

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