I’d say most people get it. The thing is, this argument puts too much blame on the age of the game and not the handling of the issue or the state of the company. Would treating their employees better have been foolproof, no of course not. But I also don’t think we would have been told on a friday that guild banks won’t have complete restorations . Most of us are left waiting the coming week to find out if the few restoration mails we got are all they could recover.
For the record, I’m not saying the CM, QA, or otherwise aren’t doing their jobs nor do they deserve blame. This is a higher up issue and this game is not unraveling simply because it’s old.
See the great thing about this encouragement is that people were already doing this in the thread, so there’s no need to paint broad strokes if you can’t be bothered to read.
Not really surprising, if it’s any decent-sized streamer (not your mom n’ pop style streamer with like 20-100 viewers) I’m guessing they have a dedicated bug/glitches team to go in and “manually” fix bugs for them specifically. The double standard is still pretty disgusting though - if they can undo it/restore 100% for one player (the streamer in question) that means they can do it for everyone, they just choose not to
It’s likely similar to how big streamers have a rapid/fast-tracked time on ticket times (less than 24 hours usually… sometimes less than 12 hours) versus the general public/“peasant” players, who have to wait sometimes weeks for a response to a ticket
Another question I have that I have not seen answered yet.
Blizzard, what changes have you done as a result of this major issue to ensure that if something like this ever happens again (guild bank, banks, reps, achievement, characters, void storage, bags, etc…) that you are able to recover this fully and promptly in the future? Clearly your existing processes and methods are insufficient given the claim you are not able to do it here.
LOL sorry … I don’t understand your point here. Admittedly I should have stressed my “is” … but as far as I can tell it reads correctly both with and without it being stressed.
I have five accounts, because I’m a moron. I had paused them all after all the extended maintenance. Now I’ve canceled them all indefinitely. Nothing at Blizzard is safe. I’m more likely to survive a cat 5 hurricane with all my real life stuff intact than I am playing this game.
This is what I told Blizzard:
‘‘You lost a huge amount of my DATA in my guild banks. I have played for TWENTY years! I had things that are irreplaceable. You failed to restore them. How is this any different than if I stored irreplaceable documents on a MS cloud drive? These items were purchased by decades of subscriptions to this game. This is an enormous chunk of my life thrown away. I’m done.’’
Does anybody know if something like this has happened in other MMOs? Preferably of similar age to WoW. EVE is just 1 year older; maybe it’s just better put-together than WoW considering the scale and the scope of a persistent world, but I can’t seem to find anything like this happening there.
I’m still just… baffled at the data loss and the failure of database management here, if the data really is lost. I’d almost prefer that to be the case over them just deciding not to commit the resources to solving an entirely solvable problem. If you’re running a game for 20 years, players should be able to feel confident that their progress won’t just arbitrarily disappear one day because you made a database oopsie. Players should be able to trust you to fix your mistakes, too.
But man. This sucks. Even if I wasn’t affected, this is just such an unbelievable blunder that I don’t think I’ll ever stop talking about it. I certainly don’t trust Blizzard anymore with the keeping of data and I don’t know what to do about that going forward. It kind of inspires total apathy to any sense of accomplishment in collecting things in this game.
Never to my knowledge. At least not MMO’s that store everything server-side. Some of the much earlier ones did a lot of client side stuff. This is unprecedented. This is something where there should be some sort of statement to the gaming media. It’s not quite as bad as a breach where personal information was exposed, but as far as the game itself it’s one of the worst things that can ever happen. This CANNOT be swept under the rug. It needs to get out to the media that your in-game possessions are not safe.
They need to basically be forced to address this publicly.
Yeah, I’m pretty surprised this hasn’t been picked up yet considering how much people still love to rip on Blizzard. It’s a blunder that reflects extremely poorly on Microsoft now too, considering they bought the company and are likely part of why the expansion came out so early (way too early, imo, even though I’ve been enjoying it). This whole thing just sucks all around.
Wowhead is silent on the matter too. They did make a reference to the blue post but didn’t actually talk about it. Great “journalism” from them.
Then again I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Wowhead doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds them, but then what’s the point of calling yourself a “journalism” site if you’re going to act sheepish?
Yeah, we need to blast this to any outlets that we can. People need to make Youtube videos about it. They need to be forced to make what will be a very embarassing public statement.
This means that I, as one person with a Linux server that cost maybe $500 to build, has better data management and backup processes than Blizzard does.
Since it sounds like you were not affected, why don’t you just move along and let others have their say. It should make ZERO difference to you, and no one really wants to hear your dismissive input about it. Your attitude is exactly what Blizzard’s is…zero empathy, zero support, dismissive and condescending.
I wasn’t personally affected by this, thankfully.
But I’m going to echo similar sentiments here, that some items being unrecoverable is just straight up unacceptable - this is a massive blow to the trust we all had in your ability to store data.
Nothing in the mail and still 7/7 tabs completely empty. Just me and my alts in the guild it so it mostly sat and collected dust over the years as communal storage but definitely had a decent amount of golds worth of stuff
And besides the value of the items, as they say “Time is money friend!” and I am sure that we have all spent way too many hours collecting all these items and that is extremely valuable/irreplaceable.
While I could eventually accept that they cannot recover things (still feels like a lie given the logs show way more stuff in game being deposited/never withdrawn than what they actually restored) not even offering compensation is a spit in the face.
I think that the vast majority of players who could be vocal, just don´t care. We have a community where many don´t even visit the forum and those that do are mostly raiders and M+ folks, that don´t care about lore, transmogs or non ilvl rewards.
For them WOW is a game they log into to raid dungeons quickly and then they move to the next game and come back at the next season.
Gamers like us, that stick to a game for 20 years, collectors that are smiling if they find a new transmog, read a fun dialogue at a quest just don´t exist in big numbers I am afraid, at least at WOW. It may be different at Eve Online or TESO, but I suppose that most wow players just don´t store anything but the next raid potion on their banks.
I would say that in a nutshell, Blizzard failed in one of the MOST critical areas of any game: ensuring data integrity.
They failed to ensure that their adjustment/technical process was ‘clean’.
They failed to properly test, in-house and on live, any part of the cross-realm guild technicals.
They failed to ensure that their systems for data backups and redundancy were adequate.
They failed to communicate with the playerbase regarding their error.
They failed to produce adequate results with their ‘restoration’ attempt.
This isn’t just an embarrassment. This is an oughtright -humiliation- for the entire company. Kotick left in late December '23. Not even twelve months ago - that’s recently enough that there’s more than enough Kotick-isms left in the Blizzard machinery to ensure that people are being ‘paid off’ - not with money, of course, that would be illegal - but with preferential treatment of some sort. Fast tracking of tickets, gratis game time, whatever.
If this got out into the wider media, the company’s public image would be devastated. I would not be surprised for one moment to hear that the execs authorized X amount of ‘goodwill’ to keep it silent. It’s an indelible black mark on the company’s reputation, it’s processes, and it’s value. If they lose big time because of this, I can’t say I’d be sad.
Microsoft paid $69 billion for Blizzard Activision via cash for stock. I wonder if they’re regretting that decision now.
I recommend emailing Phil Spencer calmly describing how Blizzard has destroyed 20 years of data and dropped a note a month later on a friday night that they will not recover it.
. Most of us are left waiting the coming week to find out if the few restoration mails we got are all they could recover.