How can you replace a letter from a deceaced guild member?
You can not!
I do not think that they even have the Data of the mounts or patterns / items that were in Vanilla, that got lost with the rework in Cata. Personally, I just don´t see how giving me a mount from WOD, would even be worth calling a “compensation”, same applies for gametme.
All that has no value, it´s the personal stuff that is gone, but also the Vanilla items, that have so much memorable stories attached to them.
What’s the point? They’ll just ‘accidentally’ delete it from your collection when the next xpac launches.
It’s not just that they lost everyone’s banks, it’s that they’ve lost our confidence in them and in the system. What is worse is that they don’t seem to care. They posted a weak apology Fri afternoon, hit the go button for restoring-some™-items.exe and went home for the weekend.
The simple fact that Classic WoW exists says they didn’t lose it.
I also agree about the letters. I had personal letters from people I used to play with many years ago. All of those letters directly related to things we did in game, like planning progression raids or what zones we want to quest in, saying “hi, i miss you”, or other various things. They don’t seem like much on the surface, but they were from people I cared deeply about, and can no longer play with. Some quit for good, and some are now deceased.
The letter I miss most is the one from my ex; it was about how excited they were for the following evening where we would be finishing the campaign in one zone we were questing in together. I read that letter in the morning, then found out that afternoon they were dead from their own intentional actions. I know it might just be a silly letter in a game, but it was the last actual communication we had. The fact it got lost on account of this bug is bad enough, but the blatant disregard for any condolence to the people affected is insulting and disrespectful to say in the least. I will NEVER forget this from Blizzard … ever.
I still haven’t received any items for one of my alt guilds. All 6 tabs in that guild bank are empty. Which is odd cause when this first started only SOME of the items were missing. Yet when I looked again at the guild bank the other day, every tab was empty.
Another alt guild bank has a few battle pets missing from each tab. That bank was just storing overflow from my main battle pet storage guild. Still no mail on that alt either.
One of my other guild leaders just received a Huge Ogre Cache in the mail from Blizzard. I honestly have no idea what could be missing from her guild bank.
It does show that there was communication being made elsewhere. Considering we got almost nothing on the NA side of things, I do feel that could be relevant. Brewbaker’s a bit of a drama lama but I do think that having the EU post(s) included for posterity might be helpful for future issues that may arise. I’d have to agree with them here on this inclusion.
If they weren’t trying to save it, they lost it. Even if they did save it, C and C++ c. 2000 are not 2019 C and C++, nor, especially, are the libraries they run on.
How they recreated it, who knows. It took them years. For all I know, they got data from the “private server” crowd.
Most organizations change source code management systems every 5-10 years, and that’s another way in which old code goes away. Today’s git is yesterday’s p4.
Actually, all I care about here is that this issue is surfaced to the point where players in general are aware of it.
The non game breaking fixed-in-5-days issues with delves made it to Fortune ffs. This bug that has trashed items acquired over two decades is nowhere to be known.
I’m not an IT person, but seems like players should have some kind of snapshot their banks client side.
Probably potential for forgeries, but I don’t know how else to prevent accidental deletion/recovery process.
Some kind of Blizz stamped log we can keep on our machines? If storage of millions of players and thousands of guilds items are too massive
Again, I don’t know the answers, but maybe some kind of decentralized bitcoin ledger like database.
Smarter people surely have a better answer. 
Actually, that’s a fair point. I did overhaul the code for a game I was making, and decided to “scrap” it, by rewriting and replicating the code in a different, more efficient engine. None of it operates online or on live servers, so it was more simplistic in that case, but still, I should have known better. It’s not the same with online servers.
Wait… so I lost millions of gold worth of items, some of which can no longer be acquired, and that garbage inscription profession item and Swift Lovebird is all I get back with a “sorry bro!”?! Are you kidding me right now?
I was actually thinking earlier today about writing an addon that would record inventories in a digestible way. CSV or whatever.
