I’d love to know actual numbers. We have the vocal people here on the forums, but there are so many players who don’t come here. I’m sure there are also forum lurkers who don’t post.
And let’s stay on topic y’all. Don’t think that Blizzard won’t close this thread in a hearbeat and delete any future threads.
Honestly, it’s best to just slap the trolls on ignore and don’t respond to them. They get their thrills from victim blaming. If nobody responds to them at all, they’ll get bored and leave.
If you worked for me and this mentality in my data centers, you’d be out of job. That is not how data centers operate, well not good ones anyway. Backups are a 101 function. Backout procedures are a 101 process. Ability to restore is a 101 function.
Crap just happens oh well too bad so sad is a, you are on the unemployment line function.
In some industries (depending on how vital they are - entertainment obviously doesn’t fall into this), not having proper backup/restore/DR processes can land the person that signed off on it in jail. And even if it doesn’t land someone in jail, it’s lawsuit time.
My data centers (and like dude, I’ve worked in for 30+ years) not once were we never able to never recover data or had a oh well too bad so sad event.
Our SAN had a malfunction and overheated and destroyed about 30 - 60 disks, we were still able to recover from replicated SAN storage at two of our other facilities and if that had not worked, we still had Iron Mountain backups to recover from.
We even deploy air-gap backup technologies to prevent ransomware.
I sleep very well at night knowing our stuff is safe and properly protected.
If this was reported in PTR and it still occurred it makes things doubly unacceptable. Any reports, even 1 of lost items should be taken seriously on testing.
At the very least it should have prompted them to evaluate their back-up scheme to be sure they could recover from something like that happening. Multiple reports would be reason in any sane company that gives a hoot to put a block on release or the feature that causes it OR at minimum again immediately begin plans to do a recovery after launch and ensure data, systems, processes are in place to allow that in a reasonable time-frame.
It’s hard to grapple with this knowing industry standards and practices. The more I think about it either management gutted back-ups to the bone in cost-cutting or more than likely the data exists but extracting it, processing it, and re-inserting it is deemed too much trouble by management or taking too much time from development by developers and they killed the process. That or Devs were cutting corners to save themselves time and didn’t do proper back-ups at all and this was allowed for some reason by corporate.
The idea that a company their size does not have LTO tape back-ups taken before every expac pre-patch that implements major systems is just bonkers to me. With tape costs there’s no reason not to have backups before every major patch deploys going back at least a full expansion if not several.
No matter how you dice it, this wasn’t an accident, this wasn’t an unfortunate event. This was neglect, malice level neglect and incompetence in failing to have back-ups OR else a deliberate, malicious choice born of cost-cutting not to do the restoration to save on cost or dev time they’d rather spend elsewhere.
Most likely this isn’t even the first data loss they’re aware of, just the first big one that affected a sizeable amount of players and things and forced them to acknowledge it. That’s scary.
While sounds like a nice feature coming, I know for myself, the only reason I have a personal Guild was to put all my alternate and my main character was to stop the damn whisper’s, “Join my guild.” Yes, you can block invites, but you can’t stop whispers unless your character is in a guild, and I was averaging 20 whispers a day.
This will hurt tailors though because a good chunk of their income is for selling additional bags to people to use in their guild bank.
They’re going to learn the hard way that many of us long-time subscribers are also the ones buying every new mount and pet they have in their store. I’ve played for TWENTY years but I love buying the cosmetics stuff now because I have no time for much else. Blizzard FA and now they’re going to FO.
Honestly, as a twenty year player who beta-tested vanilla, none of this would get me to resub. I don’t want some mount or gold thrown at me. I can AFFORD to pay for whatever they offer. I WANT MY STUFF. PERIOD.
They just don’t want to go through the effort. Period. And if they made it such that their own backups are unrecoverable because of their own negligence… you know it’s time to leave.
You can’t run a modern stack these days without some notion of logs, backups, recovery, etc. it is unfathomable.
I have never worked in the IT field, straight up. I’ve been a general ledger bookkeeper for years, with a sizeable amount of accountancy tasks in that role as well.
What does translate is the criticality of ensuring backups and the integrity of master data.
Whether we are using data centers or an MMO as examples, financial data or player data, the bottom line is this:
They are all businesses.
World of Warcraft is a game, yes. However, it is also a business and as such it is incumbent upon Blizzard to maintain the data on which their operation depends in a manner that it is stable, reliable, recoverable, and administered in such a way in which it benefits its customers, its operation, and its stockholders and investors.
Would be nice to have moderators step in, but I’m not holding my breath or wasting time flagging people at this point.