My Guild Master received a single Huge Ogre Cache this morning. That’s it. For over 200 individual items or stacks. I could give you a list of another 50ish items almost off the top of my head that should be restored even though the quantities might be off. While the majority of what is now apparently lost to the ether is in the ‘who cares’ category, there were some irreplaceable things I liked having around and other items that I was looking forward to doing things with in TWW.
Also, now all of my Guild Banks’ logs, except for one page, only go back to the day this bug happened (the seventh pages’ log goes another 15 days). So not only are the items lost, almost every record of what happened in the last 120 days of DF is also gone. While that would not materially affect the total list of lost items given how long some of them were in my guild bank, it is still another wtf moment as the day the bug happened all seven pages logs went back the full six months.
Blizzard,
Seriously,
These are first time programmer mistakes in a game that has been live for almost 20 years from a company with effectively unlimited resources.
This screams of someone looking at how much effort would be required for a full restoration and they said ‘cut our losses and screw the players, it’s not worth our effort.’
While I am sure some Blizzard people were working their tails off trying to make this right, the public face of this PR disaster has been crickets and Dodo birds.
A public apology from Holly or Ion would not suffice for the apparent lack of effort based on the restored items.
Unaccceptable. I’ve been collecting and saving items since launch and “sorry” simply isn’t enough to replace what is now a nearly empty guild bank. I don’t even know what was lost! It’s totally unacceptable to lose what in real-world money represents hundreds of dollars of digital goods and be told “it’s our fault, but your problem.”
No. Find out what was lost, and either restore it manually or deliver equitable compensation.
I’m only replying to you because you’re tagged as being on the community council, so I feel I should put forward a point. Understand I’m not trying to start any fights, just share an equally valid point of view to consider.
It’s pretty obvious from this incident that a lot of players don’t class guild banks as short term storage.
Before stacks of 1000, before stacks of 200, space was a premium and everyone would fill up alt’s bags and alt’s banks. Then this wonderful thing called guild banks came along where, if we could afford to purchase them, we could store them here so we could access those materials across any of the toons we created on that server and had in that guild. It was this bonus side advantage for your alts while your main stayed in your social guild. You got to see it all in one place instead of bouncing around characters to find and mail it along.
Many expansions later, many alts later, many professions being levelled later, it became such a valuable tool. My main toon levelled enchanting and engineering, it’s bank is stuffed with mementos that I’ve collected but also enchanting mats and engineering mats that have been gathered across all of the expansions; these take up the entire reagent bank and spill into multiple bank bags. If I find something new and soulbound that I want to hang onto in my bank I have to go through and find something else to destroy, sell, or find another home for. I have 20 characters on the realm with the affected guild bank. Amongst those, all professions are accounted for. I’m well aware of how long some materials take to accumulate and the cooldowns for certain materials.
I’m glad for the warband banks but their space is also quite limited and the cost prohibitive. I was literally sorting through the guild bank to see what valuable space I should take up in my warband banks prior to the server reset where the error occurred. The shock when I logged in the next day to see 7 empty tabs was only followed by the realisation my only Blizzard support option was to report the bug and wait. I am now doubting all my storage and then what’s the point of saving things my alts might use, or even being able to provide things to friends who might decide to return and play again. (My lie; my friends returning to play is as likely as any of my items being restored)
TLDR: while your use of guild banks is totally fair, the function of using it as an overflow for alts and stuff that doesn’t fit in the inadequate personal banking space has been around for a long time too.
So, I had every single tab of my guild bank filled to the brim with stacks of items (used by all members, this is not a bank for my alts) and all I recieved back was:
45 x [Contoured Fowlfeather]
3 x [Waterfowl Filet]
… is this a joke or is more coming? over 14 years of items…
Hate to say it, but that’s not the situation here. A trust is a type of legal entity set up by a grantor, and maintained by a trustee. Yes, the trustee failing to fulfill their duty is called a “breach of trust”. But that will not help here. Blizzard is not a trust. We’re not a trust, and Blizzard isn’t a trustee. They will just say that we don’t own the items, they do, and we’re just renting the accounts.
“Due to how some of the data was lost, we’ve reached a point where the result will be an incomplete restoration for some guilds, and we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items for them.”
This seems like a straight up lie at this point. I’m not seeing ANYONE say they got their whole bank or even most of it restored. Most people are getting a handful of random bits restored after losing hundreds of stacks of things.
For my personal bank our GM has received ZERO items restored. The entire guild bank (5 tabs full of legacy ores/engineering parts/gems etc) was emptied by this bug. How long exactly is this restoration going to take? Or has it happened and not only did our whole bank not get restored, but exactly zero items got restored? Incredibly frustrating and disappointing.
None of the 811 individual banks named in the bug forum thread have gotten anything close to even a majority of their items back. No one, to my knowledge has received any item of value back. No grey keepsakes, no limited time items received from previous expansion pre-launches. No pets, mounts, gear, or gold. The only items I have seen returned are items that start quests, bags, mats, and someone got a snowball.
Actually if you read it again, knowing what we know now … they’re not lying here. It is an incomplete restoration for some guilds. The rest of the guilds got no restoration at all.
What is a bit sneaky … and very much “big company saying one thing whilst making it sound like you’re saying something else”, is that most people, I would imagine, actually read that more like “most guilds will receive everything back, some guilds may be missing one or two bits”.
It’s like when we had management in my old workplace come round to “discuss the future” as rumours flew round about redundancies and, when asked if there were going to be any redundancies they said “no mention of redundancies has been made in any of our discussions about the future”. So everyone thought “yey” … ignoring my question of “was there mention of any other words that might mean we no longer have our jobs here …”
A few months later … the office is being closed down and they were true to their word. They did not use the word redundancy on any paperwork. Even truer to their word … when hundreds of people lost their jobs, they managed to find every single loophole imaginable and got out of paying anyone but a handful redundancy pay. (This is in the UK where people tend to expect redundancy pay when they’ve been in a job for a certain length of time and that job disappears).
Like many have said already. The bottom line is not that they cannot restore more, it is that they will not.
And giving someone the benefit of the doubt it likely is for two main reasons.
Someone doesn’t think it is worth the effort and wants to save money
Someone has decided that if there is ANY ambiguity that it is better to not restore because it could give someone an unfair advantage.
I will never believe they did not make a backup when 11.0.0 or 11.0.2 were deployed. No one managing systems of this size would EVER not take a backup before implementing a MAJOR patch to any production systems of this size.
Just use the latest backup prior to the issue and restore everything the impacted guilds had even if it gives a few duplicates here and there.
Not restoring anything is NOT an acceptable option when what you own/achieve IS the game.
Yeah it is insulting that I was missing maybe 50-100 slots of items and they sent me 3 shovels and 40 herbs…4 slots of stuff. WTF is their team doing? SERIOUSLY how can they not have snap shot and do this manually?
Nope was just my personal opinion on why I had never trusted gbanks as permanent storage. Someone before you gave a bit more of an explanation as to why they prefer gbanks which helped to understand the other side of that coin. I was rather surprised to hear how little is being restored and hope its coming in waves and not just the few items you all have seen.