IGN is talking about it now, not that it’ll change much.
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I did. Six mails on my main Horde guild and five on my main Alliance one. Both sets were received with the ‘main and only’ wave.
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For those who were asking. I was on my guild master toon a few days ago and there were no items returned. That means the few items I reported receiving yesterday were returned sometime in the last week. Again, it was like 2 dozen items out of a nearly full guild bank, still missing over 3 full tabs of goods…nothing super valuable, mostly just storage and legacy items. Just logged in to check, no further items have been received since yesterday.
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I guess…that’s not bad news at least. It means “restoration” emails are still being sent out.
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The more eyes the better. The more people outside of the forums talk about this, then more will follow (hopefully). Eventually it will have a snowball effect and Blizzard will have to restore our items.
Wishful thinking, I know…
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I haven’t received a single thing back and I lost every slot in 7 tabs give or take 1-2 slots per tab it was jam packed, I first noticed my guild bank empty 1-2 after war within launch, I remember having some kind of guild bank issue 1-2 weeks prior to this happening, I have checked every single day since I noticed my Ninja looted Gbank. absolutely nothing.
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I wonder if this all came about when one of the integral members of the “Blizzard Team” that got their lay-off notice decided to just “f” this, if Blizzard is going to force me to lose my job, I’m just going to force Blizzard into a hole and deleted all the guild bank stuff they could get away with and then delete all the backups to cause this mass disruption we are seeing now. Nothing like a pissed off employee.
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If it makes you feel any better, most people aren’t actually getting anything back so not too much time will be wasted.
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A fun thought, but that seems unlikely. The randomness very much seems like a domino effect from some glitchy code that crashed a bunch of sql tables. Patch 11 made sweeping changes to pretty much the entire item database with the Warbound and other things…just like how Heirlooms became soulbound “accidentally”… Glad they fixed that, finally, in patch 11.0.2… The Guild Bank code is probably connected in some way to the Warbound Chest code and deploying one messed up the other. This is broken code that’s overwhelmed what few people at Blizzard actually do care and they’re getting no support from those who don’t, so it’s taking a long time and, likely, won’t ever be resolved satisfactorily.
When there was that downtime issue, they gave every active player a single free day of game time…it was plastered all over the launcher and it popped up, as promised…that was an easy fix. This is a catastrophic failure that they’re trying to keep quiet because it would not only turn off veteran players, but scare away some newbies, as well.
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They could’ve accidentally caused that though, by firing the people who could’ve fixed it.
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IMO, one of the better articles on this issue that I’ve read. It sounds like they actually did some research, whether reading our forums (the Bug Report and this one) or perhaps Reddit. They didn’t simply take Blizzard’s words and promises and assume that things were actually going fine since we were getting “partial restoration.” They understand that we got very little and that we are FURIOUS.
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IGN is the only ones actually writing about it and it’s a good article… amazing.
so disappointed on the content creators i used to be subscribed to; when we needed you, you failed to help us… I unsubscribed from all WoW content creators (YT); you’re useless to me.
Wowhead, you also disappointed me by not covering the issue, but the game is unplayable without your site (IMO)… we still talking but not best friends anymore.
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What do you think would have happened if the opposite occurred? You log on your guildmaster and the mail is absolutely stuffed with mail. You start to open it and realize that Blizz sent you duplicates of everything in your GB - including gold.
Do you think that this wouldn’t be corrected ASAP if not sooner?
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I should think that access to the World of Warcraft digital environment (e.g. subscription to the servers) would be considered a service, and that the storage of digital data forms a part of that service.
Since Blizzard themselves have enabled the conversion of gold to money via the WoW Token, all digital data they store has a corresponding real world currency value, and the loss of that value is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the loss of (or failure to restore) any such data.
This would be equivalent to Facebook or Google suddenly deleting all your photos, except that your photos have a price tag on them and you could have sold them for real currency (or at least, real purchasing power in the form of blizzard balance) before they were deleted, but now you get nothing.
I’ve got no problem making enquiries/complaints with consumer protection here in Australia if it comes to that… but I’m hoping that Blizzard is still coming around to engage with the issue after another one of their classic periods of tonedeaf silence.
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While other sites have covered it, I think IGN and Massively did some of the better jobs of explaining/discussing what actually happened, even after the, uhh . . .“restoration.” While it took IGN a while to put out the article, it seems much better researched (as far as the result so far of Blizzard’s “restoration” “efforts”) and the reaction of those of us affected, as well as mentioning the issue with gold tokens possibly making in-game items actually worth real money in some sense (to people who don’t play WoW, they may not be aware of that). I liked the sort of round-table discussion Massively had on what MIGHT be a fair compensation in an MMORPG, highlighting this disaster.
