“everyone who disagrees with me is a blizzard shill” is always a productive way to think and a great way to get them to listen to you!
i’ve been very clear that i think they screwed this up massively and need to do better. but that’s not the same as “everything they say is a lie, they could restore our items with a snap of their fingers but they’re choosing not to because they’re mean” which a lot of people seem to have concluded.
Good question, I’m not too sure if I had actually checked my bank after the “great bank heist”… lol This may indeed be the issue if it was in fact already gone. I find it funny that I saw it disappear though.
Yes, you would’ve been looking at your cache. Then when it updated from the servers, you would’ve indeed seen everything go poof. That was worrysome for a bit, but it looks like your items did indeed poof during the original issue and there hasn’t been a new one.
I mean, it’s still worrysome regardless that they consider this kind of loss with no compensation “acceptable”. But it’s not as bad as it could’ve been if stuff was still disappearing.
Unfortunately the cache files (and addon files) are stored locally on our computers and are thus (in theory) subject to manipulation, so they can’t be used as evidence for what we had.
I am concerned about the latest comments suggesting that more things in other areas have disappeared. In my opinion for what it’s worth the problems are only the tip of the iceberg. My theory is it will get progressively worse. I encounter several different bugs throughout the day. There are so many broken things I’ve stopped playing regularly. My game time is becoming more and more limited. I have lost interest. Who wants to play a game that is broken, and run by a company that exhibits no integrity or care? Not me that’s why I’m out. I’m going to school and starting a new career. At first, my concern was how I was going to fit game time in. After this whole shenanigan, I look forward to quitting. So the problem is solved. I play because ATM I have free time.
Given the response to this disappearance of millions of items, I feel like should something similar happen again (and there’s no messaging that suggests any process change on their end), they will respond exactly the same way:
“Oops my bad. By the way we have gifts for you if you subscribe for a year!”
I’ve mostly weighed in on this topic due to my experience with technical stuff. I work in tech, I deal with databases, etc. However, my university degree is a Bachelor of Arts with a Specialization in Sociology.
As such, I did want to talk a bit about the communication and the problem I view here with the communication from Blizzard.
There’s a theory called Audience Reception Theory, by Stuart Hall. (Go to Wikipedia and look up Audience Reception.) In brief, it states that any message has a sender and a receiver and that the goal of the sender is to ensure a clear message has been received that properly conveys their meaning.
The possibilities for the receiver of the message are that the receiver does get the meaning the sender intended, or that they do not get the meaning the sender intended. It also essentially says that the sender has the responsibility/power to convey the meaning they want.
Let’s take an example and then I’ll talk about the Blizzard communication issue as it relates to the guild bank stuff.
Originally in WoW, you had four Horde races and four Alliance races: Orc, Troll, Tauren, Undead, Human, Night Elf, Dwarf, Gnome.
To look at them, you could easily classify the Horde races as “ugly” and the Alliance races as “pretty”. This classification also steers into “bad” vs. “good”, as, typically in our media, the “bad” characters are shown as “ugly” and the “good” ones are shown as “pretty”. (In The Wizard of Oz, the good witches were conventionally “pretty” and the wicked witches were conventionally “ugly”. (Apparently, I can’t post links? Check out all the tropes dot org and look up Beauty equals Goodness.)
So, one can read the meaning of the original WoW races as saying that the Alliance are the good guys and the Horde are the bad guys. Is this what Blizzard intended? Probably not. But it’s one of the messages that can be conveyed by the choices Blizzard made.
Let’s take this back to the message from Linxy, specifically this portion:
This single sentence has been, from my perspective as someone with 3 years of sociological theory under her belt, carefully written in order to confuse matters while simultaneously allowing people to read into it what they want.
Honestly, it’s quite clever, though this kind of cleverness has absolutely no place in an official communication to customers. Still, it’s almost worthy of praise.
In this part of the communication, which is a single sentence in length, the following conclusions can be drawn:
All of that is fact, as per Blizzard. With those facts, we can draw multiple conclusions, which is where the problem arises. Here are just two of the conclusions one can draw from the above facts.
I think we’re all in agreement that those are two of the possible meanings, right?
So then we have questions.
And then we get into the questions surrounding the data loss itself.
As such, I find the original post by Linxy (and I’m sure it was just handed to Linxy to post, not written by Linxy) to be very disingenuous. An official communication should answer questions that are being asked as well as the follow-up questions, if not in the original communication, then in a follow up.
I think that Blizzard crafted this carefully to allow people to read into it what they wanted and avoided any kind of discussion (we haven’t heard from Linxy since September 20) about it since. It brought up more questions than it answered.
