Here’s my main issue with all of this: While I remain highly dubious about this entire situation, there’s nothing we can do about it besides move forward. That being said, if we’re not going to get the hundreds of thousands/millions of gold in items back, the very least they could do is not charge exorbitant sums of gold for the warband tabs. It’s adding insult to injury to say “hey we know we cheated you out of tons of money with this issue, but please pay absurd amounts of gold to use the warbank that we’d rather you be using anyway.”
Frankly, Blizzard should be giving every player who they screwed FULL warbank tabs for free.
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Except it seems that they’re so incompetent that even they don’t know who was affected. (Probably why I received several items in the mail back in September for only my oldest personal guild bank and none others.)
Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened, just lookup the removed “The Keymaster” achievement incident at original Cataclysm launch. I remember people being upset about it (myself included), but Blizzard said they had no way to tell who’d be deserving of it if they tried to restore the achievement. And that was fourteen years ago…
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/The_Keymaster
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One can imagine that they do weekly backups so presumably they can see the items prior to the event but, after it happened, they can’t tell if the player or system removed them. I thought guild banks have robust transactions logs, though.
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We can imagine a lot of things. It wouldn’t surprise me if they rarely if ever did backups.
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That may be the case. My take on it, hot or not, is that it is utterly insane that Blizzard can tell me that on Dec. 23rd 2016, Bobshunter took 6 peacebloom from tab 3 of the bank at 4:23 pm or that on May 3rd 2021 at 11:01 am, I disenchanted a piece of gear into 2 shards, but they can’t figure out what happened to 7 tabs worth of mats worth well over 1m gold at today’s AH prices?
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It is bonkers, I’ll agree.
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Holly, how much does it cost to maintain the back-up servers.
Ion, $500,000 a month.
Holly let’s cut that cost I need a Yacht.
Ion, we could also save if we don’t fix bugs.
Holly well looks like I will get two Yacht’s.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Of course, they could
Everything is stored in a database (Oracle last I heard) which means either their code is bad (I’m sure it is), they are incompetent and don’t know how to look at a restored db from before the problem and a db right after (and I’m sure they don’t) or they don’t care.
I suspect it is a bit of all 3 with heavly weighing on #3. Why? They estimated x% was affected and they could sustain those losses by a 90.00 mount.
They sell a 90.00 mount which will make up for those who actually left (6 months to be exact - coincidence? I think not) and people will come back after the steam blows off in about 6 months. The mount was very successful which means they well made up for the 10,000 people who left (just a number pulled out of thin air) and more.
The moral of the story is, Blizzard knows they can basically do anything they want to the customer, they do not care at all, and they will just carry on.
Sadly, it is how most business operate today. Anytime you hear “we care about you”, or “we do the right thing”, or “We value you” and the rest of that nonsense – it is marketing word salad spew.
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When push cones to shove, most corporations care for their customers exactly as far as required by their contract or Terms of Service, and not one cent more. It’s about profitability and meeting shareholder expectations, not customer enjoyment.
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Well I should have correct it by saying
"We care about you"r money. 
“We do the right thing” and deposit your money into our coffers.
"We value you"r money.
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C’mon Blizz, hire more people.
Return our items!
Not forgetting.
Not forgiving!
Still angry!
GIVE US OUR ITEMS!
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No items were ever restored to my mule guild bank/guild leader. At least one item was Primal Bat Leather which is unobtainable now.
Many, many other crafting items that are still obtainable as well as some other miscellaneous items were lost, but I cannot recall what they were.
Definitely very disappointed in this massive failure on Blizzard’s part. To not even have a back-up of this data shows a huge lapse in basic data care and storage.
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Was the root cause here ever explained? Why old expansion items? Why disappear? Why only in the guild bank?
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It’s all “explained” in Linxy’s post in this thread, but in my opinion the only real answer we have is to the last question:
Anything else is speculation on our part since I don’t see Blizzard being forthcoming in this matter. (They ghosted players for over a month before this thread was started, if you’ll recall.)
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It wasn’t ONLY old expansion items. I think many people who had personal guild banks (therefore, those most likely to notice since it’s less obvious in an active bank, and therefore, more reported) tended to keep old mats in them. But I’ve also read about people losing pets and even TCG mounts that they were keeping in the bank.
SUPPOSEDLY (as Alayea said, Blizzard isn’t very forthcoming) is that when they were trying to make the guild banks available to use cross-server, something went wrong and POOF! A bunch of stuff disappeared. If it was that action that caused it, then that’s why guild banks were affected.
This is why a lot of people are nervous about Blizzard changing the bags to tabs in our personal bank - because when they mess with stuff, it sometimes breaks and they don’t put any effort into restoring what was lost. (Also, it’s not broken, so they really shouldn’t touch it).
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And why I’m extremely skeptical about putting anything valuable or more gold in the warbank.
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Not really – It was basically an ooops, we lost your stuff, we’ll return what we can, we promise we fixed it (why would we lie).
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Patch day came and went.
Yet still no items have been returned.
This is criminal!
GIVE OUR STUFF BACK!
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I don’t think it’s a hardware issue. It’s a matter of having a plan of what to backup because it may fail, and how to design a possible rollback.
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