But instead of a check, they give you a pair of batteries, a piece of lint, and 3 stale crackers and say sorry for the inconvenience.
24 Likes
I do not expect a reasonable answer to this question but what will be done for the âlost dataâ from a customer perspective? This is not acceptable; you would not respond the same way if it was your hard work and time wasted.
Activision Blizzard King was sold to Microsoft for nearly 70 billion dollars, if you fought as hard at quality checking your products there would not be errors of this nature. I also understand that the code behaves differently on live servers but I spent years, YEARS!!! of collecting I cannot just make that time up. Seriously, DO BETTER.
Your apology is just empty platitudes and means nothing. I would like to say this rant makes me feel better but it honestly just pisses me off more and more. There is no one at Blizzard that would accept this behavior from any other industry, why we have to as your customer is beyond me.
10 Likes
I was not badly affected. When I came back for Dragonflight I cleaned out my guild banks of anything of value. The only thing I had was whatever misc profession drops (not stuff from gathering) I had left over after I sold anything of value, and whatever Dragonflight profession materials I added during that expansion. I lost maybe 10 slots of DF stuff, and maybe 20 of older stuff, none of which was super important.
Honestly, the only things I lost that irritated me were 5 stacks of inky black potions. Amazingly those were returned to me via the mail. So I can say that, personally, I am âokâ as far as this situation goes.
But this is still a huge precedent and a red flag that Blizzard does not have proper data management practices, and they canât be trusted with any data. And the way theyâre handling the situation is making me question whether or not I will stay when the time to renew happens again. I may not be staying for Midnight depending on how this is handled.
6 Likes
ADHD and disorganization cause me to save things in multiple places purely on accident, so yeah. Iâm pretty sure Iâm doing better than they seem to be. 
3 Likes
This did in fact happen to me, except the insurance company processed the claim completely and reimbursed me for everything I reported stolen. A run-of-the-mill insurance company has more integrity than Blizzard.
7 Likes
I have my freaking Interface and WTF folders backed up in 3 separate locations. One on my primary gaming PC. One on my Linux server. And one on my laptop.
Configurations between the two are the same except for primary Config.wtf (which is slightly different on the laptop due to lower spec) - I believe the only difference is the laptop doesnât have AA on.
I also have a script to copy addon data between the two computers. Which excludes Config.wtf. But I back up each system separately too.
Which means I have more backup and redundancy for my addons than Blizzard does the game itself.
4 Likes
Letâs flip this around. In my hypothetical scenario, a bug on Blizzardâs end caused extra items to appear in guild banks instead of stuff disappearing.
What would happen? I guarantee this would happen. Servers shut down until all âextraâ items were removed. Even though it was no fault of the players.
7 Likes
This is just as likely to happen in your personal bank. If you think âyourâ stuff is safe there, you are deluding yourself.
7 Likes
You very closely described how loyal I use to be, but one too many write-offs of legitimate problems, without concern for the effect on the customer, lead me to invest significantly more of my leisure time elsewhere.
13 Likes
Actually, itâs like they looked at the list of your valuables, and only reimbursed the plants you had in the window. None of the things most dear were returned to anyone. If it had been the items that folks most cared about instead of a few mats, people would be a lot more forgiving.
6 Likes
No, itâs like a burglar robbed your house, and the insurance company sent you a check covering the cost of stuff the burglar didnât take or want.
2 Likes
Like if they sent you a check covering the cost of a 2 year old pack of Cheetos and a chocolate bar that are still under the couch cushion.
9 Likes
Not to be cruel but what brain are you using?
Backups are the cheapest cost item any company has right now. They can do tape backups at a fraction of the cost that they used to be 20 years ago, one tape can save multiple years worth of data.
The fact is the problem is not the backup its manpower the amount of time it would take to access the data and make a program to pick up what was loss.
However that should have been part of their contingency plans for emergencies and should have been tested.
If an earthquake happens or a flood or something and destroys one of the data centers they use they can bring up their game again in another location without massive data loss.
This is how it works in any stable company that is offering data products. (Banks, stores, so on.)
So why should this data loss be anything special?
Setup some PTR servers with the game before the tww patch, grabs the data, bring it over to the retail version⌠not simple but plausible and doable with the right team.
However this is not how you save money, its going to cost them money and they donât want to waste it for guild masters, and items that only one section of the game cares about.
Guild masters and guilds are old news and they are trying their best to get rid of them.
4 Likes
I lost Battle Pets.
I lost Ore and Gems.
I lost Dark Moon Fair items.
I lost holiday and garrison items.
Around 50% or more of my guild bank wiped out.
You know what I got in return for your âmistakeâ?
3 items returned out of hundreds. 2 pets and one common gem.
There is no compensation for what I lost. Because I canât get back the time I spent acquiring those items.
There is nothing you can do to compensate me for that time you deleted.
12 Likes
This is precisely the problem. I donât believe for one second that they donât have backups, for many reasons, but I will illuminate the obvious :
For one, no company is that stupid, even Blizzard, to not make a backup of some kind before a major content update. Seeing as how this is a company that is not new to games, especially live server games, I find it hard to believe they made this sort of mistake, or even didnât have multiple copies in case of data corruption.