Had this been done appropriately, we wouldn’t have any question regarding the meaning of the original phrase, nor would we have several other follow-up questions. I believe that this was done intentionally to try to smooth things over without firmly saying “be happy with what you got, lots of people got nothing, because we’re either idiots who didn’t make backups OR we’re idiots who don’t think it’s worth our time and money to restore these items”.
What’s going to get less bad press? A bug that loses items in guild banks or Blizzard admitting that they either don’t make backups or they refuse to restore things even when they do have backups? Clearly, it’s the former, given the lack of many news items about it.
So there you go. That’s my view on how Blizzard crafted this carefully. That’s one reason I’m still upset about this. They had the opportunity (and every day is a new opportunity, too!) to put this to rest on September 20 and they did just the opposite, by deliberately (IMHO – which I think is proved by the lack of responses in this thread) sending out a message that could be interpreted in different ways by different people and their subsequent silence when it comes to the other questions the statement brought up.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk! 
I would give you a hundred likes on your post if I could. Thank you. 
As I said earlier, clarity and explicitness are not to their advantage. The ambiguity they engineered “softens the blow” of something that, at the bottom of it all, could only lead to immediate disillusionment and anger.
They structured the communication such that they could claim (in a court of law, for instance, since that’s the ultimate test of corporate responsibility) that they made only truthful statements while simultaneously softening the ugly truth so that players could persuade themselves it wasn’t as bad as it actually was.
Well crafted and highly effective corporate PR communication.
It’s pretty obvious where the real care and talent are in that corporation. Not in the developer team. In the PR team.
okay, i’m convinced. they lied and need to step up and just restore the items!
Blizzard, will you please restore everyone’s guild bank items?
Ok, but on our side, couldn’t we claim that we had almost 2 months of posts on the Bug Report forums practically begging for Blizzard to acknowledge us before they made this thread. Then another month of silence on their end while we all realized we were lied to?
I know very little about the inside goings on in a courtroom. But I do think these months of silence are telling.
Disclaimer: I am basing this on what’s been said in this thread, the (since locked) bug report thread, and external website comments such as r/wow and YouTube.
No guild bank has been fully restored. Of those affected, only a fraction received system mail – and generally small amounts at that.
I don’t believe it was done purposely. Who knows for sure though? My theory is this was a huge screw-up by one or many. Somehow data was deleted by accident with no backups or they thought it was backed up. I believe some people lost their jobs over this. I believe for days the temperature was extremely high in all 10 data centers. At first, the reason why they were quiet is because they scrambling to fix this issue. They were hoping they could fix it. No harm no foul. As time went on they found out the data could not be recovered. I believe in being honest and accountable for my actions. When Blizzard found out this couldn’t be fixed they did the opposite. Just some stupid almost a one-liner of we’re sorry and maybe we can. It serves the company better to shove it under the rug instead of going public and admitting they screwed up. They feel they will lose less business in the long run. It’s sad because it’s not the right thing to do. Also, I respect someone more when they are transparent by telling the truth. Once again this is my theory.
Edit: I think another reason why they kept it under raps and a lower level of admission was used. To avoid the sheer mass of expectancy. Players would want their items back which they have no record of. To a certain degree, I can understand that because scammers would have a field day. Sometimes I wonder if they keep this feed open to monitor the situation or practice some level of decorum so players can vent.
Again, their core values statement is just so much word salad, means nothing.
If anyone were to only read 1 reply in this thread, this is the one.
Thank you for this analysis and breakdown!
And if you wanted to or not, it really spotlights just how dastardly Blizzard is nowadays.
In their (meh) defense, they’re not meaningfully worse than any other Fortune 50 company in how they shape their communications to avoid any kind of responsibility that isn’t strictly imposed on them by law.
The alternative might cut into profits.
I recommend as well if you want a pretty cozy game. It was developed by ONE PERSON (though he may have people helping now) who created the game, the graphics, the writing and even wrote the music for it. From what I understand, he was doing it as a project to show to get a job, but instead, created a really popular game and has become successful because of it. I haven’t played it in awhile but he has done some big free updates for it. Very small, very indie company. Definitely worth supporting.
And by the way, I think the music in Stardew Valley is really sweet.
Thanks again for your insight, Kurn!!
Because along with the pain of losing so much of what we have gathered over the years, I think one of the biggest objections we have expressed is in Blizzard’s communication and lack thereof. I’m sure it was all very well calculated.
I have the items in my guild log. Can I still get them back?
ToS’s aren’t legally binding. That has been established in court already