It would have to be an addon, as Blizzard’s web API doesn’t, as far as I know, have a means to see guild vault contents. So they would have to be acquired via gameplay.
TSM does a “phone home” thing where a separate app decodes Lua savefiles and sends it back to home base. Probably that would have to be the approach, except it would be local to the user’s PC only.
Be grateful for the effort your gaming service provider has given to your concerns, and have a great weekend!
For Horde players, if you have a WoD L3 Garrison, and a large mount, you can position it half-perched on the roof of the Bank hut, on the side next to the mailbox. Change the view to look at the front of the bank. Voila, you can reach both GB and mailbox without moving.
For Alliance, I suggest Darnassus, as it’s a few short steps between mailbox and GB. Speak to the Bronze dragon Sidormi(?) on Darkshore to switch it back to pre-tree burning phase. Or BC banks in Shattrath or Exodar if your GM has a speed boost usable indoors such as Shaman’s Ghost Wolf.
So your database backup systems failed us when we needed them, no long term archival in case of a catastrophic failure like your ‘technical change’ caused … got it!
Yes, 2 of my horde characters, that had had server transfers in the past (both of them GMs of their Guild) had their Guild rep set back to neutral. I have to send them the guild rep tabard to gradually start restoring it on old dungeon tmog runs.
OMG I’m so sorry. About all of this but especially since that last letter you mentioned must have been a treasured item. But even the happy letters . .
Blizzard will exploit nostalgia to bring people back, to keep people playing, but they don’t seem to GET that a lot of that nostalgia is tied to personal experiences - times with friends, some of whom we haven’t heard from in years. The items we got in those times have personal value that Blizzard doesn’t seem to get, doesn’t care about.
All 7 gbank tabs blank. 
Saved some items since vanilla.
Like what?
“We don’t have any more information to add”?
That makes more sense. Tbh I was hoping they’d realize that angle vs the nonsense they said lol.
Because in terms of what they said, it was literally a fruitless link other than just being, as you put it, a drama lama lol.
Hi. So I am looking at just one tab in my guild bank. 19 slots are empty. They were all full. I have an 8 tab guild bank.
You sent me FOUR total items back and they were worthless…maybe 100g worth. How about the stuff that was actually worth gold?
Would like more updates on this as there is no excuse for this behavior.
It was expansion release. There would have been even more of an uproar if they did that, just to save the few thousand guild banks that were impacted by this bug.
Also I suspect that the initial reports were AssUMe-d to be cases of “someone” ninja’ing the contents of a Guild Bank. Until sole-owner, sole-user banks were reported too. So it may have been days, or even weeks, before they started working on the bug, let along fixing the initial bug, during which daily back-ups would have been rolled-over.
I do hope they aren’t doing purely incremental back-ups, or worse the logging was also borked. There’s definitely a case, where players have been playing for up to 20 years, to take weekly/monthly/annual snapshots of the player and guild data and freeze them for when a similar issue happens again.
Although I do hope they take a good, long, hard, look at their IT processes and make some changes to prevent it, there’s always a chance that the Richard Head award will have to be instituted. (The most memorable instance of this when I worked as a Dev for a major IT firm was the hapless Consultant who put the live and backup disks in the wrong bays and overwrote the previous 24 hours of Project coding, analysis, design work etc). Heck, I’d even come out of retirement and give them a hand (for just the cost of a return 'flight, accommodation & minimal living expenses), if that would help safe-guard our game.
better idea. 1000$ refund for every single item lost. when it hits them where it hurts then they suddenly WILL start caring.
Incomplete Restoration? Completely unacceptable. As an 18 year subscriber I am devastated. Just the living steel alone: 800 bars, took a year of daily alchemy cooldowns on 3 characters to build up. My day job is building financial applications and supporting them. A response like this to my clients would end my career. You owe it to your customers to make this right!!! And after reopening my ticket 3 times, I’m no longer interested in hearing how ‘sorry’ you are. Furious!