Second, they have demonstrated they do, in fact, have the data necessary to do a proper restoration, as evidenced by many streamers who have off-handedly mentioned that they had exactly that done for them.
What this all comes down to is willingness, which they apparently do not have, unless you are a popular streamer/influencer that could cause them bad publicity. Now, I donât know if this comes down to cost, manpower, or just plain apathy for non-popular players, but the key factor in why nobody got a proper restoration is solely because no time or effort was invested in trying.
I firmly believe that this was an issue that Blizzard did not plan for or foresee, solely due to inadequate testing. When it manifested on live servers, they chose to ignore it, likely thinking it wasnât as broad of an issue as it apparently is. They must have thought that, despite this is a serious bug, it might not be as big, and therefore can be quietly fixed under the radar. My guess is, upon investigation, they realized this issue was FAR bigger than they realized, requiring much more resources to invest to properly fix and restore things, which would explain the month of silence while they tried to figure out how best to approach the problem.
Their response then was to put out this half-hearted ârestorationâ of junk items to make it look like a âWell ⌠we tried. See?â, as a way to hopefully appease some people who would think that since they got something back (even thought it was typically junk), that they would be content and move on.
This is just my guess as to how it played out. At this point, there is likely little we can find out beyond speculation, but the bottom line comes down to, they can do it, because they have proven they can do it for streamers ⌠they just donât think you, the average player, are worth it.
12 Likes
âSorry about the credit card numbers disappearing from my account so that you canât bill me for any more time. I put a lot of research into the bug that caused them to vanish, but they cannot be restored at this time.â
19 Likes
Iâm not sure that people understand how âbackupsâ may not be the answer and may not even exist in a way that would resolve this problem.
However, itâs quite likely there is, or was, a path to recovery.
Generally, software services like this funnel fundamental actions, like object creation, modification, and deletion, through APIs (internal or external).
Also in general, these calls are logged with some detail. So whenever an object is created, something is written to a file somewhere describing that creation. Whenever an object is deleted, something is written describing the deletion.
Good design requires that all creation/modification/deletion proceeds through the API, and that there is no way to make these changes otherwise.
So if there is not some kind of âsnapshotâ (backup at a particular time) available, the next thing to do is âlog diving.â You take what are probably some very large files and look through lines/entries that match the situation you are interested in. Say, âobject deletion done as part of maintenance-process-x.â
Extracting and analyzing this information tells you what you need to know to confirm and perhaps reverse the undesirable change.
In my experience, they will have these logs, or they had them anyway, and if the logs are set up to automatically expire, the expiry is not going to be 24 hours, but more like 30 days or 1 year.
In any event, I believe Blizzard was well aware of the problem within 2-3 days of it starting, if not the same day.
Many services use what are called âcanaries,â service objects that emulate customer resources, to alert them of changes that may be unexpected. So, hypothetically (and likely), Blizzard would have âcanary usersâ with typical player resources attached. A wave of unexpected modifications ought to show up on a dashboard somewhere.
Well, anyway, this is how we ran things back where I used to work, and this is how everyone in the business does things.
Recovery process:
- If relevant snapshots donât exist, go to the logs.
- Make a working copy of relevant logs, so that they donât expire or go away for some other reason.
- Scan the logs for the events of interest.
- When the necessary information is gathered, use it as part of a procedure to restore the lost resources.
This is an approach that is commonly used.
If Blizzard let these logs expire (possible but unlikely as it is a terrible and obviously bad practice), or didnât have them to begin with (I would find that impossible to believe), then there might be no path to recovery.
Bear in mind that there had to be logs to identify that the problem was occurring and to identify the nature of the problem. Those same logs would be the ones used for restoration.
I believe that this is occurring because management doesnât want to do it, or fumbled the situation so badly initially that now they canât.
The lack of appropriate messaging from Blizzard is IMO just as much a disaster as the issue itself.
17 Likes
At this point, everyone should know that nothing is safe in this game anymore. Last month it was guildbanks, tomorrow it could be your mount collection. You donât own it - they owe you nothing. They will do nothing. They donât care.
11 Likes
As a side-note, I notice the megathread in the Bugs forum got censored/closed about an hour ago - oh snap! 
I guess they really do want the victims to âjust shut up and go awayâ
12 Likes
Technically speaking, as long as THIS thread exists, the bug reports thread is no longer needed, as the bug has been identified and there is a sticky thread here for it. So I wouldnât worry too much about that at least. Weâre rapidly approaching 50% of the post count of threads that have been pinned for a couple years.
Typically having multiple threads in multiple locations is counter-productive and itâs best to consolidate conversation about an issue in one place. Now if THIS thread gets closed, then we have a problem.
I would LOVE to be a fly on the wall in Blizzard HQ right now. Itâs obvious that they are paying attention to these threads. Even if they refuse to give us any further responses, itâs pretty clear that people are paying attention and there are probably frantic conversations happening about what to do.
3 Likes