Guild Bank Missing Items Bug -- Aug/Sept 2024

Amen to that…I watch him and his crew bully a player during BfA down in the aqua zone we had when he and some of his crew where in raid to get that mount the Ray Glider one…well it dropped but not for him or any of his crew and they all moan and shouted at the person that got the mount to give it to him cause he was who he was…the poor person was knocked over from the hate from that crew of his…they were literally shaming the person to give it too him…

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That’s when I would respond that I don’t know who you are from Adam, and the RNG says I won that mount fair and square. I would also add that if he had an issue with that, he’s very welcome to open a ticket telling the CS team just why you “deserve” that mount. Happy days, indeed.

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All of the “I still have an unresolved issue” tickets are worked by GM’s, who respond using templates (usually). If this is, in fact, the “newest” template and it’s actually true, I think most people would be fine with that.

What I’m not fine with, even though I didn’t lose anything of note, is the complete utter lack of communication. If they’re still going to restore items, where is the statement saying more restorations are coming?

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I am missing a bunch of stuff from my bank alt guild bank, I’m the only one in that guild with a bank that was full. The main items that are missing are battle pets, probably like 100 of them.

The first response to my ticket was a GM with a cookie cutter copy-paste instructing me on how to reconnect to the game and reset my router. WHAT???

Reopened the ticket… reiterated that they actually READ what I wrote.

Second response was the cookie cutter copy paste “We can’t give you back items you have discarded, sold, or deleted. We recommend you use the item restoration page”

??? Do they even read these anymore?

Today’s response just pointed to this forum then stated that there was nothing further I could do, “We suggest you fill out a bug report”.

Seriously, what ever happened to Game Masters who actually want to help? Where is this sort of behavior outsourced from??? 10 years ago GM’s were helpful, they’d go above and beyond and even come into the game and talk to you in game to get something resolved, or clarify if they didn’t understand.

Now they click on your ticket, don’t bother reading it, copy-paste a response and DING move along, spending (by all appearances) less than 10 seconds, if that, working on your issue.

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Did turning it off and on bring back your items tied to the blizz server?
Support definitely has gone down hill…

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Bring back ghostcrawler

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I got the same response. I told them that if I had sold, disenchanted or deleted THOUSANDS of items, I’m sure I’d remember that.

I do wonder how much of that is even done by real people anymore. Luckily, I didn’t get the FIRST response that you did. The second response was what I got the first time. Then, they pretty much said not much they could do for me on the second response.

THIS is something I wish someone would investigate. Because it would actually matter to the issue, even if the results are the same. Either they really DID bungle it up and LOSE everyone’s data (which is very bad in that they were careless, or weren’t given the time, resources or personnel to do things correctly) OR they have the data, restored it for a select group of people and refused to do it for the larger population due to the cost and effort needed. There are nuanced differences in the BADNESS of each of those possible scenarios.

I guess this is too much of a niche problem for investigative reporting though. :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

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I never put in a ticket at all, and they must have identified one of my guilds as having been affected, bc the GM received 1 stack of meat. Nothing else. But I had not made my issue known prior to the “restoration”, so they clearly have some list they can work from in terms of who was affected (which then gets even stranger, perhaps - if they know who was affected, how do they know this without bug reports or tickets, and if they know that, why is it impossible to get the rest of the data?)

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If that is the case, why is it so hard for Blizzard to make a post and say that to everyone ? That’s what we all want to hear confirmed, for the most part. If that was said initially, we wouldn’t be so angry and discouraged and we’d be way more patient and understanding.

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I believe that podcast said it best. Blizzard is often silent about problems until they have a solid plan to resolve them. And honestly this plan seems kind of vague and inefficient already. Adding layers of promises ontop of it might just make it worse (for them).

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THIS is the thing - those old, “useless” mats aren’t always. We save it for those cases. I gave the example of last xpac where a toy was available quite easily as long as you had an OLD (as in from VANILLA) crafted item. At the time, I still had ALL of the stuff in my banks, so I was very easily able to make the Onyxia Scale Cloak then. If they decide to do this again this xpac, where you need an OLD crafted item that I could make, it will REALLY hurt now, knowing that making it would probably have been super easy a few months ago.

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What really cramps my brain is this:
A) Some people had their guild banks affected
B) Some people had X material in their guild bank (Murloc Toenails, for the hypothesis)
C) Some affected guild banks had cross-realm characters

All of us: A.
Some of us: A+B. Not everyone carries Murloc Toenails, let’s be honest.
Some of us: A+C. Also, not everyone has cross-realm guild members or alts.
Some of us: A+B+C.

It would be a statistical impossibility for there to be no other guilds that meet all three of these conditions. If it were possible to set a completely arbitrary ratio of 1:9, the 515 individuals posting in the closed Bug Report thread would have an additional silent contingent of 4,635. (No, there is zero basis for the ratio, I’m only theorizing.)

There are 241 NA realms, and a tallied 943+ guilds in the locked Bug Reports thread, so it’s possible that there’s at least one guild on each realm (as based on ‘home’ realm, and the actual distribution would be impossible to tell without specifically polling).

Even more conditionals could be added to the mix without becoming silly, but those really just add granularity (which itself to me would be fascinating to see).


Going back to Linxy’s post:

Maintenance processes are one of those things that ought to be universally applicable; whether someone thinks the physical server or the population server needs it or not, every instance gets identical treatment. It’s one of the ways to keep a verifiable constant in cases requiring troubleshooting. (Insert itsthelaw.jpg meme here or something.)

