I had not heard this (not surprised though) – whats going on w/that now?
4 Likes
It went down for an hour and has been back online for a while.
Theflappenin 
I really like your name. lol ^,^ 
2 Likes
I suspect the reason they got an active and helpful QA agent was purely because they were able to pass along good news. No-one likes to give bad news, especially if you’ve been told to give it in the form of an ambiguous corporate-speak statement, and no-one wants to deal with the aftermath of that.
It seems the standard process for blues is “oh, we don’t know anything about that > we’ve had a few reports, we’re looking into it - in the meantime do a bug report > ask for more info/or silence > still looking into it/or silence > we’ve fixed it, aren’t we great?! > silence.”
My personal current theory is that they broke something fairly major in the heart of their spaghetti code during the launch of TWW. Since then, all they’ve been doing is plugging holes temporarily as the pressure slowly builds and more and more bugs appear. Sometimes, I suspect, their “fixes” cause even more bugs, because they’re not getting to the root cause(s).
14 Likes
I would not be surprised in the least. That’s how the process tends to go in multiple areas; if all you’re doing is addressing the symptoms as they arise, and do nothing to fix the root cause, then all you have to look forward to is a slow decline via cascading failures.
I wonder how many of the knowledge-critical staff in any role (not just programming devs) were laid off in the last two years.
10 Likes
Looking back at the last 20 years, and considering how relatively decent WOW development has been during that time, the guild bank data loss catastrophe is astounding.
It’s a critical turn of events that marks a dark period for the company. Blizzard is no longer a “special” company. Many would say they haven’t been for 10+ years, or since the Activision merger.
But still, it took 10 years for this gross customer data loss to occur. Are we going to see more and more of this in late 2024, 2025 and onward?
Yes, the worse part of it all, is this will become the norm. We already have seen the classic servers bug which “hid” all items in tab 7 and 8. They got a swift dev response; why they did and we did not, I do not know, but clearly their command of their own code is wavering.
Ultimately, you all reading this are aware of how bad the bugs have been in the last few months. How overwhelmingly bad they have been compared to all previous expansions.
They won’t apologize or acknowledge how bad the bugs are. In the case of the Guild Bank deleted items, they are DESPARATE for it to be swept under the rug. For no online articles to reference it; for no popular content creators to cover it; for no blog headlines to mention it; for no youtube videos to cover it.
And they won. Not enough of subscribers were effected enough to make enough noise for them to care, and they KNEW IT.
Why spend money to restore a small percent of players items, when they could just do nothing and bank on the fact that most players would never even know about the issue?
If any Blizzard employee is reading my post, please think about how much people lost. How much time and loyalty was lost. Think about the Blizzard core values that are carved into a runed compass in the statue of an orc at the Irvine campus.
-Gameplay First
-Commit to Quality
-Play Nice; Play Fair
-Embrace your Inner Geek
-Every Voice Matters
-Learn & Grow
-Think Globally
-Lead Responsibly
19 Likes
I highly doubt they care. Heck when I questioned the commitment to those values (particularly the first 2) over in CS I was universally rebuked by the echo chamber, my post flagged for inappropriate content and marked for deletion to the applause of moderators.
Also I don’t doubt that Blizz often tries to hit those values, but they very clearly failed here. This might be one of the worst data blunders ever in a largescale MMO, and without a doubt the worst response to such an event.
12 Likes
I think this as well. I know that EARLY ON, they had weird bugs but this expansion, it’s been one bug after another, and really weird stuff. Our big bank heist was probably the BIGGEST (at least for the individuals affected) but it’s been followed by a ton of issues. I’ve had problems where I couldn’t interact with things or NPCs before but not as often as has been happening in this expansion. They recently had the “people disappearing” phasing bug that affected people out in the world as well as dungeons and BGs - not a localized phasing bug like they’ve had in the past. The portal/teleport bug would have been kind of hilarious if not for the fact that it was one of SO MANY bugs plaguing this expansion.
While I’m not in there, I suspect you are very much right. Simply seeing corporate behavior (they look at graphs and see people as numbers, not seeing specific knowledge they have as an asset, possibly a necessity). As many companies deliberately shed experienced people, or mix people from different companies, they are BOUND to lose people who would have known signs of impending disaster, people who would know how to prevent such disaster, possibly even people who could have thought of EFFICIENT WAYS to remedy that problem. They probably lost people (either during their BetterABK days after the CA lawsuit or before) and through the many layoffs while under ABK and MS that may have been able to prevent or remedy many issues.
While MOST people in WoW are kind of . . . just there, not bothering anyone but also not doing much for others, it’s also got some AMAZING people who would go out of their way to help others.
Also, I’ve seen it mentioned before in this thread, I LIKE it! 
