Before I go I feel like this pathetic blue spin doctoring deserves some dragging.
But first, could you imagine being one of the morons waving the pom-poms for corporate consolidation when Microsoft took over Activision? How did they conclude rich daddy Nadella taking over would cure the sickness permeating the studio? Look at what has happened and how they have failed to address it.
All bugs are unexpected. Saying a “technical update” made “some items disappear” sure makes it sound benign. I call it spontaenous wholesale deletion of customer data due to having bad processes in place, poor and inadequate testing, and the consequence of rushing a release to juice up Q3 earnings. All happening less than a month after CrowdStrike’s disaster.
For the layman it is important to know that in software development, bugs which can cause data loss are typically considered the highest severity. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if your people have given it the appropriate weight.
There are so many basic and obvious follow up questions which were not addressed. “Many… were related to professions…”? “Some?” What the hell kind of prevarication is this? Such flagrant use of deceptive, imprecise, and unclear language. You and your bosses are weasels for trying to downplay and minimize the severity of your F-up.
It’s become clear what the extent of the “restoration” actually is versus the slime you were spit feeding us. I have no sympathy for your people clutching their pearls on social media about trolls being mean to them when this BS is proof that nobody on your team can muster even a modicum of respect for their actual paying customers.
The lie about old mats. Based on a comparison against an Altoholic bank snapshot, I’ve determined that in one fully stocked vault I personally lost almost 200 BOE pieces of gear, patterns, and toys, including items which are no longer obtainable. I was robbed of 58% of the contents in a 7 tab bank. Value likely between 1.5-2 million gold. In my other affected guild bank, I’m conservatively estimating a theft of 44% of 6 bank tabs which included a ton of pets.
I cashed a token so I could check my mail and confirmed I have received nothing. I am reading about many others who received nothing and the few who received crumbs of bricked trash (soulbound BOEs, items with 0 charges) and with player name tags on them to boot. I too noticed some Molten Core BOE epics were soulbound when I logged in a month ago, e.g. soulbound warlock belt on a warrior.
Was I too late in cashing my token? Did the mails get deleted? Did I miss some nebulous unspecified deadline? How the hell would I know? You 
haven’t said 
and your GM’s were given marching orders to turn a blind eye! Are you going to mail out expired $10 UberEats gift cards to affected customers next?
That’s your very experienced in-house PR crisis team giving your “people” grade A advice.
Where’s the apology though? All I see is an attempt to wash your hands clean before the 20th anniversary event’s arrival. Your management got to talk about the (then) new PTR without this overshadowing it after they “resolved” the issue and had you underlings lock up all the loose threads on the public forums.
To recap: A major data loss event occurred. Possibly the worst in 20 years. You allege the bug was detected and halted within days. Customers however were left to twist in the wind for over 5 weeks while your bosses went into hiding to decide how they could spin this. They dispatched you—a low-ranking underling—with the bad news on a Friday afternoon. Crisis management 101 when you want to bury something. Over 5 months have now elapsed and nobody above your pay grade has said a peep about this in public.
The lack of forthrightness leads me to believe much pertinent information is still being withheld. My assumption is embarassing incompetence behind the scenes.
We know you are lying. We’re just not exactly sure what those lies are yet.
A statement concerning a screwup of this magnitude shouldn’t be unattributed let alone be coming from a $10/hour employee. It should be coming from someone salaried and higher up in the food chain like a director, VP, or some of the others who have no trouble opening their yaps on the media circuit when they want to do their promos.
It’s amazing what happened when some people said Dragonflight was “decent” and you regained access to the Chinese market. You quickly regained old form and decided you don’t need to listen or be responsive anymore. The good old hubris that got all those people fired never left eh?
SoD P4 and Cataclysm Classic launch were half-baked bug-ridden car wrecks. Some very delusional people downplayed the sad state of those launches because those games are being maintained by a part-time skeletal developer crew of milkmen and plumbers.
Retail was the crown jewel they said. It would be backed by the full might of Activision, Microsoft, and all of their development resources they said. Some how TWW ended up topping both of them.
Lest anyone foolishly think the guild bank data loss is an isolated issue. The following problems were present in the August 2024 update and some of these bugs are still here 5 months later.
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Guild banks got wiped
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Warband banks got wiped
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Gold disappeared from banks
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Currencies disappeared during transfers
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Items disappeared from the AH
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Mail disappeared
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Character faction reputations reset
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Character guild reputations reset
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Achievements reset
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Honor levels reset
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Action bars, keybinds, macros not saving or getting reset (Just had this happen about 3 days ago!)
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Character undelete feature stopped working
At a fundamental level the game is nothing but reading and writing a database.
Looking at that long list of problems however makes it look like the team is made up of hacks hired from Fiverr or fresh out of the University of Phoenix. The database team’s only job is to keep the data safe and it’s the one thing they can’t seem to do. At any reputable software house this wouldn’t even be alpha quality but at Irvine they call it production.
Will you cowards actually take some damned ownership over your screwups instead of hiding under a rock? In an honest operation, taking ownership and fixing your self-crapped bed is just the cost of doing business. How you get there is not the customer’s problem nor should you try to make it theirs.
Last year when Google Cloud wiped out a customer’s $130 billion database, the CEO brought his yacht back to land to issue a statement. He admitted to the failure, apologized for the downtime, explained the issue, what was being done in the recovery effort, and assured people it wouldn’t happen again.
It was followed up with an internal review and a public explanation of what processes triggered the problem, what was done to remedy it, and how they would prevent it in the future. They did everything in their power to give customers confidence and ensure they could still trust the platform.
That’s what competent and trustworthy operations do. They don’t keep people in the dark and then shuffle on like nothing happened.
I’m just glad the Magic Rooster Egg I had was actually stored in the personal bank of one of my toons unlike other folks who had theirs sent to the Shadow Realm but I know that isn’t safe and foolproof now that your Einstein programming Dream Team has turned their eye towards tinkering with character banks. How can we trust they won’t make the same mistake twice, or in this case, make the same mistake a 13th time?
Good luck with Nadella’s stretch goal of 100 million Game Pass subs. I won’t shed any tears as Microsoft and Xbox continue to slide backwards into gaming irrelevance and they have to pick the next of their pandemic-fueled acquisitions to lean up and sell off. While hoping for the next Arkane or Tango is too wildly optimistic, there are a lot of deserving cuts around here.
(Why is the middle finger emoji selectable from the forum drop-down if it’s blocked for use?)