So that brings up the question: If it was a bugged-out maintenance process, why were the effects felt in such a scattershot, Swiss cheese sort of way? If all other criteria were identical, where is the evidence contradicting the scenario that Billyray-X lost items from their guild bank whereas Joejim-X did not? If they both had Murloc Toenails in their guild bank and both had cross-realm members, then what happened in the process that Joejim-X still has his?

For as much as the technology gets scapegoated (ie ‘that stupid computer did this or that and ate my spreadsheet’), they’re just machines. Computers, programs, processes etc only do what they are instructed to do. Computers don’t write bad code, humans do. (General observation, not an accusation.)

This may not be the way things actually work or are viewed, but to me, every line and every conditional in a piece of code is a potential failure point. That means that there are hundreds upon thousands upon millions of potential failure points, and when your ELSE turns into ELSEIF, then that increases exponentially.

It’s like the more I look at this, it just becomes increasingly more bizarre and unexplainable.

(By the way, if there’s anyone reading that is good with math, I’d love to see what some of these numbers look like when run through the Pareto Distribution etc).

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This is exactly why I am fuming. There are mats I can go refarm that are pretty easy to get but there are others from older xpacs that are required for mounts and pets that aren’t easily farmable because you have to farm the mats to make more mats. I had been working on making Living Steel for a mount and that requires farming white and black trillium and motes of harmony. I had stacks of these in my guild bank being saved to make the mount. I can only stand to do that farm for so long so it has been a slow process. I almost had the amount I needed to make it and everything poof. The idea of starting over makes me see red. I know there wil be trolls that will say "just buy it off the Auction House but that requires gold that I do not have/want to waste on the AH, especially when I had the mats in my GB.

Not to mention all the elemental things needed for crafting older stuff (which I still want to do because I don’t raid and like to collect transmogs which requires leveling older professions). I had scarbs from AQ that I have been trying to collect to go get transmogs there. Herbs, cloth and so much time farming and it all gone with nothing returned and basically a middle finger from Blizzard. I had just transferred all my DF mats to that bank to make room for new xpac mats. Those mats aren’t useless when you can still make items with them.

I play to have fun and relax and this entire thing has stressed me out and is not fun anymore. My bf keeps telling me about all the new things coming out and events and such and I have basically told him I don’t care. It just feels like a grindfest and money grab. The Warband bank sounded great until I saw the cost of the tabs. I am on a fixed income with WOW as my only entertainment and I am unable to play for as long as I used to be able to, due to health issues, so I cannot endlessly farm/quest to make gold to purchase tabs and I refuse to spend what little income I have to purchase tokens to buy them.

The handling of this data loss and middle finger to those of us that have been playing since the start/almost the beginning has been defeating. My sub is supposed to renew in Nov so I may play till then but not really wanting to get Blizzard more of my precious funds if this is the treatment we will be getting.

Feat of Strength should be titled. Into the Void-Vaults of the Defeated

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(No offense is meant.)

It really isn’t.

Look at it from a Cost/Benefit point of view from Blizz’s perspective.

You have a bug that has impacted many players, true.

You always have churn in the playerbase. The real question is: Will Blizz actually notice an uptick in the lost players?

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No offense taken! :slight_smile:
I wasn’t really addressing the cost/benefit where it relates to players (or the exodus thereof), or really even the costs of equipment, maintenance, and those who handle those topics. I was thinking more along the lines of the technical/mechanical side of the issue.

My apologies for not being more clear! :slight_smile:

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Our guild losses honestly, were acceptable, we didn’t store anything expensive in our guild bank or anything sentimental.

HOWEVER. What’s not acceptable is the lack of communication and that’s what irks me. Like, we shouldn’t HAVE to speculate about if there is still restoration happening or not. Just communicate with us and I can tell you a lot of us would be a lot less pissed.

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Obviously there’s at least one additional variable in place. For example, I have three guild vaults … two are personal ones and aren’t touched much, and one is our active guild vault. The only vault, as far as I could tell, that was affected, was the active guild one. And the only tabs that were affected were those that had been interacted with during that small period of time when people were having items “glitch” in their vault … so trying to move something and it wouldn’t, etc.

Although I think it’s unlikely that people who have personal guild vaults will have interacted with ALL their tabs during that small window of time, to trigger the bug?

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Can’t be that. I have a friend who had to take about 2 months off the game, simply because she didn’t have time due to a work project. She just came back the other day, and found a few slots of her personal guild bank also missing. She didn’t lose anything of value (she said the couple slots she is missing were just worthless junk that she didn’t need), but still.

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I remember a few self-reports in the various threads from people who stated that they’d just returned from some hiatus, or even had re-subbed just to check their banks when they heard about this, and found that they also had been affected.

It’s going to be difficult for anyone on the outside to know if the click glitch and the disappearances were linked, or just were just unfortunately coincidental.

Edit: I should probably add that I was one of the ones that did not experience the click glitch.

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Our guild consists of my wife and myself we had all the tabs in the guild bank full (mostly trade skill things as we are hoarders) every thing is gone, we started putting things in the guild again and so far it has stayed there.

When this happened right around War with in start we had had no problems with the guild vault then next day it was all gone. it seems like there are lots of flavors of this issue some people are saying they had some things lost or whole tabs of things lost and others saying they lost everything.

Also as its just my wife and I we do not have cross relm members in the guild.
we do have alts from both factions.

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