- The Maw! That is what this is, and we are trying to make the best of it. I consider this a community of sorts, so I like having a name to refer to us by. If we can’t have a special title (like “The Depleted,” “The Robbed,”) we can at least have a name for the place we KIND of at this point, call “home.” 
10 Likes
Not gonna lie I stopped reading that Classic bug thread, was just too upsetting seeing that QA Blue restoring player’s stuff right in your face… while the bugs forum is filled with (mostly retail) players still twiddling their thumbs and waiting for a response on their own bug reports 
Like, just seeing how that blue QA agent responded to basically the same issue within HOURS and started restoring players on the same day 
- that kind of crap is rage-inducing and infuriating in the context of this (much larger) thread
Now to be fair, this “favoritism” towards Classic from the devs is nothing new. I recall back in 2021 they literally got on-the-fly tuning to casual BGs like Alterac Valley… while the same retail maps (…such as Alterac Valley) rot stagnantly for years with no similar balancing fixes. They even take the time to add stuff that never existed in the “original” Classic versions, like the WoW token
The difference in dev attention is definitely noticeable, even if it seems subtle
14 Likes
Considering the state of the industry as a whole lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a good chunk. Success doesn’t equate to job security anymore.
7 Likes
So I’m at the bank in Dalaran, and notice this…
https://imgur.com/a/mRD3xKD
PS, I’m sucking at adding links haha
7 Likes
- Auto-looting working half the time, if that, since 11.0.0.
- The “Umbrage for Umbriss” achievement still being required for the “Glory of the Cataclysm Hero” meta even though the 11.0.0 changes made it impossible to obtain. There was an opportunity to fix this with 11.0.5, but weirdly all they did was strip the points from Umbrage in the first PTR build and then nothing afterwards.
- Completing the criteria for the “Family Battler of Khaz Algar” prior to patch 11.0.5 will give your account the achievement but not its pet reward. According to the support article, CS can’t help you.
- Having the original time stamp for both old and current reputation achievements over-written randomly.
- For the story being an important aspect of the Warcraft franchise, it’s pretty embarrassing to push live broken quest cut-scenes that also break the audio for the entire game unless the player restarted the game client. (At least that was fixed fairly quickly, but it already soured the experience for those like me that had already done them.)
- A Hallowfall treasure that requires an item to unlock it, but looting said item renders the treasure unable to be interacted with.
And all that is just The Beta Bug War Within. There’s still existing bugs from older content, like being unable to fly out of Undercity on certain characters, or Gorepetal’s Gentle Grasp being non-functional since 9.0.2, and that same Shadowlands patch also removed the White Tuxedo Shirt from the Appearances tab.
Now certainly none of those I mentioned above has been game-breaking in the truest sense of the term (like how boomkins at one time would crash the game server), and vary in degree of priority, but I bring up all these examples to make a point – it’s the classic “death by a thousand cuts”. As much I’ve put up with bugs over the decades, there’s a limit and if it weren’t for the guild bank data loss with 11.0.2, it could very well have been the umpteenth stupid bug with this very glitched expansion.
Elune, I’m tired… 
Oh man, that has really not aged well. 
11 Likes
The original ticket I created got a response stating the GM could see the items in our bank, but they were hidden from us. I posted that response in the original bug forum, which is now buried so deep it’s not worth finding.
But yea, this started the same way, but in Classic they knew how to stop it, from what they learned on the retail side.
1 Like
It hasn’t aged well, but that’s been there since Legion. Nearly a decade now.
3 Likes
The way I imagine what happened to us. Our guild banks must have been located in Dalaran. Personally I blame Khadgar for showboating.
3 Likes
Back in the day if something like this happened and the items were unrecoverable, there would’ve been some RP about it. About Dalaran being destroyed, or the goblins doing it, or something.
4 Likes
It doesn’t take long, either, to see other bigger bugs such as people having their Honor reset to 1, after reaching several hundred; people losing gold, reputation and currency. And most of the Blizzard responses, when they do respond, generally involve no refund.
6 Likes
I think the Classic players got old Blizzard while retail is stuck with current Blizzard.
7 Likes
And here we are at 4,000 replies. I hope others are using the in-game bug report button daily (or at least regularly). Customer service may have shut us down, GM bots may not have been helpful, and our community managers may have resolved to manage us by throwing us into The Maw. But they still haven’t taken away our last “poke the last living quality assurance agent” button. Maybe if we poke enough times a dev will take a break from repurposing old BFA content long enough to notice who they left behind.
1 Like
So less than 1 percent restoration to less than 1 percent of the thousands effected by this bug is heralded by Blizz as a valid solution, they pat each other on the back, and work on marketing strategies to sell us 100 dollar pets.
EAT YOUR PEAS PEONS !
9 Likes