Actually no, all GM’s, senior or not, have been limited by what the developers give them the tools and permission to do. They have NOT be granted any leeway to assist in this scenario. I’m sure they want to (Vrak and Orylia especially) but they can’t.
The people that deserve the blame are the executives that made these decisions. Not the people who are just doing their jobs.
Not saying they don’t have rules, I’m just saying the very broad statement that no GM has any power or script to restore an item isn’t entirely true, or at least wasn’t true like 5 years ago when a guildmate used to be a GM. There’s a hierarchy to all things. Just like in an office, cubicle workers get to answer phones, people with their own small offices get to make limited changes to customer accounts with certain restrictions, and only people on the top floor (devs) can make/break all the rules and ignore the consequences.
Still, in this particular issue I’d imagine most GMs can’t do much. I’m not sure if they can even access backed up data (that may or many not exist). And if they don’t have a data list to pull info from, it doesn’t much matter if they have the power to generate items or not.
For the record, what happened in that time frame was probably due to this separate bug:
Separately, I’ll remind you all that patch 11.0.5 will be going live this Tuesday (10/22). One of the most anticipated changes besides the anniversary event itself is this line:
- When quests are completed, all appearances from non-cosmetic item rewards will now be granted, regardless of if that particular class can see or choose them or not. This should apply retroactively to all quests previously completed.
As someone who picked the worst class to obtain the original Loremaster achievement on prior to the Cataclysm expansion’s release, this is something I’ve been wanting badly for a long time given how many quests and associated rewards were removed.
On the other hand, however, what joy I may have experienced from it has since been tempered by the data loss. Honestly I’m feeling rather anxious instead at this point, so I intend to take a screenshot or few just so I can compare before and after the patch. Others may wish to do the same.
I’ve been really looking forward to this as well. Have they stated a yes/no on whether or not the appearances for quest rewards now removed will be granted as well?
I’m seriously considering re-subbing for just long enough to get all of my saved items including tier pieces learned. They haven’t said they’re backing off on the decision to convert personal guilds from bags to tabs and so I’m anxious about being gone if/when that’s implemented and the personal banks going crunch, thus losing all those items before I’ve learned the appearances.
For those of you who have asked or been curious, here’s the mention of their intent for personal bank bag-to-tab conversions:
“The UI and functionality of the character-level bank will be adjusted in the future, and tabs like the Warband bank will also be adjusted. Bags will no longer be needed in the character bank when this change occurs. This change won’t alter the number of slots currently available in your bank but will shift them from bags to tabs.”
https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24115313/get-the-band-together-for-warbands under Carting Around Your Band Equipment.
No there isn’t. Only QA reads Bug Reports, and they only do so to transfer reports to their triage system, and I suspect they’re being told to ignore postings about this since it’s been declared “fixed”.
Actually I think you are synthesizing some meaning even while trying not to.
What I read is:
“We’ve reached a point” does not in any way imply that there is an impossibility of further restoration. It simply says that this is the end of effort. “Due to how some of the data was lost” could mean “it happened in a way that would require (too) much effort to recover.”
“We do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items” sounds suspiciously like it is actually impossible because of technical issues, but it jibes equally well with “because our efforts have ended, further restoration is impossible.”
Basically it is a well wordsmithed “sorry we just don’t care and finally had to say it.”
Is there verifiable evidence that GMs still exist? Because I sure haven’t seen any such evidence this year.
If they replaced their GMs with chatbots I’m sure people would have figured out how to exploit the system. No they’re just real people who often copy-paste prewritten scripts to common issues that might be helpful, but often isn’t because the problem persists.
That’s not to say they can’t help with some things, like very stuck characters that dc everytime you log in, or people dropping swears in chat, or possibly very obvious bots. I think between all the extra problems this expansion and the downsizing of staff, they’re spread so thin all they can do is copy-paste from a mixed bag of very limited information.
I do miss the days where they would wait for you to log in and chat with you about your problem, actually investigate things live with you, and refer you to other GMs that may have more experience (or perhaps authority) until they’ve made things right.
What will happen to the items in the bags when this goes live? Will they mail them to us?
They did communicate, and by all accounts they have fixed the problem. Data that they cannot recover cannot be recovered, and folks are going to have to come to terms with that sooner or later.
