Guild Bank Missing Items Bug -- Aug/Sept 2024

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.

58 Likes

Oh wow. A response finally.

Who thought that a month without this post was a good move?

Any chance we can get acknowledgement of the other major bugs, like weeklies not resetting or no retroactive Crests?

People aren’t mad because it’s taking time, they’re mad because it’s been radio silence.

126 Likes

Thank you for the update. This hasn’t affected me or my guild, to my knowledge, but it raises two concerning points for me:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

64 Likes

So does this mean the problem was resolved and we can re-open our guild banks?

Do I need to wait until I get my stuff first? If I get it at all, apparently…

23 Likes

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.

75 Likes

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?

13 Likes

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.

53 Likes

Can you stop trying to make this about anything other than the complete lack of communication by Blizzard?

These issues are connected, whether you like it or not.

20 Likes

This thread is literally about:

Guild Bank Missing Items Update

This issue is NOT part of the guild bank problems and you can make your own thread.

I’m looking for answers on the topic.

You’ve spammed every single other thread about your Crests. Try bumping one or making a new one about that instead.

47 Likes

Aw, muffin.

Blizzard CS is terrible.

That is connected.

18 Likes

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.

62 Likes

All I want to know is if the issue is resolved and I can re-open the guild bank. Or if I need to wait to see if I’m mailed anything.

7 Likes

:popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:

9 Likes

Communicate more!

People are legit begging at this point. Half our information comes through a 3rd party website. That should never be the case.

71 Likes

Yeah I don’t know how much patience people are going to have when they don’t get all their stuff back.

21 Likes

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.

48 Likes

If anyone needs proof that testing is a bottom-tier priority for Blizzard, this is it.

This is entirely unacceptable, especially with a AAA billion dollar company. Do better.

72 Likes

For the incomplete restoration, have you been able to identify the impacted guilds? And if so will there be a form of compensation for them?

49 Likes

Will the items be sent to the current guild leader? Or the guild leader at the time of loss?

Our leader of many years moved on to other things right before expac.

6 Likes