I agree in being disappointed with WoW content creators. I wonder if they were subtly or overtly “persuaded” by Blizzard. WoWHead is probably powerful enough (I mean, they save Blizzard having to actually make Quest text make sense or allow them to put quest markers in the wrong place, have bugs, etc., because WoWHead allows the game to be playable even with glaring issues) that they might be able to report on it without much repercussion, whereas YT creators who depend on WoW/Blizzard for their content (and thus making a living) is too afraid to make waves - even when they had, in the past, ranted and raved and vented about other WoW-related issues (for example, go back and watch what a lot of them had to say regarding Shadowlands - not exactly flattering stuff).
Is it a case of “it’s not affecting us or our friends or people who PLAY like us, so it’s not a problem?” I mean, if it was a bug that removed raid-and-dungeon related achievements and titles, would it be a whole different thing? OR on the other end, is it SUCH a huge problem that Blizzard is doing what they can to shut people up (IF that is the case, I think more players SHOULD worry), or is MS using a bigger stick to intimidate content creators than ABK did? What is it about THIS problem that has them so silent?
This is one of the pieces of the puzzle that’s got me flummoxed.
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I think a lot of the ‘streamer silence’ is this, in part. For whatever reason out of many, it seems like people tend to not care (or have the energy left to care) about things until they themselves are affected. Call it compassion fatigue, I guess.
Regarding the playerbase in general: our guild banks = their raid achievements, PvP ranks, etc. If the players who care about those lost them, they’d be raising a riot as well. The only difference here is that they haven’t lost 99%+ of their achievements or ranks and been told ‘oh my bad’ whereas we have with our guild banks.
Out of all the streamers that possibly could be ‘enticed’ to just stay quiet, there’s maybe five to ten that have any real traction in the community, probably less, and even fewer of those have enough traction that Blizzard’s PR might feel it wise to do anything about it. Streamers are basically free advertising, sub numbers are deceiving because they include gifteds, and so on.
RWF unicorns might have been a good sector for Blizzard to keep happy, but probably not for much longer. With the lack of decisive and meaningful action on Blizzard’s part in response to both the Ansurek issue and the reputation issue, they’ve shown that any bad behavior on the RWF teams’ parts is going to be allowed, and as for the teams themselves… I have no reason to think that they’d be policing themselves any better than they had this time around. Short of it is, RWF players are going to start making Blizzard look bad, and I’ll put money on that.
Whether or not there’s some goodwill going on between Blizzard and streamers / RWF / sites is one of those things that’s never going to be proven to be true or false. I would caution anyone, however, to not give Blizzard credit for much influence in terms of keeping things silent, though. Ascribing them any real power is just like assuming that they, as the company that they are now, give two rats about their playerbase - they don’t have the ability or capacity for much of either.
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I’ve gotten mail on 3 toons - all rather insignificant amounts of stuff. My first bank toon got a partial stack of an enchanting mat, my herb banker got two partial stacks of stuff and my LW mats/ore+bars/gems bank got I think 3 different items. None of it was significant and ALL of the items I got back were of things that had remained in the bank after the “great heist.”
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Nope because those things are pretty meaningless.
Yes. I suspect this is it. I’ve seen comments on some social media posts where, when the guild vault issue was raised, those NOT affected would reply saying “but Blizzard said that was all fixed”. They saw the announcement Blizzard made that they’d found the bug and, in theory, would be returning most of the lost items, and thought that was case closed.
And sometimes trolls who comment here really have nothing invested - it’s not affected them, they’ve spent very little time actually immersing themselves in the game, so to them it’s like complaining you got killed in Overwatch. They’ve lost nothing and there’s nothing they care about in-game enough to worry about losing it.
Different people play in different ways. My 80 yo dad plays WoW too … he essentially plays it like it is single player, as far as I’m aware he’s never used the auction house and I’m fairly sure he doesn’t use his bank - and he certainly doesn’t have access to a guild vault. He has played for years - but still hasn’t worked out how to reply to me if I whisper him in-game.
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Happy to see this thread is still alive. I don’t know if it’ll change anything but I was relieved IGN did an article. Guess we’re not quite done with being swept under the rug yet.
Now that some time has passed, I’m realizing the loss of all the stuff isn’t the end of it. I’ve been too chicken to put anything else in our guild bank since the purge. I know that’s a bit irrational considering it could conceivably happen to any form of storage I guess. Anyone else in a similar boat?
Feels like I’ve lost an entire bank, because I can’t bring myself to trust ever putting anything else in it. I’m turning new alts into “tabs”, mailing them each different categories of stuff/mats.
Thanks Blizz for the extra anxiety 
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