The biggest red pill I’ve gleaned from this whole fiasco is that Blizzard is (apparently?) no longer making players whole when something bad happens to them, even when it wasn’t the player’s fault
The unspoken “you’re on your own” change in their policy is pretty clear, Blizzard no longer “has your back”
This is a complete 180 from the og days. I would know, I got hacked early on in late 2006 (I didn’t have the same “internet street smarts” back then ). I quickly went into damage control/panic mode of course, but fortunately their customer service was on a different level/top-notch back then (…presumably all the future mass-layoffs had not happened yet) and my ticket got responded to very quickly. They quickly took steps to lock/secure the account and I got to change my password
Then, once I finally got back into my toon (I logged back into a naked Orc standing next to an Orgrimmar mailbox with all bags/gold cleared out ) a real-life human being GM personally whispered me to follow-up on the restoration process. He provided me with some green catchup gear to get my toon back on it’s feet (which was actually better than my crappy questing gear at the time) He also mentioned something about them not being able to restore gold specifically “due to policy” or something, ok that’s fine… I still appreciated that an actual real-life human being had contacted me
But in 2024? It seems like it’s mostly just automated emails/automated responses to tickets if you happen to encounter a problem or bug. Even this Blue-post at the start of the thread is fairly impersonal and generic (…probably carefully worded/drafted by higher-ups or PR people in the background), and isn’t very reassuring at all/leaves more questions than answers
Same here. But that would have caused a greater outcry.
The way they did it, people, myself included, were simply thankful we’d had a reply and, we assumed, most of us were getting most/all our stuff back. So we sat and waited.
It was only when people started receiving those mails in-game with minimal, worthless items, that we started getting concerned … and even then most people were just being patient.
There are STILL people turning up on the forums, trying to work out what’s going on, and thinking they’re just waiting now for the full guild vault’s worth of stuff to turn up in the mail. Despite all the evidence pointing to that not going to happen.
Reminds me of the story of the frogs in boiling water …
They gleamed over it with oh well it happened but now it is fixed and though bad, all is well now. They then go on to support Blizzard’s stance they things will be mailed back but some items won’t be, but everything is now fixed.
Seems like they are trying to play nice nice about this… That podcast just lost all credibility with me.
Well they stated it happened and it was “a bad thing” but now is fixed per blizzard but not everything can be recovered…so they pretty much glossed over it pretty hard.
I was not expecting torches and fire but some discussion about communication, responsibility, empathy, lack of customer service, etc - naaa…none of that - - you were left with the feeling that yea Blizzard did their best and it won’t happen again and all is good in the Azeroth Banking System.
Was told by GM to post here. This is my second post as the guild bank affected is still empty after over a month. Saurfang Alliance Guild “Mishmash” GM Velcoe. I am the only user in the guild as it was a family alt guild and my wife and son no longer play. It has NOT been hacked and is part of the ongoing issues you have had with disappearing items. 7 tabs affected, I was able to remove some items to my warbank before the rest disappeared. Cant say just what Ive lost as been off playing classic since its launch until tempted back by the new expansion. The logs show stuff going in, mats mostly like gems, LW mats etc. Nothing like having a JC completely cleaned out of mats after thinking the guild bank was the safe place to put mats.
My feelings exactly. I love my toons, they’re extensions of me. I would love to keep playing, but the trust is gone so I’d rather say goodbye now, on my terms, than wait for something worse to happen.
Honestly, it’s because their thread is on the support forum. When ours was in the bug forum we didn’t have to deal with all the trolls or trash either.
I think ticket by ticket basis would have been a good way to go - that way, people unaffected or didn’t care about it, wouldn’t have to worry about it. Also, I think the numbers would have been much more manageable. It would STILL have been a lot of work (especially since I don’t know how they are doing the comparisons and how restoration is done - whether it’s just plugging in numbers or what) BUT if they can’t get EVERY SINGLE GUILD in the game, then at least, get the ones where people noticed and actually cared. At the very least, a good start.
I also think, knowing that there was an ISSUE with GUILD BANK LOGS not working for many months on probably a good number of guilds, they shouldn’t have gone through with this. Look - with the way you can now play the game, cross-server raids (EXCEPT mythic), dungeons, PvP, shards (formerly CRZ), Btag-group-invites and even a lot of the Auction functions, did they REALLY NEED to rush cross-realm guilding? I don’t think so, unless it had something to do with Mythic raiding. It’s NICE especially for people with characters they don’t play on certain servers due to the lack of their community, but was it THAT urgent that they had to rush this??
What irks me here is that all of my tabs are wiped. I had a couple of tabs that I cleared out myself beforehand (really old cooking and gathering mats), but that doesn’t count the following:
The tab that I had dedicated to the tons of stuff I’ve looted from Molten Core.
The tab that I had dedicated to WoD/Legion materials.
The tab that I had dedicated to Shadowlands/Dragonflight materials.
And I have yet to receive anything in-game to bring any of that back.
At this point, I’m assuming that my personal guild is not on Blizzard’s radar, and it’s just all gone.
Makes me sick everything I lost.
There needs to be some recompense, we can’t just “let this go” and be OK with it.
Massively Overpowered has a short article on the news about the latest Microsoft layoffs and a lot are coming from Blizzard. Hey, aren’t software engineers kinda important?
Anyway, the article is called
Microsoft’s latest game division layoffs affect nearly 400 Activision-Blizzard employees.
