With the way things are going over there at BlizzHQ (mostly downhill):
coding quality down
bugs/glitches go unfixed
apparently no backups to guard against data loss, or there is no actual procedure for restoring players affected by data loss when something goes wrong with a patch release or after a weekly maintenance
greedy bean-counters/higher-ups pushing “aggressive” patch release cadence (like 1 new patch every 2 months or so) and creating “pressure” among the devs (…and being “rushed” by bean-counter types is obviously not good for coding quality/game stability, as we have seen)
etc
…how much longer until they start charging $ to respond to tickets? Maybe they’ll even charge $ to file a ticket appeal?
Wouldn’t surprise me at all if they “doubled down” on greed like that rather than making sure paying customers are happy and made whole (if affected by bugs/glitches)
If I go to an auto mechanic shop, and something on my car gets damaged/broken while they were working on it - let’s say the mechanic accidentally leaves the oil drain plug loose and all the oil leaks out while driving home - I’ll be made whole with a new engine (plus installation labor) for free if it’s a reputable/insured shop, no questions asked
And that’s just one example, it seems pretty standard across various different businesses that when THE BUSINESS screws up the customer gets made whole. Or if the customer isn’t made whole, the company is at least somehow punished via lawsuits or fines
This incident is perhaps the first time in my entire life where a large/established business (…they are a multi-billion dollar company) has messed up/created losses among customers and the customers were not made whole… AND the company didn’t incur any lawsuits/fines/outside action/etc. I dunno, the whole thing just sounds like something out of “The Twilight Zone” it’s so backwards and illogical
Yeah 1,000’s of players are really soured too Blizzard now with this guild bank mess…one of my guild mates they have 14 personal guild banks between him…his wife and daughter that plays…they lost almost 4 full guild banks of stuff…and got nothing in return at all…they are long time players since 2008… like me…
I lost a lot but not that much and nothing that is irreplaceable.
Just really don’t understand the nature of this bug. I assume there were logs that existed prior to executing the patch that caused the problem. Were those also wiped out?
My understand is yes those logs got wiped out or they say they did cause they don’t want to put the man power to solve it fully now…who knows…but yeah its sour taste in many players now and its not going to go away …and its not cause most of the stuff can’t be replaced now…its the years of work that can’t be replaced now…that is the killer of this now…not days or weeks now…years…since 2008…
Yeah that is a kick in the gut, years worth of mats, gear, whatever just disappeared.
I tend to agree with Warzug, it is very odd that there is no effort to make good beyond, “we found the bug, fixed it, sorry we deleted your stuff”. I am surprised they didn’t try to sell us on all the free space we now have to store more stuff.
If they don’t fix it, then there is no log of what happened. So why fix something that probably is still going on – this way they can continue to cover their tracks.
I refuse to acknowledge their first post at this point (given the continued radio silence again)
They made changes to a critical system (guild banks / cross character vault access / etc) without any form of recovery, then ignored hundreds to thousands of people reporting it for months, hid the page that acknowledged the issue, and then after realizing this wont go away were just like “oops uhh bug soz”
Its 2024. Everyone (even those not in tech) knows to take backups and have rollback plans when making changes to key systems.
This is not a bug, this is straight up data deletion through negligence at this point.
What I meant is that their above post feels like them coming here after months with a lame excuse, and no actual resolution for all the data loss.
Tbh the key of the message is that all of this should have been easily avoidable these days, I stand by seeing this as data deletion through negligence
You will not hear much more about this other than the lie and cover up they didn’t handle our data well.
They want it to go away – No one will get an apology nor compensation - if they do either of those things, it means they admit they messed up and would send ripples through the gaming community. If they keep it here, keep the message vague they figure it is contained, and it will eventually lose steam and all be forgotten. It is a strategy - not a good one but it is one.
Oh, this is 100% obvious especially given the fact that gold, achievements, reps, etc just reset/disappear, things sometimes work and other times don’t. This expansion should be called the WoW, The Bugs Within
There’s apologies and there’s apologies. Blizzard’s “apology” was insincere and constrained, like catching someone after they’ve burgled your home and they say “oh sorry about that”, but the only thing they give back is the remote for a TV they also nicked - and they’d taken the batteries out first. Sure … they apologised … but it wasn’t a proper apology. If they HAD felt moved to make a proper apology, they would have made a bigger effort to resolve the issue.
Honesty, for a start off. No-one here really believes that they lost all that data irretrievably. Look at the number of people who actually have logs in-game showing what went in, but didn’t go out “officially” - so there must be more data than Blizzard are willing to use.
Personally I believe it’s more a “time is money” situation - they’ve gotten rid of too many good staff and are now on the back foot fighting out of control forest fires. They’re stuck on a timeline forcing them to produce new content before fixing older bugs and this is just causing more bugs that they can’t keep up with.
Guilds have traditionally been the overlooked section of WoW ever since they removed the more granular permission controls, despite having events like RWF and despite the Ibelin documentary which clearly discusses the positive impact being in a guild can have and this whole fiasco, amongst many, just proves as much.
Which is all you’re going to get from a multibillion dollar international corporation with all the legal immunity they need to not actually spend any time, money, or care on fixing things.
In the distant past, Blizzard DID care about their customers and how well their games worked for us.
These days they’re doing a lot more of the big talk (“making it all about the player”) but less of the showing it through actions (just look at all the bug reports and the variety of bugs that involve data loss - nearly all of which are handled with a brief shrug and a wave).
That care for customers disappeared around the End of MoP era…that was the last time I ever had a in game GM talk to me in game about an issue …that was back in 2012…
Back in late-2006 I got hacked/password-jacked on a phishing website. After calling the customer service line to get my account locked/password reset I remember I had a real-life human being GM personally whisper me ingame the next day to “follow up” on the call and walk me thru the restoration process
We chatted for a bit via whispers and he hooked me up with some random green gear to get me back on my feet, then he excused himself with some cheesey “RP” lines. It’s like, you could tell they actually gave a and were passionate about their job back then
At some point though, the customer service got shifted over to automated email responses and AI (presumably for greed/money-saving reasons?)… and a real-life human being GM only seems to come into the picture if there’s an appeal or two filed
Would love to love logging in again.
Would love to enjoy the 20th Anniv. event
But NOOOOO!
You had to go and ruin all that fun, Bliz
You had to delete my stuff from my guild banks.
More than one bank!
Give it back!
You took it!
Give it back!
Never going to forgive!
Never going to forget!
and were passionate about their job back then