It won’t be long before they lock this thread, like they did others, to let it fall off and die, to quell the vocal players.
Almost 3k posts, 35k views and counting, and no further communication. No further “we’ve decided to take a deeper dive in to this, given we do in fact see your Guild Bank Logs showing deposited items and understand losing nearly 20years of your subscription time collecting items you entrusted us to Bank warrants more effort”
So before they do, and they will, soon…
Give me my stuff back. That I earned, while paying you monthly. On time, every time. I’ve paid my rent - you don’t get to break in to my place, steal stuff from me, then expect me to keep paying rent as if nothing happened.
So I’m moving out when my lease ends - already put in notice. Just wish I didn’t sign that year long contract…
My problem is, quite a bit are soulbound - mementos, mostly. I suppose I could put them in Void Storage. But some of the important things - like the name of the crafter who made the gear, would be erased. (Many of us are a sentimental lot, aren’t we?)
My hope (as slight as it is) is that Blizzard will look at THIS fiasco and say “maybe we don’t need to mess with that” because seriously, they do NOT have to mess with that.
And honestly, except to make a bullet point in some kind of report to shareholders or whatever, they didn’t NEED to implement Cross-Realm guilds right away. MOST things can be done cross-realm anyway - questing, dungeons, most raiding - except early Mythic Raiding (sooo . . . the change was made for Mythic Raiders?? No idea, really). Friends can group across realms through Bnet if they wanted to.
They could have taken the time to make sure that whatever they did, WORKED. They could have said “we didn’t have enough time to test it out, so we won’t be rolling it out till later in the expansion.” Someone chose to RUSH this rather than making sure it worked correctly.
At least you’re willing to do something, but PTR and beta servers are not enough to test something like this properly. They need to take it upon themselves to test it on max capacity guilds across dozens of realms across multiple data centers. If it needs to function on that scale it needs to be tested on that scale.
I suspect part of the reason they made cross-realm guilds was to deal with the issue of low population realms. I’m on the EU servers so don’t know how it is here in the US, but we have quite a few realms that are essentially dead or dying. Blizzard promised back before Shadowlands that all these realms would be connected up to higher population realms to improve their situation but they had increasing problems doing so until, eventually, they just stopped. There was no explanation - one minute they were regularly updating people with which realms were going to be connected next, etc, and the next the communication just stopped.
The intervening time since then didn’t make those dead realms any better and they had no solution. They did the semi-connection of the auction house, but that doesn’t help the situation for a lot of things, and certainly didn’t help guilds on those realms, or players who felt they didn’t want to/couldn’t move realms.
Cross-realm guilds helps both the people “stuck” on those realms, and the guilds who were often taking their last gasp.
So for Blizzard, this “solved” that issue of people/guilds on dead realms, without actually doing anything physical with the realms. Obviously it doesn’t solve it … but as far they’re concerned it probably dampens down some of the complaints.
At least that’s my assumption … but then, I’m also fairly sure they don’t do anything anymore “for the customer” so perhaps this is a pre-cursor to some other change that’s coming, that will save them money.
I think the issue here is, though, that Blizzard SHOULD NOT be relying on general members of the public - those paying to play their game no less - to quality check their game.
They should be fully aware of what changes they have made and be paying professional in-house QA testers to test fully and report thoroughly on those and any potential areas of impact.
I’m guessing with a game this old there is a lot of spagetti code in there, so it’s difficult sometimes to determine what might impact what, however, it’s fairly obvious that if they’re going to introduce something as big as cross-realm guilds, they should be testing everything to do with guilds. Either they did not do that, did not do that thoroughly enough, or they ignored their testers. Or a combination of all three, which I think is more likely.
The fact that in order to get an alliance into a horde guild, cross-realm or otherwise, requires some convoluted hoops to jump through, suggests that they threw together something without thinking too much about how it works and what it affects. Like they’re hacking together code in a rather *Heath Robinson manner just to get something out there that “works”, instead of spending time and care over getting it right.