Sorry, I’d link but I guess I’m just not a trustworthy enough person to put LINKS in my posts. Unlike the upmost-trustworthy company that is Microsoft / Blizzard . . .
But that does not excuse the incompetence that lead to this massive loss of items.
Edit:
I work as a Software Engineer where we have many individual services that specialize in whatever task that they do, but have to all come together as one to work as a single product. And I completely understand that it can be difficult to coordinate and ensure that everyone is playing nice with each other.
This is why we have Development, Test, and Production deployments, all having Unit and Integration Tests ran at each stage to catch these things. Did no-one bother to test this change? Surely you could have had data in your Test environment that simulated your Production environment, that you could have tested against to be sure things didn’t get screwed up.
Simple testing scenario - Test environment, pre-change, log of character inventories, Gbanks, etc. Post-change, check inventories, Gbanks, etc. to ensure no anomalies, like items lost, etc.
Or is that asking too much of a Billion dollar company?
I’m requesting a formal RCA (Root Cause Analysis). Not a simple “we found a problem and we fixed it”:
What exactly caused this issue?
Why did this issue slip through Development, and QA?
What remediation steps are being taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?
I think Microsoft/Blizzard are willing to sacrifice certain things. Not only have they been having waves of layoffs (which had been happening quite a bit since the Bobby Kotick days) but lately, they have really sped up releases of content. Something had to give somewhere - whether it’s teams spread too thin, testing time cut, or whatever. It’s not an excuse because these are choices that the company made, including letting people go, possibly experienced people who might know what to do or what HAD to be done to make sure everything worked correctly - ever step of the way. THIS was a huge change that should have been tested a LOT to make sure that nothing like this would have happened, but they most likely didn’t.
They knew about the guild bank log issues, but failed to fix it before implementing the cross-realm guild access. That doesn’t sound like a good idea.
All very good questions. I think it would be fair for them to give us answers, especially no. 3, since that gets to the heart of whether or not our data is safe going forward.
It sounds like they believed what Blizzard said. Technically, yeah, not a LIE but they gave the impression with their wording (though using technicality they could defend it) that MANY MORE guilds would get A LOT MORE stuff back. “Some” to me, doesn’t imply getting less than 1% of the lost items back (IF they were, indeed, lost items and not just stuff they removed from the few remaining stacks of what we had left . . .) While I only have anecdotal information piecing together what I’ve seen in this and the later part of the original Bug Reports forum, it doesn’t sound like ANY guild received a satisfactory amount back.
I THINK Elizabeth Harper (the lady whose voice kind of reminds me of a Gnome was the most sympathetic and Joe Perez was the one that seemed to take Blizzard’s word the most (though he wasn’t necessarily unsympathetic to our issue).
I’m sure if Blizzard is as guarded with the information regarding this fiasco as it looks (with very little news coming out from third-party sources before their reply above) I wish someone would actually do some in-depth investigating that goes beyond simply taking Blizzard’s word. All we have are some anecdotes, rumors and speculation, in absence of a lot of information.
I’d love to know HOW and WHY this could happen in the first place, and especially how they will make sure (and not just “HOPE”) this will never happen again, but also things like . . .
Why didn’t they repair the bank log issues before proceeding with the huge change of creating Cross-service guild bank access?
Did the waves of layoffs (starting with Kotick doing some deep cutting years ago) and rushed schedule contribute to this? How much testing was done on the cross-realm guild access before it was allowed to go live? During testing, if enough was done, did anyone report seeing issues of ANYTHING disappearing and if so, did they try to recreate and repair the issues?
Did streamers, content creators, etc., really receive preferential treatment in having their items restored not only FULLY but in a timely manner?
What was Blizzard doing to control the messaging of this debacle outside of their forums? Was it simply making sure that the loudest voices were not affected? Were there implied threats (such as loss of access?) or benefits to staying quiet? Or is this really such a SMALL story that fairly vocal people like Preach and Bellular haven’t really touched it?
How much of the data was TRULY LOST? If it was lost HOW could they have let this happen? Why were there no complete back-ups?
IF the data was NOT truly lost, was their refusal to restore everything (or even a decent amount) more about saving labor costs for the company?
These answers may not get our stuff back, but I think we at least deserve to know what they’ve been up to in regards to this issue.
I’m still missing things from my Warbank. Pet charms, honor tokens, Pet stones…
That stuff went missing after the first wave of pre-patch gear going missing that was returned.
Maybe you guys need to do another whatever it was that returned the initial missing Warbank items? I’ve just stopped using it unless I can stick something in for an alt that can instantly log on and retrieve it, which is a shame because it’s an awesome QoL addition if it ever works right.
). I quickly went into damage control/panic mode of course, but fortunately their customer service was on a different level/top-notch back then (…presumably all the future mass-layoffs had not happened yet) and my ticket got responded to very quickly. They quickly took steps to lock/secure the account and I got to change my password
) a real-life human being GM personally whispered me to follow-up on the restoration process. He provided me with some green catchup gear to get my toon back on it’s feet (which was actually better than my crappy questing gear at the time) He also mentioned something about them not being able to restore gold specifically “due to policy” or something, ok that’s fine… I still appreciated that an actual real-life human being had contacted me
was the most sympathetic and Joe Perez was the one that seemed to take Blizzard’s word the most (though he wasn’t necessarily unsympathetic to our issue).