There has not been any firm answer that I’m aware of. It would be quite baffling if the retroactive credit didn’t apply to removed quests; one can still query the database for a true/false response, after all.
It’s up to you whether you fork over more money or not. Since my sub still has about six more months to go, it’s rather academic for me at the moment.
I mean, you know what’s going to happen, right?
which you know for a fact was possible at that time because…?
Yeah, the trolls almost seem like obvious PR/damage control plants, to try and discourage people in here with their callousness. That’s why I put them all on ignore, and encourage others to as well. They aren’t worth engaging with.
Anyone else find it ironic that this upcoming “20th anniversary event” is supposedly all about nostalgia and attracting longtime players into resubbing for a bit (to get the goodies, experience the limited time event, etc)… when longtime players are the almost always the worst affected by these various post-TWW bugs? 
It’s like, if you’re some more recent player - say, you started playing in 2018 - likely you didn’t lose much if you happened to get hit with one of the recent TWW bugs.
But if you’re an og player that started 2004-2006ish, holy… the sheer amount of /played hours and investment lost to these bugs can be insane 
Just an interesting observation that crossed my mind today, a theme of “nostalgia” versus a backdrop of progress-robbing bugs…
I’d love some expose (maybe like the latest Schrier book, which I haven’t read but have a bit about some of the topics discussed in it) on later Activision-Blizzard, into the MS years. I’d love to know how what effects (NOT what the company says but what occurred) mass-layoffs have really had on the games, customer service, etc.), what effect the rushing out of content has had, and specific to this case, just HOW the data was lost, if backups were made, then how complete was it? Was it accessible? How quickly did they realize that the data had been lost? Quick enough to have done a rollback right away with minimum inconvenience to players? What did they know about the guild bank log issues before the changes were made to the guild banks? Did that have any bearing on the items lost (or at least, any attempt at restoration?) WAS the data available and could they have restored the items, even if it took a long time? How much money did they save by NOT making things right with us?
What I really WANT (as in, wishful-thinking) is that they can’t say anything because they are still figuring out how to get stuff back to us and don’t want to make any promises. But that’s as likely as Santa Claus showing up with a ton of expensive and meaningful gifts. What I really WANT is for EVERYONE affected to get everything back and a small compensation and a heartfelt apology, with a sincere promise to do everything they can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
BUT that’s not going to happen, is it? Next to that, I want the inside information of HOW all this happened, who made and how decisions were made to NOT either take precautions and/or how it was decided that we got VERY LITTLE to nothing back, while they used vague and deceptive words. I want to know what happened in meetings. I want to know if QA people learned about this and was dismissed or they simply weren’t even given the chance to test this feature out. I want to know ALL the steps in how this disaster happened and how the they decided to make the awful reply and trollish “partial restoration.” I also want to know IF any player(s) were deemed special enough to have their items restored or if that’s just an unfounded rumor (possibly started by a streamer). I want to know if anyone actually CARED about this, if they actually thought that people would be HAPPY with their pathetic “partial restoration” or if that was just another way to say “we tried” and “we didn’t lie,” while doing the worst job they could and STILL be able to say they DID what they said they would. Basically, if WE can’t have everything back, I wish we could at least have accountability. (Which, yeah, probably not gonna happen either). 
Just like with politics and corporate scandals, its probably better (easier) just to ignore the issue until a bigger issue comes along to make people forget all about that first issue. Rinse and repeat.
He has an AMA with other tidbits outside of the book, if you’re interested and haven’t seen those yet. Though iirc he’s said that the more recent the subject the less people are willing to speak up and speak up much about, so stuff about MS isn’t really talked about or in detail I think. I agree on the accountability though.
I don’t know. I haven’t seen anything that indicates how they plan to do it. A month ago, six weeks maybe, a few of us went over the possibilities, but it’s all 100% conjecture at this point.
I would like to think that it’s effectively more of a UI change than anything actually being done to the architecture of the personal banks, but who knows.
Only Blizzard knows, certainly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the latter. Other than having the UI go “HD” in Dragonflight, it’s basically been left untouched since the creation of the game. One can only hope Blizzard takes greater care if/when they get around to it compared to how our guild banks fared.