It seems that the only Guild Banks that I can see that were not affected were those that contained gear or consumables. Tabs that contained mats were the ones that had the most loss.
A little off topic, other bugs I’ve come across:
Logged into one toon and my Trader’s Tender was reset to zero. Changed to a different one and it was showing the correct amount.
Decided to get some mats, one toon could not see mining nodes (ore) on the mini-map. Only herbs showed up. If I saw a ore node I could mine it. Same thing happened to a friend of mine.
Another friend’s toon got DC’ed when going down the tunnel, thus far that toon is in purgatory.
Yeah I doubt it unless I hear it from blizzard directly. So far it is seeming like they are going “Well, we tried.” and now they are gonna pretend this never happened :3
I do hope that GM you are chatting to is correct, but, I have 0 faith. considering the history around the communication of this issue.
Got a reply back to my ticket today,…
-quote Greetings Daniel,
Game Master xxxxxxxxxxx on duty today!
Thank you so much for patiently waiting while we tackled our queue that has been super busy due to the release of several games and patches.
I see that you are missing items from your Guild Bank. Let me see if I can shed some lights on this!
After carefully checking your case, I would like to inform you that there was a known issue with the Guild Bank and our Developers are already working on restoring the missing items. At the moment we do not have any workaround. You can find more detailed information about this topic, by following this link: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-update/1963451<>/>
-snip to shorten no relevant part referring to other bugs - As a player myself, I can totally understand that this might not be the outcome you were hoping for but, Customer Support has no influence on this matter, since it will be solved by our Developers.
Thank you for your understanding and, if there’s anything else you might need, please feel free to contact us again. We will be more than happy to help.
-end quote
So,…I am going to take “some hope” in their wording that “developers are already working on RESTORING THE MISSING ITEMS”. (my writing bolded for reference.).
So hopefully they will restore it all. Fingers crossed.
I/we can but live in hope!
Blizzard has been pretty quiet on this thread. I guess they’re hoping this dies out and people just accept it, like every other F up they’ve done, like Blitzchung.
It’s not gonna, I want to know, and will get banned from the forums soon if they remain silent.
Blizzard, if you aren’t going to restore my things, TELL ME. Then I can make a decision about our future. I swear this is like dealing with a cheating spouse…
This whole situation with these items disappearing was the final straw for me. I haven’t cared for the direction Blizzard has been moving in for a while. This expansion is terrible regarding bugs and glitches. The final straw is Blizzard has lost most of my stuff. They don’t care in the least bit about my losses. They haven’t made a real apology. It’s like my years of subscribing to this game don’t mean squat. No loyalty whatsoever. I don’t mean anything to this company. I am but a dollar sign. Sadly, my leaving has been already added to their business equation. Corporate greed and saving their multiple billion $$$ platforms are more important than the fundamentals of customer service. The customer comes first not the money. What can I do to correct my mistake or cover it up? Well, we see what path they took. A situation like this will happen again and the same type of response will be issued. So not going to subject myself to this anymore.
Key word there, “some”. I get I may not get all that was lost. But if it’s going to be nothing, how about an in game mail to the GMs of my two guilds that lost 7 tabs each of materials. Those items represent over a decade of my time gathering. That’s all I want is a notification this is done, and I’ll be getting nothing back.
Wow. This post got another like and it was over two weeks ago. Blizzard truly failed people that were using guild and war banks and were impacted by this bug.
I really hope they come back with a better statement… but the radio silence and initial empty apology likely mean those customers are dead to blizzard.
15 years ago I created my 6 tab guild bank. 98% full and lost 98% of that. Everything you can think of was in my guild bank. I have not received one single item.
Words cannot express my disappointment. I have such a hard time believing Blizz has no way of getting these items back.
I still refuse to believe Blizzard has no data for this to restore people’s items, there’s no way they are this incompetent as a company people invest money into are they??
